National Review: Fooled again

Everyone's favorite litmus test for cultural cool, the National Review, has compiled a list of the top 50 "conservative" rock songs. Yeah, this is about as good as you'd expect.

No. 1 is The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," because "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss" is clearly anti-revolutionary and thus conservative.

Or, maybe "And the party on the left/Is now the party on the right" shows that The Who think the right wing sucks. But maybe that's just me.

And it just goes on from there. No. 50 is Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man," which is a classic rock song if I ever heard one.

Alaa update: gaining traction

i saw reference to the bloggers in the Tribune last week, too.

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Day of Action to Support Arrested Egyptian Protesters!

Demand Release of Jailed Egyptian Protesters!

Activists in the U.S. will picket the Egyptian embassy and consulates
in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago and San Francisco (and protests
in London and Cairo) on Thursday, May 25 at 12:30PM (local times).
Activists will demand the immediate release of all jailed
pro-democracy protesters recently arrested in Cairo.

Fool me once...

Playing catch-up but this is important. Last Friday Drudge picked up a story saying Tehran passed a law mandating Jews and other religious minorities wear badges. The piece appeared alongside a giant black-and-white shot of Hungarian Jews wearing the Nazis' yellow stars. Helpful in case you didn't figure out the implications.

The original showed up in Canada's National Post, a CanWest publication, which five years ago handed down corporate policy not to criticze Israel in op-eds. The ownership lineage of the outlet is important to note.

Headlined "Iran: Jews, Christians Must Wear Badges", the story has disappeared from the National Post site, replaced by a back-peddling folo. If you really must read the original, we can (*sigh*) send you to the dribble-mouth archives.

The article's charge is wrong and fits neatly into the pattern of PR groups working with expatriates to invent stories and further the demonization and fear by which elements of the administration can enact their gross schemes. This story was authored by an "analyst" tied to Benador Associates, whose roster includes Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and other neocon notables.

Plant a story in the compliant right-wing press, push the rest of the media to lap it up, and watch the country swing into a frenzy. Sounds familiar.

"Aquaculture" sounds like a new hipster subgrouping

my grand appearance. cue trumpets.

along with other members of the Central Committee's Midwest District Headquarters, i'm heading to see Michael Pollan talk tonight. Prep with this piece on California's queasy hello to fish-farming to get the animal-agriculture hate flowing.

Spotlight quote: "The pollution that's produced by a population of 200,000 or 300,000 fish would be the equivalent of the waste produced by a town of 60,000 people," said Tim Eichenberg, regional director of the Ocean Conservancy.

the real importance of the piece, though, is to reinforce the certainty that wild stocks of fish are plummeting worldwide, pushing the fishing industry into huge investments in these "farms," really just giant nets in the sea. Predictable results follow: massive pollution, disease plumes due to monoculture fish-farming, contamination of the remaining genetic stock and invasive-species predation because of the inevitable escape of some farmed fish.

Oh, and 1 in 5 fish we eat (well, some other people eat, i guess) is already brought to market in this manner. Time to dispense of those romanticized "Bridges of Madison County" images of our relationship to the aqua world.

Patriot Act, home edition

If I had a color printer, and many hours to kill, I'd print out and put together my own version of Patriot Act: The Game. This would make a much better party theme than hawking Tupperware.

Killing joey

You don't have to be an herbivore to find this appalling. Evidently kangaroo meat is becoming more popular among Czechs.

At the very least, I hope fans of FC Bohemians Praha aren't following this fad, since their mascot, like the Australian national symbol, is the roo.

The saga of incompetence continues.

In light of the news about the dismal polls for the Republicans, there's only one real question: how are the Democrats gonna fuck this one up?

Also note the reference (in passing) to the effects of gerrymandering... not that they call it that.

This may be snide enough

It's likely that everyone knows about this, but... Stephen Colbert's address to the White House correspondents dinner.

This is my kind of comedy... Colbert tearing into the president with the man sitting fifteen feet away. The discomfort experienced by the whole audience is quite palpable, and palpably delightful.

Mess o'potamia, college history edition

Since, presumably, more folks will be reading Politburo minutes than my personal blog, I've decided to start posting here some of the more perplexing pieces of purple prose I encounter as I grade undergraduate exams and papers.

I came across two gems tonight, grading for a course on American Cultural and Intellectual History since 1877 (you would've thought the course finished the first week of the term, no?). One of the prompts asks to assess a debate between John Dewey and Randolph Bourne over U.S. entry into the Great War. Thankfully, this isn't the class I'm actually TAing, as I would be tempted to strangle my own students if they began their essays with these doozies:

"John Dewey and Randolph Bourne could be the 19th century Plato and Aristotle - minus the funny robes and Latin." Yup, that's why Greece is known as the cradle of democracy, because they spoke Latin in Athens. Uh, oops. This gets my vote for best inappropriate analogy involving an ancient Greek philosopher since Shaquille O'Neal began referring to himself as "the Big Aristotle." (This was also about the time he said his game was like the Pythagorean Theorem, since no one had the answer. To which my then-roommate replied, "C squared.") And, of course, the student didn't even place the Great War in the right century.

Evidently many students are fuzzy about the timing of the Great War and the sequence of events that let to America's entry. At least in this class.

"The beginning of WWI was brought to the American people due to the sinking of the supply ship the Mesopatamia [sic]." Wow. Another ancient civilization butchered at the hands of the undergraduate history student. I think she meant the Lusitania, though we all know the fall of the modern Babylon has brought America ever closer to ruin.