Friday Reads: Lords Of Misrule
Posted: January 3, 2014 Filed under: just because | Tags: 12th night, Duck Disaster Family, feast of fools, Lord of Misrule, Mary and Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans 54 Comments
Good Morning!
We’re coming upon my favorite time of the year marked by 12th night. It’s a big deal down here in New Orleans because January 5th is the first day of the carnival season. It’s when we eat our king cake and try to avoid getting the plastic baby! It’s also one of my favorite Shakespeare Comedies. Even high school English classes didn’t ruin the fun for me! We still have 12th night masquerade balls down here and it’s just generally a great time because there are only locals. It’s fun to see folks walking around the quarter in medieval costumes and masks. The art, photos, and tidbits that decorate the post today are all related to the upcoming and past 12th nights which celebrate the 12th day of Christmas which is also known as the eve before the Epiphany.
My favorite thing about 12th night balls is the entire idea of having a time dedicated to the “Lord of 
Misrule” or the “Abbott of Unreason”. If you have no idea what I’m writing on then we can safely assume you don’t have any old timey Scots, French or Brits in your family because that’s where the old Saturnalia festivals hid out for many years. Boxing Day is also part of this tradition. Our favorite Abbott presides over the Feast of Fools.
In Britain, the Lord of Misrule — known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots — was an officer appointed by lot at Christmas to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia. The Church held a similar festival involving a Boy Bishop. The celebration of the Feast of Fools was outlawed by the Council of Basel that sat from 1431, but it survived to be put down again by the Catholic Queen Mary I in England in 1555.
While mostly known as a British holiday custom, the appointment of a Lord of Misrule comes from antiquity. In ancient Rome, from the 17th to the 23rd of December, a Lord of Misrule was appointed for the feast of Saturnalia, in the guise of the good god Saturn. During this time the ordinary rules of life were subverted as masters served their slaves, and the offices of state were held by slaves. The Lord of Misrule presided over all of this, and had the power to command anyone to do anything during the holiday period. This holiday seems to be the precursor to the more modern holiday, and it carried over into the Christian era.
The entire thing, of course, has pagan roots and was morphed into a different celebration by christians or at least those who didn’t try to ban the celebration outright. He’s also called the King of the bean which is why a bean was placed in King Cake prior to the little plastic babies we find in today’s modern king cakes.
In medieval times, most Europeans adopted the Roman taste for a good time by electing a Lord of Misrule, or King of Fools. This harlequin king went by many names: King of the Bean in England, the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, the Abbe de la Malgouveme in France. All had the power to call people to disorder. Cross dressing, bawdy songs, drinking to excess, and gambling on the church altar were only a few of the wanton acts reported
In some places the Festival of the Ass was commemorated. A young girl with babe in arms entered a church riding an ass or donkey. During the mock services, prayer responses that would have normally included an ‘amen’ were substituted by a hearty ‘hee-haw’. Parisians had a particularly infamous reputation. By the 15th century, an embarassed Catholic Church finally clamped down on the ‘monstrous’ celebrations in which, centuries later, Victor Hugo wrote of Quasi Modo as the King of Fools in Hunchback of Notre Dame
You can still find hints of the pagan festivities in Philadelphia’s Mummer Parades as well as the rituals down here in New Orleans that deal with the celebration of 12th night. Of course, cross dressing, bawdy songs, drinking to excess and all those wanton acts actually survive down here and sans tourists which makes it very merry for the lot of us.
So, let me now change the subject.
First up, some statistics on why a woman with out a man today, is like a fish without a bicycle. It came from a Time story with an outrageous headline that I shall ignore here. Here’s to my theory that women and gay men are the really source of civilization.
Over the last few decades men’s incomes have been slowly declining and women’s have been rising. Last year one in five men
were not working, something economists call the biggest social crisis we will face. Party this is because the economy is changing quickly, but men aren’t. As the manufacturing economy gets replaced by a service and information economy, men are failing to adjust or get the skill they need to succeed.
Meanwhile, women are moving in the opposite direction: In 2009 they became the majority of the American workforce for the first time ever. Now in every part of America young single women under 30 have a higher median income than young men, which is really important because that’s the phase of life when people imagine what their future will look like. As one sorority girl put it to me — remember, I said sorority, not someone from the women’s study center — “Men are the new ball and chain.”
It’s the end of men because men are failing in schools and women are succeeding. In nearly every country, on all but one continent, women are getting 60 percent of college degrees, which is what you need to succeed these days. Many boys start falling behind as early as first grade, and they fail to catch up. Many men, meanwhile, still see school as a waste of time, a girl thing.
Be sure to check out the comments because the men are literally revolting. The term “mansplain” is just inadequate.
Senator Mary Landrieu will be targeted and challenged by Republicans for her seat this year. How serious will the challenge be? The most interesting thing may be the primary which could pit the Tea Party and the neoconservative, religious hate groups against Karl Rove’s establishment republicans.
The national publication POLITICO reports that prominent social conservatives are still mentioning former Louisiana legislator andFamily Research Council President Tony Perkins as a potential candidate in the state’s contentious U.S. Senate race this year.
In an article about social conservatives’ plans to raise big money nationwide around issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, writer Kenneth Vogel says activists have floated Perkins, in particular, as a candidate they could get behind.
As a member of Louisiana’s House of Representatives, Perkins passed the state’s convenant marriage law, making it more difficult for people to get divorced. He has been an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage on the national stage.
According to Vogel, several conservatives gathered in Virginia recently to discuss aggressively financing and coordinating political efforts around social issues. The religious right is trying to counter fiscal conservatives, who have raised more money and gained more influence in the Republican Party in recent years.
South Dakota businessman and conservative organizer Bob Fischer was part of the team putting together a strategy for elevating social issues on the national stage. He mentioned Perkins, according to Vogel.
“Fischer in his private conversations has singled out the possibility of a long-shot Perkins 2014 Senate candidacy in Louisiana as just the sort of campaign that the new effort could support,” Vogel wrote in the article.
If Perkins ran for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, he would hardly be the only person trying to unseat Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu. Landrieu is a top target for the national Republican Party in 2014, and many candidates have already jumped in the race.
U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is largely considered the Republican frontrunner in the campaign. Several fiscal conservatives, such as billionaires Charles and David Koch, have already donated money to Cassidy’s campaign.
Vogel speculated that Perkins’ entry into the Senate race could highlight the split between social and fiscal conservatives within the Republican Party — not just in Louisiana, but around the country.
Vogel wrote in the article: “A Perkins campaign would make an interesting test case, since he would be pitted against Rep. Bill Cassidy, who has been singled out as a rising star by (GOP strategist Karl) Rove’s (American) Crossroads groups and is the GOP establishment’s choice to take on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.”
Mary’s always been a mixed bag for me even though I have done fundraising, volunteer work, and attended misc. women’s fundraiser’s for her in all of her elections. She is totally captured by the oil and gas industry but tends to support all the decent social justice issues that manage to come up in the Senate. I will vote for her again but I’m never really happy about it. I’m currently volunteering for her brother Mitch’s re-election as mayor. He will undoubtedly be a target too and he’s also a mixed bag. They are the only viable alternatives to the crap we’ve gotten since Bush/Rove basically made it difficult for black people to return here after Katrina so it is what it is. Louisiana was a purple state before the Rove/Bush purge of people of color. My hope is Jindal has ruined the republican brand so much here that a lot of folks will return to the folds of the Kingfish. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week supporting friends who’ve been lambasted for saying the many of our big post Katrina changes aren’t particularly good ones. You can find me sticking up for one such friend here.
Happily, I am going to introduce you to HIllary Clinton’s graph of the year via Wonkblog. It’s about reading and singing to your children.
I used to sing to Chelsea when she was a baby — until she was old enough to gently tell me that I couldn’t carry a tune. This graph shows us that about two thirds of our youngest children are fortunate enough to have a family member tell them a story or sing to them regularly, and about half are read to by a family member. That’s a great start. We’ve known for years that singing, reading, and talking to our children helps their brains grow and develop. Now new research is telling us even more about how important this is for our kids as they build vocabularies and prepare for school. Seven hundred new neural connections are formed every second, laying the foundation for learning, behavior, health. What happens to children’s brains in the earliest years shapes the adults they become, the successes they achieve and the contributions they make to our economy and our society.
Every child deserves an equal chance for success. But studies show that by age four, children in middle and upper income families hear 15 million more words than children in lower income families, and 30 million more words than children in families on welfare. So we’ve got work to do. That’s why the Clinton Foundation is focusing on closing this “word gap” through an initiative called Too Small to Fail. We want to help all parents give their kids a good start in school and in life. That’s what this graph is all about.
I love the idea that children should be “Too Small to Fail”. Run, Hillary, Run!!!!
One last little bit about the duck dick that has made my entire state look like a backwater of haterz. I’m mostly disturbed by the bevy of right wing politicians that say they are supporting his right to free speech when what they are really saying is they agree that women are men’s property, gay people are perverts, black people should be poor and happily working in the fields, and that any one who isn’t their kind of christian is some kind of subhuman monster.
Roberts’ initial interview resonated so deeply with conservatives because it fit with the narrative they mutter to themselves daily: “Things used to be better, and once we’re all dead you’ll see we were right all along.” Gay sinners in the closet, darkies picking and grinning on the porch, America the way God (their very particular and peculiar God) meant it to be.
For the Right to reject Robertson now would mean acknowledging that his advocacy of cradle-robbing is of a piece with his comments about the blissful black workers of his youth and his anus-centered eschatology. The thing about marrying off women before they got old enough to know better? It used to be that way, as well. And it was justified with the same paternalistic logic and ruthless rejection of anything that dared to threaten the position of those in power.
For the professional Right – candidates, pundits and the like – this Duck Dynasty flap is a reminder of a different disturbing truth: the gap between what you want voters to believe you stand for and what it’s OK to say out loud. There’s a reason they call it a dog whistle and not a duck call.
So, that’s it for me today. A little of the old, new, and some hope for future as we move towards the Feast of Fools. Kinda makes you stop and think about who the real fools are these days.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads
Posted: December 30, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: 2013, Bob Filner, Comet Ison 71 Comments
Good Morning!
Well, the year 2014–if that’s how you count years–is upon us. More than anything else, I’m hoping this year goes down as the year the Tea Party goes into the correct bag and we dispose of it. It’s time to look back with regrets and hope that things change for the better. Let’s start with the Sleaziest Pols of 2013. Here’s my pick of the list for ickiest pol this year.
BOB FILNER
Bob Filner is not the first politician to commit sexual harassment. In fact, he’s not even the first politician to serially harass and grope women. But he’s almost certainly the first one to count a former admiral in the U.S. Navy among his victims. Filner spent 20 years in Congress as a relatively obscure Democrat representing much of San Diego. Then, he became mayor of San Diego and the scandal floodgates opened. At least 18 women came forward and Filner was eventually forced to resign as mayor, pleading guilty to one felony and two misdemeanors related to his serial harassment.
Some times things need an explanation. The Economist always does this with something in its weekly issues. Here’s The Explainer article in 2013 that I found most compelling. What makes a language difficult?
Ranking languages on a universal scale of difficulty is itself difficult and controversial. Some languages proliferate endings on verbs and nouns, like Latin and Russian. Such inflection can be hard for learners who are not used to it. Several years ago, two scholars found that smaller languages (those with less contact with other languages) tended to have more inflection than big ones. By contrast, creole languages—which arise between groups that do not share a common language—are thought by scholars to be systematically simpler than other languages, even after they become “normal” languages with native speakers. They typically lack heavy inflection.
But inflection is only one element of “hardness”. Some languages have simple sound systems (such as the Polynesian languages). Others have a wide variety of sounds, including rare ones that outsiders find hard to learn (like the languages of the Caucasus). Some languages (like English) lack or mostly lack grammatical gender. Some have dozens of genders (also known as “noun classes”) that must be learned for each noun. Languages can have rigidly fixed or flexible word order. They can put verbs before objects or even objects before subjects. Yet it is not clear how to rank the relative difficulty of exotic consonants, dozens of genders or heavy inflection. Another recent approach sought to go around the problem by finding languages that had the most unusual features, skirting the question of whether those features were “hard”. Comparing 21 feature parameters across hundreds of languages, they ranked 239 languages. Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Mexico, was the weirdest. English came in place number 33. Basque, Hungarian, Hindi and Cantonese ranked as among the most “normal”. The researchers did not find any larger similarities between “weird” and “normal” languages.
As you know, I’m obsessed with digging up ancient stuff. So, no list of 2013 outliers of mine would be complete without looking at the top archaeological 
finds of 2013 and picking one that fascinated me. One of the most disturbing events in history on my list was the destruction of the Great Library and the absolute purging of all kinds of ancient wisdom during the Crusades and the onset of the spread of dogma by the “Holy Roman Empire”. I love it whenever we recover something that these self-righteous destroyers ruined. So, in that spirit, I’m glad some of the ancient writing mediums were reused. We know have the technology to recover the good stuff that’s buried under the propaganda.
Ancient Philosophical Writings Found Hidden Beneath Medieval Text A group of scientists and historians made an incredible discovery relating to some writings made on parchments that were produced in medieval times. Using cutting-edge technology, the researchers found that the parchment had once contained ancient philosophical writings that had later been washed off and over-written. Using multispectral imaging, scientists were able to recover the original text, shedding new light on the history of philosophical education in the late antiquity. The uppermost layer of text dates to the thirteenth century and comprises the Prophetic Books of the Greek Old Testament. However, through an amazing stroke of luck, it was discovered that beneath this text there had originally been some writing by the well-known ancient Greek writer, Euripides, and an unknown ancient commentary on Aristotle, which dated back to the fifth century. “The discovery of this work is of inestimable value for the history of philosophical education in the late antiquity”, said the discoverer of the manuscript, Dr. Chiara Faraggiana di Sarzana from Bologna University. The research being undertaken, named the Palamedes Project, aims to create a critical edition of the two important manuscripts featuring the newly discovered and unexplored Greek texts, made readable using the latest forms of technology.
My choice for best beat down of an urban myth this year–other than the NYT’s article that should shut the Republicans up on Benghazi— is this one about coffee stunting your growth. It turns out that there’s no evidence that coffee is bad for a kid’s growth. That idea was put in our heads by the makers of POSTUM because they didn’t want to lose customers.
Modern concerns about coffee’ health effects in the U.S. can be traced to C.W. Post, an 1800s-era food manufacturer most well known for pioneering the field of breakfast cereal. He also invented a grain-based breakfast beverage called Postum, advertised as a caffeine-free coffee alternative, that was popular through the 1960s (and is still in production).
“Postum made C.W. Post a fortune, and he became a millionaire from vilifying coffee, and saying how horrible it was for you,” Pendergrast says. “The Postum advertisers had all kinds of pseudoscientific reasons that you should stay away from coffee.” Among the “evil effects” of coffee for adults, according to Post: it depressed kidney and heart function, it was a “nerve poison,” it caused nervousness and indigestion, it led to sallow skin.
Even after Post died in 1914, his company’s ads continued their attack on coffee, highlighting its effects on youth in particular and marketing Postum as a kid-friendly hot beverage. Postum’s ads claimed that that coffee should never, under any circumstances, be served to children, for a number of reasons—it made them sluggish, irritable and sleepless, it robbed them of “rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes,” it led to failing grades and, as the 1933 ad above claims, “it hampers proper development and growth.”
Over time, it seems, the belief that coffee is unfit for children—and, specifically, that it stops them from growing—slipped into the country’s cultural consciousness and took root, despite a total lack of scientific evidence.
Happily, Postum is now mostly forgotten, and coffee reigns. Virtually all of coffee’s supposed ills have been debunked—including the idea that coffee stunts growth. On the whole, scientists now believe that the health benefits of drinking two to three cups of coffee per day (a reduced risk of developing dementia, diabetes and heart disease) outweigh the costs (a slight increase incholesterol levels, for instance).
Of course, you might have your own very legitimate reasons for not letting kids drink coffee that have nothing to do with growth. A big concern is sleep, and how crucial it is for developing children—they need more of it than adults, and there’s evidence that sleep disturbances could be linked with childhood obesity—so the fact that coffee packs more caffeine than tea or soda is an issue.
Then there are the more prosaic problems that could result from giving kids coffee. “My biggest concern is that caffeine is addictive,” Pendergrast says. “And there is a lot of evidence that if you’re addicted, and you don’t get your caffeine, you suffer quite exquisite headaches, among other symptoms.”
Fox says the NYT’s research on Benghazi is wrong. They’d probably be fighting a faux war on coffee for kids if the ad dollars from Coffee aren’t 
so huge these days compared to POST cereal and POSTUM. It’s just really dismaying to see how a media outlet that basically exists to lie to people gets to pass itself off as news.
There were a lot of kewl science events this year. Some of the Best Space Photos include my one of my favorite science stories this year. The compelling voyage of Comet ISON that started some where around the time our ancestors were learning to walk upright ended this year in a battle with our Sun. Comets cemented the Law of Gravity and have contributed to knowing our timing and place in our universe for some time. ISON may have disappointed some. But, I really got hung up in the last days of ISON.
After Comet ISON made its spectacular hairpin turn around the Sun on Thanksgiving, as seen in online images taken by the SOHO and STEREO spacecraft, it was unclear if enough of the comet had survived for it to become widely visible in the night sky. By the time it exited SOHO’s field of view a few days later, ISON had faded dramatically, even as it became larger and diffuse. Many astronomers believed the comet had disintegrated, melted by the fierce heat of our star and/or ripped apart by tidal forces. Unfortunately, it seems they were right.
ISON was to have been at its best in early December, had it lived up to its more optimistic projections: A beautiful sight with a long tail extending up into the predawn sky. But nothing of substance emerged from the solar glare. Several of the world’s most skilled comet observers reported sightings of a large, faint smudge at the comet’s approximate position around December 8, but no photographs were able to confirm this, and such sightings have ceased. Last week, both the Arecibo giant radiotelescope dish and the Hubble Space Telescope attempted to find remnants of ISON, but they were unable detect anything near the comet’s expected position. All that’s left of ISON is a ghost: an expanding dust cloud, faded into invisibility.
As it is with ISON, so it is with 2013. There was a lot of gas, speculation, and hooplah that ended.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? And, any thing that stands out in my lists our any others that you’ve found that grab your fancy?
Friday Reads: Cold Weather Distractions
Posted: December 27, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Abe Visit, austerity, bizarre Victorian/Edwardian things, Charles Burchfield, Dickens' Christmas Carol, Yasukuni Shrine 32 Comments
Good Morning!
I’ve been trying to find some distractions recently. I’m going through one of those periods where I’d rather hole up and not see what’s going on around me. I’ll snap out of it once we’re passed 12th night and the carnival season ramps up. It’s difficult to ignore random parades and continual parties. I love the season up until about the last two weeks when the tourists come and the celebration becomes less personal and a lot more fake.
So, here’s a few things to keep you distracted.
An equation familiar to anyone who’s sat through a few old episodes of Tom and Jerry. Women + Mice = localised uproar. It’s a sexist old TV trope, of course, but it played out for real in England in 1875, when a mouse dashed suddenly on to a work table in a south London factory.
Into the general commotion which followed, a gallant young man stepped forward and seized the rodent. For a glorious moment, he was the saviour of the women who’d scattered. It didn’t last. The mouse slipped out of his grasp, ran up his sleeve and scurried out again at the open neck of his shirt. In his surprise, his mouth was agape. In its surprise, the mouse dashed in. In his continued surprise, the man swallowed.
“That a mouse can exist for a considerable time without much air has long been a popular belief and was unfortunately proved to be a fact in the present instance,” noted the Manchester Evening News, “for the mouse began to tear and bite inside the man’s throat and chest, and the result was that the unfortunate fellow died after a little time in horrible agony.”
When basic staples like bread started to be produced cheaply and in large quantities for the new city dwellers, Victorian manufacturers seized on the opportunity to maximise profit by switching ingredients for cheaper substitutes that would add weight and bulk. Bread was adulterated with plaster of Paris, bean flour, chalk or alum. Alum is an aluminium-based compound, today used in detergent, but then it was used to make bread desirably whiter and heavier. Not only did such adulteration lead to problems of malnutrition, but alum produced bowel problems and constipation or chronic diarrhoea, which was often fatal for children.
Aren’t you a little more appreciative of government regulations and inspections now? Well, there’s a lot of defunding of basic public goods going on. Here’s one weird little story.
A small town in Oregon has become the victim of so much austerity that it’s police department has become completely dysfunctional. So, they’re relying on private posses now. That sounds like a town that some one like George Zimmerman would just love.
The North Valley Community Watch (NVCW,) a private volunteer public safety group in northern Josephine County, has announced plans to attempt to “fill the gaps” left in law enforcement, which have come about as a result of recent budget cuts related to the ongoing deficit reduction. The group, of which many of it’s members perform their self assumed law enforcement support roles armed, are expanding on the duties more typically performed by community watch organizations, by actively responding to calls as police might normally. Following the end to federal subsidies which sought to promote timber harvesting while balancing the costs derived from their own environmental regulations, the largely rural Josephine County found itself facing a revenue crisis similar to many going on throughout the nation. After a vote seeking to raise revenues failed, the Sheriff’s office released as statement announcing that it would only be able to respond to “life threatening situations” and went on to advise that those who feared they were in danger to consider relocating. In response, former Sheriff’s Deputy Ken Selig, who lost his position as a result of the cuts, formed the NVCW with friend Pete Scaglioni. In addition to the standard patrols and flier circulations that community watch groups are know for however, Selig and Scaglioni are looking now to take neighborhood watch duties to the next level by creating a “response team” of, sometimes armed, civilian first responders to respond to burglaries and other suspected crimes. While the effort of private citizens to assume public duties in the absence of sworn law enforcement personnel is admirable, many, including County Commissioner Keith Heck, are worried that the forming of private posses like these could lead to “aggressive” behavior and dangerous situations.
The Cleveland Public Library has discovered a lost first edition of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.
Cleveland librarian Kelly Brown had far more modest plans when she first began collecting items for a holiday traditions display at the Cleveland Public Library. But when she began poking around the stacks, she stumbled on a fairly unexpected Yuletide surprise: a first-edition copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
The leather-bound book, donated at one point but soon forgotten about, is one of only 6,000 first-run copies printed on Dec. 17, 1843. At the time, it cost a modest 5 shillings. In the last few years, first editions have sold at auction for several thousand dollars.
The newly discovered first edition may have been too valuable to make it into the library’s final display, but curious visitors can go visit the rare book in the library’s special collections department. “The Cleveland Public Library is a library, not a museum, so you actually could come here and sit with it if you wanted to,” Brown told Cleveland’s Fox 8.
The relations between the Japanese and Chinese have not been good recently. Japanese PM Abe has visited a shrine to Japanese soldiers from World War 2 that has them really upset. It’s also upset the Koreans. So, what’s the deal?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine has enraged the Chinese and South Korean governments and ignited – no surprise – a firestorm of protest across Asia. The shrine, which honors more than a thousand indicted war criminals who took part in Japan’s disastrous war in Asia, remains a place of fascination for Japanese rightists, who persist in claiming that Japan’s war in Asia was a war of liberation against Western imperialism.
This claim sounds particularly hollow in China and Korea, which suffered horrifically from Imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation of much of Asia. Yet there has always been a jarring element in official Chinese protests against the Yasukuni Shrine visits. Such visits are condemned as insensitive to the feelings of the Chinese people. But, just as Japanese conservatives are rightly taken to task for refusing to acknowledge the horrors of their country’s colonialist past, so China would do well to expand discussion of its own wartime history at home.
For many decades, under Mao Zedong, the only acceptable version of China’s wartime experience was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spearheaded the resistance against the Japanese, honing its armies while preparing one of the world’s most significant social revolutions. Meanwhile, China’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) government under Chiang Kai-shek, weakened by incompetence and corruption, did little to oppose the Japanese.
Yet, in recent years, research from China itself has shown the enormous scale and cost of the war against Japan. Fourteen million or more Chinese were killed from 1937 to 1945, and 80-100 million became refugees. And the invasion destroyed China’s roads, railways, and factories.
But other significant changes also began to occur during that period. As the bombs fell on China’s wartime Nationalist capital, Chongqing, the social contract between state and society became more important. The state demanded more from its people, including conscription and ever-higher taxes; but the people also began to demand more from their government, including adequate food provision, hygiene, and medical care. To understand why the war changed China so profoundly, historians had to move away from treating the 1937-1945 period as a simple story of an inevitable Communist victory.
Thus, in the last two decades, China has started remembering its own war history anew.
That’s the background, here’s the current controversy.
Chinese newspapers rounded on the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, on Friday, describing his visit to the Yasukuni war
dead shrine as “paying homage to devils” and warning that China had the ability to crush “provocative militarism”.
On Thursday Abe visited Yasukuni, where Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal after the second world war are honoured along with those who died in battle. The move has infuriated China and South Korea, both of which were occupied by Japanese forces until the end of the war, and prompted concern from the United States about deteriorating ties between the Asian neighbours.
In an editorial headlined “Abe’s paying homage to the devils makes people outraged”, the People’s Liberation Army Daily said Abe’s actions had “seriously undermined the stability of the region”.
“On one hand, Abe is paying homage to war criminals, and on the other hand he talks about improving relations with China, South Korea and other countries,” the newspaper said. “It is simply a sham, a mouthful of lies.
“Today, the Chinese people have the ability to defend peace and they have a greater ability to stop all provocative militarism.”
In a separate commentary published under the pen name Zhong Sheng, or “voice of China”, the Communist Party’s People’s Daily said: “History tells us that if people do not correctly understand the evils of the fascist war, cannot reflect on war crimes, a country can never [achieve] true rejuvenation.”
I decided to feature the artwork of Charles Burchfield. Some of his paintings of winter scenes are really fanciful. I’ve always been fascinated by his work. Many of his paintings of trees and nature look like images of natural cathedrals.
Charles Burchfield was one of the most inventive American artists of the twentieth century. Throughout most of his career, watercolor was his medium of choice, sometimes used in combination with gouache, graphite, charcoal, conté crayon, chalk, or pastel. During Burchfield’s lifetime three major periods in his work were generally acknowledged: an early period dating from roughly 1915 to 1921 when landscape was often treated in metaphysical, fantastic ways; a middle period dating from the early 1920s to the 1940s when realism reigned; and a late period which marked a return to a transcendental, mystical perspective. Some recent scholarship has challenged this view, emphasizing instead qualities evident throughout Burchfield’s entire career: his consistent aesthetic and cultural point of view, his desire to work from familiar surroundings, and the deep personal symbolism of his works, which probed the mysteries of nature in an attempt to reveal his inner emotions.
So, that’s a little bit of the bizarre news from me. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Oh, and here’s a little music for our Republican Friends: Fitz and the Tantrums doing “Money Grabber” in honor of them stealing food from children and unemployment insurance from the long term jobless during their sacred Christmas Season. I’m still looking for the part in the new testament where Jesus said starve the hungry and fuck little children. I must have a bad copy or something. Oh, and ending benefits will actually cost us more in economic activity than it will save us in deficit spending. You’re a bunch of mean one’s Republican Grinches!
Happy Festivus! We shall now Have the Airing of the Grievances!
Posted: December 23, 2013 Filed under: open thread 23 Comments
So, I gotta lot of grievances … GUN NUTSSSSSSSssss!! This stuff should be UNACCEPTABLE!!! I’m tired of reading that no charges are filed and it’s an “accidental shooting”. You fucking leave an unlocked and loaded gun around the house with children you freaking deserve to be locked up for life!
Arizona: 3 year-old boy fatally shoots himself in the face with parents’ gun
10-Year-Old Girl Dies After Accidental Shooting
Right Wing Religious Extremists! Women are not your property or the state’s property! Hating on GLBT is not a religious statement! It’s Freaking Bigotry!
A lot of poor people work and still don’t have enough to eat or have access to healthcare. Look at the Walmart Heirs! They are the lazy bums!! Poor people and unemployed people are not the ones that scam our country out of money!
Okay, that should get things going … air your grievance!!!
Monday Reads: The Beat Goes On
Posted: December 23, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 65 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m going to continue with my own whims and fancies since this time of year always creates one big cultural, political, and historical vacuum. I use my winter break to renew myself and to tickle my fancy. The first man I really fell head over heels in love with introduced me to Jack Kerouac during my freshman year of university. He broke my heart but Kerouac became a muse. Then, came my husband who got me deep into Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Dizzy. I left him but that bebop jazz stayed right in my heart and under my fingers. The closer we got to those awful 80s, the more some of us craved that old time bohemian rebellion that started with the beat generation and lead to the hippies. I feel like that now. Can we please get a new groovy, snap worthy, punk generation to rebel against the republican status quo so I don’t have to wax nostalgic?
I’m going to start off with this article from The Guardian: “Greenwich Village: what remains of New York’s beat generation haunts?” This culture made me want to drop everything and move to New York like my cousin. Oh, Mary Bracken I am so sorry I didn’t follow you there when you offered to get me situated after high school graduation I could’ve lived the remnants of this as well as the birth of CBGB.
A few landmarks of those bygone bohemian days – most recently portrayed in the Coen brothers‘ film Inside Llewyn Davis, out on 24 January – still exist. The inspiration for the movie’s fictional anti-hero, Davis, was Brooklyn-born Dave Van Ronk, a real- life blues and folk singer with no small talent, who worked with performers such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, but remained rooted in the village until he died in 2002, declining to leave it for any length of time and refusing to fly for many years. Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, takes its name from the street that was home to the Gaslight Cafe, and other early 60s folk clubs.
The Village stretches from the Hudson River Park east as far as Broadway, and from West Houston Street in the south up to West 14th Street.
Lots of folks want to save landmarks ethereal. Every one needs a place to go to get away from the pressures and the ugliness of modern 
corporate instigated culture. Why shouldn’t we save the places where elves and gnomes are said to live? Why shouldn’t we protect the “hidden folk” and their environs?
Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer. They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church.
The project has been halted until the Supreme Court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental and the cultural impact — including the impact on elves — of the road project. The group has regularly brought hundreds of people out to block the bulldozers.
And it’s not the first time issues about “Huldufolk,” Icelandic for “hidden folk,” have affected planning decisions.
They occur so often that the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states that “issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on.”
Scandinavian folklore is full of elves, trolls and other mythological characters. Most people in Norway, Denmark and Sweden haven’t taken them seriously since the 19th century, but elves are no joke to many in Iceland, population 320,000.
A survey conducted by the University of Iceland in 2007 found that 62 percent of the 1,000 respondents thought it was at least possible that elves exist.
Today’s world brings on so many things that make you want to shake your head and slap folks right in the face. Why shouldn’t we indulge in a little fancy when these kinds of things pop up in today’s headlines? Women are not be incubators. But yet, the state of Texas, says yes they are!
On Nov. 26, Erick Munoz woke to the sound of his year-old son crying and found his 14-weeks-pregnant wife, Marlise, lying on the kitchen floor, blue in the face and without a pulse. A firefighter and paramedic, Munoz called 911 and performed CPR, to no avail. When they arrived at the John Peter Smith Hospital (JPS) in Fort Worth, Texas, he thought he would have to make an agonizing decision: refuse life support even though that meant losing both his wife and his future child. Munoz said in a WFAA News report that four years ago, when Marlise’s brother was killed in an accident, she told him that she would never want to be on life support — something they had discussed many times since.
A month later, against his requests, she is still on a ventilator. Not only does Munoz want to honor his wife’s wishes, but also he believes that the fetus she is carrying has been seriously harmed. “I don’t know how long she was there prior to me finding her,” he said. Munoz, who could not be reached for comment, wrote on WFAA’s Facebook page, “All I know is that she was without oxygen long enough for her to have massive brain swelling. I unfortunately know what that type of damage could do to a child during crucial developmental time.” Doctors say it’s likely that Munoz’s wife suffered a pulmonary embolism, and no longer has brain activity.
When Munoz first arrived at the hospital, he discovered that, according to Texas law, life-sustaining procedures may not be withheld or withdrawn from a pregnant woman, — even if she has an advance health care directive (also called a living will) stipulating that she does not want to be kept alive on a machine. There are conflicting reports about whether Marlise Munoz had an official DNR (Do Not Resuscitate order), and the family could not be reached for comment. But according to them Center for Women Policy Studies, as of 2012, Texas and 11 other states have automatically invalidated pregnant women’s advance directives to refrain from using extraordinary measures to keep them alive, and others have slightly less restrictive but similar laws. A spokesperson from the hospital told Yahoo Shine, “Our responsibility is to be a good corporate citizen while also providing quality care for our patients. At all times, JPS will follow the law as it applies to healthcare in the state of Texas.”
Marlise Munoz’s mother and father say they support their son-in-law’s request to take their daughter off life support. “She absolutely DID NOT EVER want to be connected to Life Support,” her mother, Lynne Machado, wrote on WFAA’s Facebook page. “This issue is not about Pro Choice/Pro Life. Our intent is purely one of education about how this [statute] null and voids any woman’s DNR [if she is] pregnant. We know our daughter well enough, after numerous discussions about DNR, that she would NEVER EVER consent to being hooked up to Life Support.” While the family’s tragic situation hits a nerve in a state where abortion debates rage, Munoz also said he doesn’t want to participate in arguments
over right-to-life verses pro-choice issues, but instead wishes to honor his wife and inform the public about a little-known law. Marlise Munoz, at approximately 18 weeks pregnant, remains unresponsive and her husband describes her as “simply a shell.” Doctors check the fetal heartbeat daily, but Munoz doesn’t think the testing is sufficient to measure the fetus’s viability. “Its hard to reach the point where you would wish your wife’s body would stop,” he said.
Yes, there are many things that horrify about the way the right wing and religionists treats women.
We’ve compiled a few of the worst things said about women by TEApublicans in 2013 in the list below:
Rape exceptions for abortions aren’t necessary because pregnancies resulting from rape are rare.
Arizona GOP Rep. Trent Franks was the “brains” behind what was probably the most high-profile abortion restriction this year: a bill to ban all abortions in the U.S. at 20 weeks after conception. “The incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape are very low,” he claimed.
The ‘masturbating fetus.’
Yes, this really happened. While defending Franks’ 20-week abortion ban, Texas GOP-er Michael Burgess used a rather bizarre argument to claim that fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks after conception, despite medical evidence to the contrary. “Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he said. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”
Having an abortion after rape is tampering with criminal evidence.
New Mexico GOP Rep. Cathrynn Brown caused a stir when she introduced a bill that defined aborting a pregnancy that resulted from rape as criminal evidence tampering — that should result in a 3-year prison sentence. The bill said that “procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”
Rape of an underage victim is understandable if a woman seems more mature than her age.
Montana Judge G. Todd Baugh received a huge backlash when he sentenced 54 year-old teacher Stacey Rambold to only 30 days in prison — after he was convicted of raping his 14-year-old student, Cherise Moralez. Justifying his sentence, Baugh said that the victim was “as much in control of the situation” because she was “older than her chronological age.” Moralez committed suicide during Rambold’s trial.
Transvaginal ultrasounds before abortions are a good idea.
Anti-abortion politicians in the Indiana Legislature pushed a bill that would force women who wanted to use an abortion pill to undergo two medically unnecessary ultrasounds — one before taking the pill, and one after. Responding to the backlash, Indiana Right to Life’s Sue Swayze said, “I got pregnant vaginally. Something else could come in my vagina for a medical test that wouldn’t be that intrusive to me. So I find that argument a little ridiculous.”
One disgusting term: Rape insurance.
We saw a lot of bills that banned Obamacare from covering abortions this year. Nearly half of all statehouses pushed through some type of measure forcing women to purchase abortion coverage as a separate abortion-only policy, called a “rider.” Some of these laws did not include exceptions allowing insurance to cover abortions in the cases of rape or incest. Michigan’s Right to Life’s Barbara Listing didn’t see any problem with this: “It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those.”
It’s easier to believe in elves than to believe most of the things spewed by republicans and their right wing base. Still the media villagers take them seriously and report their lies as just another opinion.
Of all the falsehoods told about PresidentBarack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.
As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”
Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.
Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.
But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.
Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.
Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:
• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.
• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion.
So, my winter break starts and I want to celebrate rebellion, creativity, and wanton. I can’t wait for 12th night because that signals the end of Crass Consumerism and the pleasure of hedonism and the carnival season. I just want to give up all this sit com fantasy and grab on to something real for a change.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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