Sister Becky Explains It All For You
"Just a girl in short shorts talking about whatever"

This may or may not be Becky, who is the personality behind the entertaining and provocative blog Just A Girl In Shorts Shorts Talking About Whatever. If she's real, or a metaphorical construct, matters not to me.

What I enjoy about JAGISSTAW is the concise text that unravels complicated issues using the tongs of her sass and smarts.

She describes herself: "Mom, recovering attorney, post-modern neo-feminist, enthusiastic regenerated dyke, unlikely punk, nice Catholic girl, passionate freedom-loving libertarian, thinking conservative, sappy romantic, spiritual redneck, softball enthusiast, shopaholic and unrepentant flirt. My other passion is mountain climbing.

On July 4, 2007 I started the next phase of my life as a femme desert tomboy in Arizona, where the chick , once called "trailer trash with a brain" by an Intertard wit, will be able to wear unfashionable daisy dukes year round."

That's what I'm talkin' about.


"How you get that much traffic without the equipment is beyond me."

There's a scene in a cult lesbian power movie Desert Hearts that reminds me of Becky, or the Becky character the blog represents.

The setting is the Reno, Nevada, 1959, where Columbia University professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) has come to establish six weeks residency to obtain a divorce. While outside the safe confines of New York City, she meets an artist and casino worker Cay Rivvers in a dramatic way that has stuck in my head since I first saw the film at The Biograph Theatre when it came out--and has to be one of the all-time great entrances of a film character.

While driving in the desert, Cay recognizes the car of her friend Frances (Audrey Parker) who runs a boarding house for would-be divorceés. With Buddy Holly singing "Peggy Sue," Cay throws her long black, tail-finned car into tire-squealing, smoke-throwing reverse to catch up with Frances for the express intention, as the truckers used to say, of checking out the seat covers. She introduces herself to prim Vivian and we know right away something is going to happen between these two.

[Starts in this clip at 4:29]




Anyway, that's how I picture Becky. But even better, she just gives an alternative viewpoint and she's witty and brassy and knowledgeable. And she uses, um, pictures to illustrate her points quite well. I don't expect to agree with everything she writes -- but -- in interpreting the current financial meltdown, I think she's, well, right on the money.

She writes:

"The American dollar has shrunk 25.8% since 2000. If the US dollar had kept pace with the Euro, the going rate of a barrel of oil (which are traded in dollars) would be around $80, rather than $140. Gas would be about $2.60 a gallon.

One might think all this inflation, and economic hardship, would be enough to wake Americans up.

But since it is not:

Don't we have a freakin' ounce of pride?"


A few years ago, when the loonie slipped in value, there was widespread patriotic outrage in Canada, with demands that their currency be shored up.

However, Americans, for the most part, don't seem to care at all.

We define patriotism by the wearing of flag lapels.

And shopping."


A Stroke Of Insight
"I'm having a stroke...This is cool!"


Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor has most likely never worn a pair of wonderful raggedy cut-off short shorts, but who knows. [this is her via drjilltaylor.com] And, yes, that is a real human brain with spinal chord attached. Not her own, in case you were wondering.

Since the billion-eyed audience is several ticks more aware than average, you may have already heard about the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Taylor who in 1996 suffered a massive stroke. While experiencing this event she was able as a scientist to analyze how the separate hemispheres of her brain functioned and malfunctioned.

Her mind-splitting epiphany inspired her subsequent writing and talking about not just those insights but how she managed to recover from, well, death.

A commenter here yesterday mentioned Dr. Taylor's story as a way to dispel my favoring the adoption of a "No Hope In Hope" attitude. And in my better moments, I favor Taylor's sensations of "connection to everything" (Due to some wonderful positive interactions with, um, certain manifestations of scientific mixology in my college years, with sensations that have stuck with me ever since).

But knowledge that one is connected to everything conveys to me a frightening, befuddling sense of responsibility. That's how I'm wired.

And, perhaps we humans are a freak of nature. We have evolved with a brain too large, really, to accomplish the basic tasks we need; rusticate and fornicate. We ruminate, too, and that's not necessary for the first two. So we are forever unhappy and isolated and in need of assurance and comfort, wherever and however we choose them.

That's one theory.

And here's the thing. We can't conduct self-diagnostics. We can study the brain, but the brain can't study itself -- though Taylor's experience comes closest. Science requires experimentation. If you cannot repeat the result more than once, you have...an unverifiable outcome.

It's kind of like the "WOW" signal picked up on August 15, 1977 for a 72 scant seconds by astrophysicist Dr. Jerry R. Ehman while working with the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio University. He thought he may picked up an extraterrestrial signal. On the computer print out graph he wrote "Wow!"indicating his astonishment. He may have picked up some kind of alien signal, but nobody's been able to find it since, even after extensive searching. The energy might've been generated by some funky terrestrial source bouncing around out there (probably not) or a heretofore unknown noise caused by an odd pulsar. Nobody knows. You can read about it here.

Taylor explains what happened New York Times piece by Tara Parker-Pope:

“How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?,'’ she said. “In the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life.'’

Her account of the experience of stroke is vivid, and at one point, she recalled, she felt like someone had taken a remote control and hit the mute button. “I was shocked to find myself inside a silent mind,'’ she said.

What is so surprising about Dr. Taylor’s story is that she experienced a sort of euphoria as she was left with only right-brain functions. She lost her sense of self, but she also shed the stress of her life and, as she puts it, “37 years of emotional baggage.'’

“Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter,'’ she said. “I felt a sense of peacefulness.'’

She wrote My Stroke Of Insight, and has been lecturing, writing -- and singing, about her life-altering event. Taylor is quite a speaker, taking a serious-as-it-gets issue but using humor as way to explain what happened to her and the changes she went through.

Opinions as to her message vary. Like: "This insight she describes is the basis of all religion, without the story telling and mythology. She is presenting what could be the basis for the unification of science and religion."

To: "Pseudoscientific [sic.] garbage!"

Dr. Taylor's experience is without question a real one. But whether her intense and intimate understanding of what happened can be universalized -- that, that is another question. I do want to read her book, though. I guess how you take her words is a matter of, dare I say it: faith and hope.

And around the cat goes.

You can read the New York Times interview here.

A fascinating 18-minute video is below:

The First Friday Femmes: Not Taking The Night Off

Curated Culture didn't want to cancel the First Friday Art Walk after all, the weather is good, and there's work to see. So ....

By now, most of the billion-eyed audience should know the story behind this image, but if not, I will here again explain: The picture was taken, and not by me, at an opening several years ago at the vanished Three Miles Gallery and that this space, and an adjacent one, is now the busy Tarrant's Café.

These ladies represent the Greek dramatic expression of comedy and tragedy, the twin fountains of artistic expression.

So there.

I'm busy writing a book, so I doubt I'm getting out. But enjoy yourselves, girls, and drink a PBR for me.

Scylla and Charibdis
Either government doesn't matter, or that's all that matters. I don't know which.


I'm really wishing I had a poster version of this fantastical, post-collapse illustration of a road trip. And I wish I could be responsible and tell you a) the artist and b) where I got it. I've had this for awhile and just slugged the title as "Road Trip2" and a search for this didn't turn up the picture. If anybody knows where or how to credit this, say so.


Should I Go To Monterrey And Watch The Whales?

About two weeks ago Amy Goodman had Ralph Nader on Democracy Now! He was also profiled by Paul Farhi for the Washington Post, because, yes, he's running for president again.

From Farhi:

"So at 74, shunned and marginalized, he's running for president for the fifth time.

"It's the rational approach," he declares. "If you're locked out of the governmental system, if you can't get a hearing, and I can't, you go to the electoral system. What's my alternative? Should I go to Monterey and watch the whales?"

Having burned so many bridges, and persuaded for decades in the righteousness of his cause, Nader insists not on harnessing his dwindling sympathizers to the current Obama Hope train but instead takes every opportunity to drub Obama about how he's really just another suit. And Nader could be right.

Obama must run as a centrist candidate--much as Doug Wilder did when running for Lieutenant Governor and Governor here in Virginia, and what he sought to do when he ran for President for 10 minutes in 1993. This is the same reason Colin Powell was bruited for one executive office or another; but frankly, I don't know if Powell--one-- has the stomach for the fol-de-rol of campaigning and, two, with the way he was trotted out to fall on his sword for a lying administration, if he wonders himself what the hell he built a career in the military fighting for. Or maybe I'm naive. The latter is the most possible.

My gullible nature notwithstanding, if Obama ran as big a liberal as he likely is, there's no way he'd turn out the votes he needs. He's got a tough enough time being black and half-white and not Muslim. Politics is politics. Nader must know that.

I once met Nader, prior to his 2000 bid that made so many people angry. He was speaking at a philanthropy conference and I had the opportunity to interview him for a publication. We were backstage at a brand spanking new performing arts center at the University of Richmond. With a straight face, the only one he owns, he worried whether the blown-in insulation above us was asbestos. I got anxious because the little table upon which I rested my notepad wiggled and that caused the small lamp on it to flutter, with an obvious electrical short. I thought better of this, and rested the pad on my knees.

I remember how in 2004 Michael Moore and Bill Maher got down on their knees to beg Ralph not to run. The former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell -- who always made the best points on the shows she was on -- makes the point that Nader changed the way people throughout the world think about power. And said then he could be out there as the gadfly mobilizing people. He could be part of a feet-to-the-fire campaign. Use a check list, and f a candidate doesn't do it he pays the price. If Nader helped somebody win, he's still a player, and has influence where influence is everything.

Nader didn't take her wise advice. He's got his own reasons.




From the Post feature:

"Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor and a liberal author, admits he becomes "splenetic" on the subject of Nader the candidate. "I regard him as a saboteur of the cause to which he purports to devote himself," Gitlin says. "Nobody I can think of in public life has so willfully repealed his contributions to American life with such intensity and conviction."

Eric Alterman, another liberal commentator and author, calls Nader "a megalomaniac" and "a Leninist," in the sense of Nader's belief that things must get much worse before reform can begin. "There was only one person in entire world on election eve who could have prevented Bush's election."

Nader doesn't feel a need to apologize. He doesn't worry that the first line of his obituary will describe him as the spoiler of the 2000 race. He often quips, "You can't spoil a system that's rotten to the core." To strangers who get in his face, he has another deflection: "Gore won. The election was stolen. Go after the thieves."

It wasn't his responsibility, he says, to persuade people to vote for Gore. If voters were attracted by his positions and issues, he says, then Democrats were free to take the same positions. Bottom line? "The Democrats couldn't beat a bumbling governor from Texas," Nader mocks.

Nader wasn't the only man who could have changed the election's outcome. His name was one of eight third-party candidates on the Florida ballot, all of whom attracted far more than the 538 votes Gore needed to change the outcome.

Nader thinks it's futile to keep arguing about it. He also thinks one man could stop the "scapegoating": Gore. "If he would stand up and say publicly, 'Ralph Nader wasn't responsible,' that would make a huge difference," Nader says."

Nader: Obama Is Running For "Panderer-in-Chief"

From Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, on his first day as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Barack Obama traveled to Washington to address AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is some of what he had to say.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state—the Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper, but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

AMY GOODMAN: Obama later appeared to backtrack on his comments about the future status of Jerusalem as capital in a follow-up interview on CNN. He said it would be up to the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think Barack Obama is in training to become panderer-in-chief. That was really a disgraceful speech. It didn’t further the peace process, the two-state solution favored by a majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, a majority of Israeli and Palestinian people. He basically sided with the militaristic approach to occupying, repressing, colonizing, destroying the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. He hasn’t even spoken out against the international crime of the blockade of Gaza, one-and-a-half million people, from medicine or drinking water, fuel, electricity, food—lots of silent fatalities in Gaza because of that.

Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z. In his voting record, he voted against reform of the Mining Act of 1872, which gives away our hard rock minerals. He voted for a terrible class-action restriction law that the corporations wanted him to vote for. He, in many ways, has disappointed people who had greater hopes for him. He’s voted for reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. He refuses to even discuss—he’s vigorously against impeachment of Bush and Cheney. He won’t even support his colleague Senator Russ Feingold motion to censure the Bush administration for systemic repeated illegal wiretaps. He—you know, he’s letting the corporate-dominated city of Washington, the corporations who actually rule us now in Washington, determine his agenda. And that does not augur well.

He’s just appointed economic advisers right out of the Robert Rubin school of Citigroup and the University of Chicago. His Middle East advisers involve people who actually helped write his AIPAC speech. You know, it’s a sad thing to see, because he knows better, but he’s suppressing himself repeatedly until he becomes a different person, should he be elected president.
.............................

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I wanted to play for you two clips, one of Barack Obama and one of McCain. This is Barack Obama speaking about Iran.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything.

AMY GOODMAN: On the campaign trail, John McCain accused Obama of being naive on Iran.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: My friends, they are developing nuclear weapons. Also what is totally unsatisfactory is that the Iranians are making, are manufacturing and shipping into Iraq the most lethal explosive devices that are killing young Americans. That’s not acceptable. And Senator Obama wants to sit down without any precondition across the table and negotiate with this individual. My friends, that’s not right, and that’s naive. And that shows a lack of experience and a lack of judgment.

AMY GOODMAN: McCain’s position and then your assessment of Obama?

RALPH NADER: Well, it recalls Michael Abramowitz in the Washington Post in March and New York Times reporters a few weeks later saying that if Obama or Clinton were elected president, the foreign and military policy would not be much different than the foreign and military policy of George Bush in his second term. And that illustrates that. The military-industrial complex and the politicians like Obama and McCain who support it—$700 billion, over half of the federal government’s operating expenditure now is the military budget—are desperately looking for enemies, desperately exaggerating enemies.

Iran has not invaded anybody in 250 years. Yet it’s obviously frightened. It’s surrounded by the US military west, south, east. It’s been labeled “Axis of Evil” by Bush, who invaded Iraq after he labeled them “Axis of Evil.” We have Special Forces, according to Sy Hersh, that go in and out of Iran. What are they going to do? They talk very belligerently nationally, but they’re really scared. I mean, we supported Saddam Hussein, logistically and with materiel, in invading Iran, which took a half a million Iranian lives. They remember the shooting down of their civilian airliner years ago."

Theodor van Thulden - Sirens, Scylla and Charibdis, 17th century via, orrologion.


I admire communal and even anarchic principles and can see how they may work in small communities where the consent of the governed, or un-governed as they case may be, is easy to gauge. But with a nation of 300 millions, spread over a continent, there is little real way of maintaining a democratic relationship forever without periodic renovations of the structure. And that happens every, oh, 200 years or so.

Am I just throwing up my hands, and therefore saying; OK, you win, bring on the despot? Or am I saying: I am a concerned citizen, but I have too much going on in my life, with an accumulation of interests and a good group of friends and colleagues, to allow my precious life moments to get siphoned off in the affairs of national government that is beyond repair. On a street and even block level, this is where when I have the emotional energy spare on such matters. I mean, at this point, I don't see any other way to retain my balance.

Obama can give no speech and Olbermann can make no Special Comment that'll save us.

"Hope And Fear Chase Each Other's Tails"

I'll keep voting, though I feel that beyond the local level, it doesn't matter much.

Jim Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation isn't the place to go for cheerful news, usually, but I do on occasion run into somebody who has written thoughts I harbor but haven't articulated. As in here, with Djinn:

"All this talk about the presidential election, and candidates and their stated policies, underlines an emerging situation that people have yet to get their heads around: IMHO politics and the political structure in the US have already proved themselves ideologically and intellectually irrelevant, and I think they are about to become manifestly irrelevant.

Government is structured in such a way that sound and sensible policy decisions are politically impossible. Besides that, not that many of the problems we face can be addressed using the political machinery, even if there was any will to address them. We are looking down the barrel of something that government simply can't do anything about. We can be sure that government will perform its customary function of implementing policies so misguided as to assure that the coming catastrophe is as catastrophic as possible."

No Hope In Hope

Djinn also gave an extensive excerpt from activist Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. This piece came from Endgame, published in June 2006 by Seven Stories Press, and is about how Jensen gave up on hope. Things are bad, and getting worse, and hoping something will intervene is, well, he says, folly. I've truncated it, but you can see it all here.

"Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.....We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow.

...I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

...

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.

Another question people sometimes ask me is, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just party?” Well, the first answer is that I don’t really like to party. The second is that I’m already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love."

One of the aspects I enjoy about this image is the dynamic between these women.
They've stopped to discuss how best to proceed. Should they continue on, or will they be able to make it to the distant and ruinous city (seen in the larger example at the top of this post) before nightfall? Should they even try? What's the best way to proceed? Those cute rucksacks don't appear to be large or lumpy enough to have bedding materials inside--but maybe, if stowed in a neat fashion. Maybe this is a short reconnoitering hike to see what's Beyond The Next Hill before returning to their outpost.

The former highway's surface is cracked and on the verge of getting reclaimed by nature. A busted car is just ahead, crooked jersey barriers, a discarded tire. This is not quite the Yellow brick Road. And, I admit my bias, I have a thing for women in shorts and hiking boots. And I also like that neither of the women appear to have weapons (though I suppose you could smite somebody with that walking stick).

I'd like to read the story about these intrepid women.