True (McDignity Mix)

Yes, there really is such a thing as “McTeacher Night”; I’ve seen one, before. And, yes, the fast food joint invites the students from a local school to come over and order food from their teachers.

To the one, there is an old slogan about the day the schools have the money they need and the Air Force needs to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. It’s been around for a while; posters, bumper stickers, t-shirts―the whole nine yards. One wonders at the potential hullabaloo if we sent some military recruiters to do the same.

To the other, if you have ever witnessed one of these events, it might seem plainly evident why so many people back teachers in contract disputes. This really is asking too much of schoolteachers, yet they will put on their shining classroom smiles and face their students in good faith and the best possible spirit.

When it comes time to remind children to do whatever it takes to get the job done, perhaps we don’t often enough point to their teachers as examples because we are ashamed of what communities demand.

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Image note: Detail of cartoon by Jen Sorensen, via Daily Kos, 19 May 2016.

The New Mundane (Petty Grotesquerie)

There are days when we might simply shrug and say, “Yeah, it happens.” But, you know. This happened:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) hasn’t yet met with Supreme Court nominee Merrick B. Garland for what has been a long anticipated encounter between the former Judiciary Committee chairman and the federal appeals court judge he has long praised.

But when the meeting does happen, don’t expect Garland to succeed in convincing Hatch to support his nomination, because Hatch has already declared that it won’t.

“Like many of my Senate colleagues, I recently met with Chief Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. … Our meeting, however, does not change my conviction that the Senate should consider a Supreme Court nominee after this presidential election cycle,” Hatch wrote in an op-ed published on the website of the Deseret News early Thursday morning and later removed. It remains available in a Google database.

The headline for Mike DeBonis’ Washington Post report is straightforward: “Sen. Orrin Hatch reacts to meeting with Merrick Garland before it occurs”.

Look, the simple fact is that once upon a time politicians used to at least pay lip service to the notion of statesmanship. Certes, the Utah Republican knows this after thirty-nine years in the United States Senate.

It seems futile to complain about such petty grotesquerie; we probably ought to be thankful Republicans aren’t calling for Second Amendment solutions to the Garland nomination. Nonetheless, it’s worth reminding that the presidential contest is neither the only evidence of Republican unfitness to govern nor any manner of surprise. Republicans have labored hard to achieve such depths. The presidential contest is symptomatic. Orrin Hatch’s continued descent is emblematic.

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Image note: Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), left, is flanked by House Speaker Ryan (R-WI), right, while signing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act of 2016, on Capitol Hill, 18 May 2016, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

DeBonis, Mike. “Sen. Orrin Hatch reacts to meeting with Merrick Garland before it occurs”. The Washington Post. 26 May 2016.

A Memo to the Guardians of Female Chastity and Other Assorted Pervert Prudes

MEMORANDUM

To: Guardians of Female Chastity and other assorted Pervert Prudes

re: Ride stops at the elbow

Ye Guardians of Female Chastity―

My entire life, I’ve been told to fear you in one way or another. I’ve been told to cover my body as to not distract you in school, to cover my body to help avoid unwanted advances or comments, to cover my body as to not tempt you to sexually assault me, to reject your unwanted advances politely as to not anger you. I’ve been taught to never walk alone at night, to hold my keys in my fist while walking in parking lots, to check the backseat of my car, to not drink too much because you might take advantage of me. I’ve been told what I should and shouldn’t do with my body as to not jeopardize my relationships with you.

I’ve been warned not to emasculate you, to let “boys be boys,” to protect your fragile ego and to not tread on your even more fragile masculinity. I’ve been taught to keep my emotions in check, to let you be the unit of measure for how much emotion is appropriate and to adjust my emotions accordingly. I’ve been taught that you’re allowed to categorize women into mothers/sisters/girlfriends/wives/daughters but any woman outside of your protected categories is fair game.

So to those of you who think you’re being helpful by “protecting” me and my fellow women, you’re like a shark sitting in the lifeguard chair. I wasn’t uncomfortable until you showed up at the pool and the only potential predator I see is you.

Your mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives and daughters don’t need you to walk them to the bathroom for safety.

(Rose-Hodge)

―it is time to go fuck yourselves.

Not the Worst Thing Budweiser Has Ever Done, But Still

It is my regret to advise that Jen Sorensen is actually not joking. Well, not about that part, at least, but what’s a cartoonist to do?

Sadly, though, no, it’s not a joke. InBev is actually doing this:

The America labels are only going on 12-ounce bottles and 12-ounce cans, said Nick Mills, general manager at the Baldwinsville brewery. Other sizes―such as 24- and 16-ounce cans―will be in patriotically-themed case boxes and packages, but will not be labeled as America.

“We do summer patriotic packages every year,” he said, noting past labels and artwork that featured the Stars and Stripes or the Statue of Liberty. “This one seems to be getting more attention.”

It has raised eyebrows from those who question the use of the word “America” by a brewer not based in the United States. A-B InBev was formed in 2008 when InBev, itself a merger of Belgian and Brazilian brewing interests, acquired Anheuser-Busch in a $50 billion takeover. A-B had been founded in 1876 in St. Louis, which remains its U.S. headquarters.

(Cazentre)

Certes, ’tis unspeakably crass, but let’s face it, this is hardly the worst thing “America’s Rape Brewery”™ has ever done. Generally speaking, Budweiser ought to be disqualified from being “America’s beer”.

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Image note Detail of cartoon by Jen Sorensen, via Daily Kos Comics, 24 May 2016

Cazentre, Don. “‘America’ rolls off the bottling line at Upstate NY’s Budweiser plant”. Syracuse.com. 25 May 2016.

The Word from K Street

This is probably relevant to something:

An election year filled with anti-K Street rhetoric hasn’t stopped candidates up and down the ballot from pressuring prominent Washington lobbyists to pony up record sums of political cash.

Lobbyists may well give more in 2016 than they did in previous cycles. The 2014 Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission did away with an aggregate limit on donations to candidates for federal office. And with control of the Senate in play, it’s increasingly difficult for lobbyists from both parties to resist fundraising pleas.

(Ackley)

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Image note:“Leading Lobbyists’ Donations to Federal Candidates and Super PACs” (Ryan Kelly/CQ Roll Call, 20 May 2016)

Ackley, Kate. “Lobbyist Donations Surge, Despite Anti-Establishment Rhetoric”. Roll Call. 20 May 2016.

A Walking, Talking Uterus in a Superhero Costume Beating an Orange Anus

Congratulations to Matt Bors, who notes his latest nomination for an Eisner Award, and with with penultimates like this, it’s easy to see why.

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Image note: Detail of cartoon by Matt Bors, via Daily Kos, 18 May 2016.

Clear as Wood

Two fun paragraphs:

Researchers at the University of Maryland were able pull away color and chemicals from a block of wood to leave it impressively see-through. The result is a material that is both stronger and more insulating than glass, with better biodegradability than plastic. “We were very surprised by how transparent it could go,” said Liangbing Hu, who wrote about the project in Advanced Materials.

Hu’s team isn’t the only group that’s developed a technique for transparent wood―Swedish researchers have also been able to clear out that pesky visible pulp, replacing it with a transparent polymer. The treatment techniques appear pretty similar: it’s a two-stage process.

(Smith)

The human species never ceases to amaze me.

The trees, of course, are appalled.

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Image note: A block of wood before, left, and after treatment to become transparent. (Photo: Liangbing Hu via New York Times)

Smith, Mat. “Scientists made see-through wood that’s stronger than glass”. Engadget. 16 May 2016.

The Conservative Christian Conscience

With all due apologies to Mr. Fish. Via Clowncrack, 11 May 2016 .

Something Completely Different

“Have to face it, I’m finally an addict; the smell of popcorn and worn plush lingers for weeks.”

―Margaret Atwood

Here’s a change of pace:

No matter where you go, the movie theaters tend to smell the same: like popcorn, and the butter-like stuff they put on the popcorn, and that stale odor of recycled air-conditioned air.

Also fear, and sadness, and joy. These feelings aren’t scents, per se, in that you don’t take a whiff of air and consciously think, “Man, it smells scary in here.” But in a study published earlier this week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers found that the air in movie theaters tends to take on unique chemical signatures based on how the audience reacts to what’s happening on the screen. A horror film, for instance, will have a different chemical imprint than a comedy, which will leave a different mark than a tearjerker.

The report from Cari Romm for Science of Us actually sets a number of thoughts in motion, including a weirdly recursive context in which yes, actually people do now have ideas of something smelling scary, and as the colloquialism sets roots in American culture the idea will eventually concretize or crystallize long enough to be noted, and then set right back to shifting and changing and growing and evolving. It’s not quite the same as the decade-old debate whether sour apple or lime tastes like green, though even then the question illustrates contextual challenges. To wit, the straightforward answer: I’m middle-aged; the sour-apple thing is “new” by comparison, so “lime” is what tastes like “green”. A more honest answer: Marijuana. A more cultural-contextually useful answer: I’m sure as a middle-aged lifer in cedar and hemlock country, green means something different to me than it would a young’n barely as tall as the wheat that is all he can see for miles in any direction.

Smells, of course, are more interesting, but translating the relevant trivia about memory into something useful seems a challenging return on investment especially according to a daunting prospect against success.

Nor should we wonder why Atwood comes to mind.

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Image note: Shizuo Heiwajima wanders Ikebukuro. (Detail of frame from Durarara!! episode 7, “Bad-Ass Dude”.)

Atwood, Margaret. “You Take My Hand And”. 1971.

Romm, Cari. “Movie Theaters Smell Like People’s Feelings”. Science of Us. 13 May 2016.

The Donald Trump Show (Death Wish Double Trouble Super Fun Follow-Up Sequel Pak)

“He’s a death’s-head jester cackling on the edge of the void, the clownish host of one last celebration of America’s bombast, bigotry and spectacular ignorance.”

―Andrew O’Hehir

Sometimes the setup requires a bit of seemingly otherwise useless melodrama; and sometimes that seemingly otherwise useless melodrama―your buzzword for the week is, well, okay, two words: “October surprise”―works well enough to address certain otherwise seemingly obvious questions somehow obscured by a hazy addiction to synthesized melodrama. Or, more to the point:

We can’t be sure how many people really support Trump, [Thomas B.] Edsall reports, since there’s considerable evidence that they aren’t telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it appears, is something white people do in the shadows. It’s a forbidden desire that is both liberating and self-destructive, not unlike the married heterosexual who has a same-sex lover on the down-low, or the executive who powers through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin. On some level you know the whole thing can’t end well, but boy does it feel good right now.

I have argued on multiple occasions that white Americans, considered in the aggregate, exhibit signs of an unconscious or semi-conscious death wish. I mean that both in the Freudian sense of a longing for release that is both erotic and self-destructive―the intermingling of Eros and Thanatos―and in a more straightforward sense. Consider the prevalence of guns in American society, the epidemic rates of suicide and obesity (which might be called slow-motion suicide) among low-income whites, the widespread willingness to ignore or deny climate science and the deeply rooted tendency of the white working class to vote against its own interests and empower those who have impoverished it. What other term can encompass all that?

Trump is the living embodiment of that contradictory desire for redemption and destruction. His incoherent speeches wander back and forth between those two poles, from infantile fantasies about forcing Mexico to build an $8 billion wall and rampant anti-Muslim paranoia to unfocused panegyrics about how “great” we will be one day and how much we will “win.” In his abundant vigor and ebullience and cloddish, mean-spirited good humor, Trump may seem like the opposite of the death wish. (He would certainly be insulted by any such suggestion. Wrong! Bad!) But everything he promises is impossible, and his supporters are not quite dumb enough not to see that. He’s a death’s-head jester cackling on the edge of the void, the clownish host of one last celebration of America’s bombast, bigotry and spectacular ignorance. No wonder his voters are reluctant to ‘fess up.

(O’Hehir)

Nor is this a matter of making the obvious point; with Americans, it’s all in how you say it.

I mean, sure, we can all see it, but explaining the mess is a whole ‘nother thing.

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Image notes: Top ― Brook, the jolly Humming Pirate. (Detail of frame from Shonen Jump One Piece.) Right ― Donald Trump speaks during the 2016 Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Candidates Forum (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images).

O’Hehir, Andrew. “Appetite for destruction: White America’s death wish is the source of Trump’s hidden support”. Salon. 11 May 2016.