Divinest Sense

I stole this from Medley. Hmmm, I’m getting hungry, time for another walk in Rock Creek Park…

Get Your Monster Name

Well, as you can see, I’ve got my past entries imported from Movable Type into Wordpess, but I haven’t managed to bring over my fabulous stylesheet yet. So you’re looking at the wretched Wordpress default theme. Hopefully I will have some time this week and/or weekend to work on it. The gallery will now be at jenniferbishop.org, and I’ll be attempting to bend “gallery” to my will and make it look like an interesting online portfolio rather than a generic repository for my many, many kitty pictures. That’s what Flickr is for. So anyway…. hang in there! Things are going to be looking a lot better Real Soon Now.

Did you know that we have secret laws and regulations in this country? I wish I could tell you more, so that you can avoid breaking them, but since they are secret, I’m afraid I don’t know what they are. Except that apparently one of them is that a government-issued ID is, in fact, required to board an airplane, even though that law is not on the books anywhere. Kevin Drum is following the story. I guess these laws were passed by the secret congress of the shadow government. Which was elected by the shadow citizenry, I presume. But waitaminute, I learned in my fancy private school that we, the non-secret American people, *are* the government, and *we* pass the laws through our elected representatives. I better write to Miss Roberts about this one, she may want to change her curriculum for 4th grade social studies.

Sid Blumenthal’s got an excellent, clear-eyed, and personal analysis of the scandal surrounding the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity as an act of revenge against Joe Wilson. (at Salon, watch an ad to see the whole article)

Rove’s still very much in his place of honor at the White House, seated right behind the prez, serene as a basking eel, and free to crank that republican spin machine harder than he’s ever cranked before. It’s thrilling to watch it in action. The talking points memo to the republicans…. the magical transformation (through endless repetition of the memes) of “unethical and low” to “gutsy and patriotic”…. the deliberate misquoting and outright fabrication… the relentless flogging of this hackery at the Wall Street Journal and Fox News….

If you step back, relax, and just let the waves of deliberate obfuscation wash over you, you can appreciate what an artist Mr. Rove is. Right before your head spins around and you start spewing bile, that is.

But, as Mr. Blumenthal matter-of-factly points out, it doesn’t really matter if Rove’s talking points squelch our outrage for now; “before the prosecutor, Rove’s arsenal is useless.” . . .

At one point, on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked [RNC chair Ken]Mehlman if he had attended meetings at the White House on how to deal with Wilson. Suddenly, the voluble Mehlman constricted. “I don’t recall those meetings occurring,” he said. Has the prosecutor inquired about such meetings and their participants?
The sound and fury of Rove’s defenders will soon subside. The last word, the only word that matters, will belong to the prosecutor. So far, he has said very, very little. Unlike the unprofessional, inexperienced and weak Ken Starr, he does not leak illegally to the press. But he has commented publicly on his understanding of the case. “This case,” he said, “is not about a whistle-blower. It’s about a potential retaliation against a whistle-blower.”

My thoughts are with the people of London and the families of the victims of the horrible crime that took place there this morning. This attack serves as grim notice that nothing we’ve done so far has even come close to dampening the threat of terrorism; in fact, our ill-conceived invasion of Iraq has made the situation worse. What we’re doing IS NOT working, and this proves it.
Back over here in the states, the threat level on public transportation systems got bumped up a notch to “orange”. In DC, that means bomb-sniffing dogs and police with big guns patrolling the metro stations. Although there’s been no specific intelligence about a subway attack in the U.S., lots of folks have been wondering why the whole city freaks out when a cropduster enters the restricted air space, but anyone could walk onto any metro train at any time and leave a big-ass bomb under the seat. Eerily enough, an old man who was talking to me on the metro last night said “yep, with all the folks on these trains, it could be just like that 9-11. I tell you whut.” (OK, I added that last part)
So, what gives? A quote from today’s Congressional Quarterly e-mail update:

Many lawmakers have sharply criticized the administration’s focus on aviation security above all other means of transportation. Democrats, in particular, have pushed in vain for increased funding for transit and rail. They vowed to do so again next week.
The president’s fiscal 2006 Transportation Security Administration budget proposed $4.7 billion for aviation security and just $32 million for passenger rail, buses and other modes of surface transportation.
Bush also sought to eliminate dedicated funding streams for rail and bus security. The House rejected that proposal and restored $150 million in funding for rail security grants in its version of the Homeland Security funding bill (HR 2360), which passed in May.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would offer an amendment next week to double proposed funding for rail, bus and subway security.

Chuck Schumer has been pushing for more security on rail systems since 9/11. Perhaps now that we’ve seen two deadly attacks on public transportation in two major cities, he’ll have some success. This is not rocket science. Terrorists will try to blow up trains because it’s easy to blow up trains, and it causes a lot of civilian casualties. Poisoning the milk supply? Unleashing a virus? Cyberattacks? All very creative, but much less likely than some well-placed, low-tech explosives.

I’m just going to be lazy and point you to this Daily Kos entry by BriVT: Media Reaction to Yesterday’s HUGE News from Philadelphia. Great stuff - especially since I’m reading 1776 right now and noticing a lot of significant parallels between Iraq’s insurgency… and our own.

In a move termed a “last-ditch plea for relevance from a defeated insurgency” by a British Army spokesman, the Continental Congress yesterday gave final approval of a Declaration of Independence.
The document, signed by the Congressmen, provides a brief introduction followed by a litany of what the Congress terms “injuries and usurpations” by King George III.
“This really is the last gasp of a dying insurgency,” said British Army spokesman Larry DiRita. “With our fleets gathering outside New York to put the final touches on their rag-tag ‘Army,’ the rebels decided to make one final plea for attention.”

I’ve been tagged by Medley (some time ago now, sorry) in this book meme, so here is my contribution.

Total Number of books I’ve owned
I have no freakin’ idea. In the hundreds, definitely. I went through and got rid of a bunch of paperbacks and stuff back in September, so the collection is almost manageable at this point.

Last book I bought
Zorro by Isabel Allende, for my mom

Last book I read
Parts of The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod - bad, bad, bad. I generally don’t like science fiction that much, and this was tepid science fiction at best. A bad, pun-laden story jumbled together with rants on “Trotskyism” to make it seem relevant.

Last book I finished
The Corporation by Joel Bakan. Recommended.

Five books that mean a lot to me
This is a really difficult question, because I’m sure I’ll leave something out. Much of the impact of these books has to do with the age at which I read them.

1)Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Have I mentioned how much I hate science fiction? Well, this book is just awful. Heinlein rampages around a story like a horny wildebeest. That said, however, this book is important to me because when I read it at the age of 13, it opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about morality, intercultural differences, love, and sacrifice. And, of course, body paint and orgies.

2)The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago. I am a sucker for any interesting interpretation of the life of the J-man, and this one is particularly thoughtful and well-written.

3)The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This bizarre little tale makes me WEEP. The chapter about the prince meeting the fox is one of the simplest and most beautiful characterizations of what it is to love someone.

4)The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Showed me writing at its most plastic, writing as art, writing as a life force. A great book is not a set of instructions telling you what to think, it’s not an information dump. The human mind is not a refuse pile and should not be treated as such. A great book has a life of its own.

5)Beloved by Toni Morrison. Because it forces us to imagine, and try to comprehend, something that is unimaginable.

Five people I’d like to see to do this as well
Ummm, I think a lot of my friends with blogs have already been tagged, so I’ll extend this to anyone I know who’s got a corner of the web staked out somewhere and hasn’t written about books in a while.

Yet another reason I’m glad I no longer live in Texas. I could start a second blog just on that topic. Maybe I will.

On a visit to my country of origin this past weekend, my heart was warmed by Governor Rick “Almost as bright as Dubya” Perry’s down-home publicity stunt - signing a parental-notification law at a Christian school in Ft. Worth. He also signed a proposal to amend the Texas constitution to forbid gay marriage. (This is not part of the procedure for changing the constitution.)

Now, there are a lot of Christian private schools in North Texas, and a number of them are very highly respected. Calvary Academy is not one of them - it’s one of those places you send your kids if you believe that evolution is “just a theory” and that public schools have too many Mexicans, but you’re too busy with your clinic protests to home-school. So I guess what Perry’s saying here is that if you’re going to mix church and state for the sake of your re-election campaign, go whole-hog and find the most evangelical establishment that you possibly can. But in a move that no doubt disappointed all his “pro-family Christian friends”, Perry announced on June 4th that he would not be filming the event as originally planned. The footage was going to be used in a campaign commercial.

But, of course, it’s even worse than it looks. Kevin Drum elaborates on the cluster of anti-choice legislation, medical center refusal, and zealous fetal-murder laws that make it impossible for Texas teens to have any safe and sane options for ending an unintended pregnancy.

It’s really saddening to have such a constant barrage of reasons validating my aversion to Texas. The food is so dern good.

Update: The Baltimore Sun gets wind of the story.

Yes, this is a real poster on the MARC, Maryland’s commuter rail system. I have seen it with my own eyes. I wondered at the time whether it was some sort of guerilla art making a statement about the fun times we live in, but alas, no…

UPDATE: Here’s a possible inspiration for the poster. I guess when I said “Soviet” I spoke too soon!

Actually, to be serious, the MARC poster is a reference to the poster designs of the Constructivist movement in 1920’s Russia, which was a strong influence on later design movements - most notably Bauhaus, de Stijl, and the Italian Futurist movement. The strong diagonals, bright colors, metallic surfaces and machine-like shapes are meant as positive, bold statements about the limitless potential of a technological and industrial world. This fertile period of design happened after the Bolshevik revolution and before Stalin solidified his dictatorial power. Thus, the vision is not born out of totalitarianism, but encourages putting art, technology, and human ingenuity in service to society at large. The MARC poster’s slogan, however, reminds us of what happened next - when poster designs became a propaganda tool of dictators, meant to inspire fear and obedience.