Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 219

Season’s beatings: Syfy’s “Happy!”

Chris Meloni as Nick Sax in "Happy!" (Credit: Syfy/Peter Kramer)

You have to appreciate a series that establishes exactly what it is, right up front. In this respect, Syfy’s “Happy!” is remarkably efficient. Within the first minute its hero, Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni), pulls out a pair of pistols and blows off the top of his own skull, transforming his head into a geyser of CGI blood. Horrifying as this sounds, the burst of shock gives way to comedy as Nick starts dancing, and the scene turns into a disco number set to a remix of “Jingle Bells.” Dancers in shiny hot pants grin and writhe around Nick as he elatedly waves his pistols and flings around the liquid scarlet gushing from his dome. Death is a party compared to his crappy, colorless life, a dream just beyond his grasp.

This “what if” moment plays out in Nick’s imagination. But his reality is no less obscenely cartoonish. Compared to what comes afterward in “Happy!” that grim fantasy is fairly tame.

If “Happy!” and its cracked-out perversity feels intoxicating, credit the dissonance between Nick’s sticky nihilism and the relentlessly cheery holiday backdrop to the sadism he endures and inflicts upon others. The shiny world surrounding the disgraced ex-cop turned hitman insists on twinkling, even as Nick pounds his way through the criminal underworld, dying at least once in the process. And this is before Nick meets Happy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), a flying blue horse who appears to Nick, and only Nick, after he’s revived from a particularly taxing encounter.

Debuting at 10 p.m. Wednesday, “Happy!” is not expressly a holiday treat, despite its setting, in the same way that Nick is not a Grinch. He harbors the same regard for the season as he does about everything else — which is to say, none whatsoever. This liberates the serialized adaptation of Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson’s graphic novel to maintain the same kind of reality-defying savagery that’s illustrated on the page, while capitalizing on Meloni’s undeniable charm. The former “Law & Order: SVU” star is tough to dislike, regardless of the role he’s playing, and that helps make a series devoid of nuance and brimming with extreme violence piled atop even more extreme violence, infinitely more palatable than it would be otherwise.

Weird roles like this one allow Meloni to uncork his demented side, which he plays to the hilt in a role that might otherwise read as one-dimensional. Partnering the character with a squeaky-clean figment of someone’s imagination leavens the plot of “Happy!” Pairing Meloni with the voice of “Ratatouille” is a move of marketing genius, especially since Happy’s raison d’etre is to persuade a battered inebriate who doesn’t care about anything to save a missing, endangered little girl. In the meantime, he has to fight his way through murderous mobsters and crooked cops. One of them, Det. Meredith McCarthy (Lili Mirojnick), has a past with Nick – and she’s the only female character in this sausage banquet who receives the tiniest shred of character development.

Obstacles notwithstanding, Happy’s unyielding optimism keeps Nick on task while reminding the viewer that the many acts of carnage he commits are in the name of cuteness. Who can find fault with that?

Only people who have a medium-level threshold for mind-numbing high-velocity barbarity, I suppose. In that respect, “Happy!” tests a person’s tolerance for skull-busting, bodies flying through glass and human beings leaking blood, saliva and other fluids. There may be no more significant reminder on TV right now that we’re all just bags of meat and liquid, than this show.

But then, if you’re familiar with Brian Taylor, who directed the pilot and co-wrote it with Morrison, you already know what to expect. For the edification of everyone else, Taylor directed “Crank” and “Gamer,” and if you haven’t seen those movies, you can pretty much guess what kind of movies they are by reading the titles. Not one for subtlety, Taylor’s testosterone-flooded approach jacks up the wattage of every confrontation to the maximum limit. To slam this point home, in one scene Nick procures a keychain bedecked with a pair of metal testicles, shown in close-up. People, this is why you bought the largest flat-screen TV possible, am I right?

Such cheeky energy lends an electric pep to “Happy!” that’s oddly enticing at first. By the end of the second hour, the series becomes an entertainment best absorbed in doses, as the initial excitement calcifies into a kind of apathy that detracts from the appeal Meloni and Oswalt grant to the story. Only two episodes were available for preview, and I can’t say that I’m particularly eager to view the third or the fourth any time before the last of my neighbor’s Christmas lights come down.

For others, the simple impolite approach of “Happy!” may be a brilliant antidote to the season’s bombardment of saccharine, commercialized jolly. This ain’t the show to get in the mood to bake cookies for Santa. But if you’re already on the verge of punching Christmas right in the kisser, go ahead and set your DVR.

The isolating effects of weight gain

(Credit: Getty/stockvisual)

We can sleepwalk through life, can’t we? Then something wakes us up. We look in the mirror, or a friend speaks the truth, or, in Brooke Russell’s case, she stepped on the scale. She couldn’t believe what she saw; she was a stranger to herself.

“I get on a scale and it had popped up to 196 pounds, which . . . We have obesity in my family, and so I’m very, very, very strict about and have been for as long as I can . . .  since I was like 10,” Russell told “The Lonely Hour.” “So when I saw [on the] scale that I let myself lose control in a dietary sense I was just mortified.”

After that, Russell shut herself away. She stopped going to AA meetings. She stopped having sex with her boyfriend. She hardly went outside.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me,” she said. “I would go home and stay home and order Grubhub. Grubhub is the worst thing ever. I mean, I love Grubhub, but I mean it’s such an enabler. You never have to leave your house. You don’t even have to call anybody; you just order online. It’s like ultimate isolation. It was beautiful.”

The cycle went on, but eventually, she woke up.

“My first Weight Watchers meeting, I cried because it was like, I’m finally around people who get what it’s like to have an eating disorder,” she said. “People forget any sort of obsessive compulsive behavior around food is a f**king disorder. But you don’t have to exercise it in starvation or bingeing and purging. This is like something that people really don’t talk about enough: Anyone who finds the need to go to Weight Watchers and spend $45 a month in order to track and monitor and manage their eating probably has an eating disorder.”

As for AA, Russell is working her way back.

”I’m working the steps again and trying to do that, but it’s still hard for me to go to meetings, like, I don’t go to the same meetings that I used to because I still don’t want people to see me, because I still feel like I’m 20 pounds overweight,” said Brooke. “Once I hit 155 pounds, I’ll feel comfortable enough to be around those people again.”

Hear Brooke Russell tell her story about addiction and overeating, and how she’s doing now.

Editor at American Media Inc., publisher of National Enquirer, accused of sexual misconduct

(Credit: AP/Ed Ou)

Dylan Howard, chief content officer of American Media Inc., which publishes prominent gossip and tabloid publications like The National Enquirer, Us Weekly and Star, is the latest power figure to be accused of sexual misconduct, according to the Associated Press. Former employees told AP that Howard encouraged women to have sex with sources for information, described his sexual escapades and forced women to watch or listen to non-newsworthy celebrity sex tapes.

The employees allege this misconduct happened while Howard ran American Media’s Los Angeles office. “Howard’s self-proclaimed nickname was ‘Dildo,’ a phallus-shaped sex toy, the former employees said,” the AP reported. “His conduct led to an internal inquiry in 2012 by an outside consultant, and former employees said he stopped working out of the L.A. office after the inquiry.”

The AP obtained a copy of an invitation for Howard’s 30th birthday party in January 2012 where he invited a dozen employees to Las Vegas for an three-day party called “Dildo’s Dirty 30.” A week later, the investigation began, AP said.

A lawyer for American Media told AP that an investigation into Howard’s behavior did take place after employee complaints, “but none of it rose to the level of harassment that would require termination,” attorney Cam Stracher said.

The author of the report also confirmed its validity, and that it included interviews with close to 20 employees, and recommendations for how to proceed. But Stratcher refused to release the findings to AP.

Howard left the company after the report, yet was rehired a year later to work in the New York office. Stracher told AP that Howard was “cautioned when he returned that what I would characterize as horsing around was not appropriate.”

Former senior editor at RadarOnline, Maxine “Max” Page, said she complained to human resources about Howard on behalf of two women colleagues. “Howard told employees in the newsroom he wanted to create a Facebook account on behalf of the woman’s vagina, commented on her sex life and forced her and other female employees to either watch or listen to graphic recordings of sex involving celebrities despite there being no professional rationale for doing so, they said,” the AP wrote. Other employees under the condition of anonymity told AP that Howard repeatedly made inappropriate comments to women and would graphically describe his own sex life in the newsroom.

Many of the former employees said they were inclined to speak out about Howard’s behavior after a New Yorker article published emails that showed Howard coordinating with Harvey Weinstein to undermine women accusing the movie producer of sexual assault.

Howard told the AP that the allegations from former employees were “baseless.”

Robert Mueller’s special counsel has spent $3.2 million on Russian collusion investigation: Report

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller (Credit: Getty/Saul Loeb)

Robert Mueller has spent $3.2 million since May on the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to a report released by the Justice Department today. The Justice Department spent another $3.5 million, totaling $6.7 million on the investigation thus far.

According to the report, Mueller’s expenses have mostly covered the following:

$1.7 million on “personnel compensation and benefits”

$223,643 on travel

$362,550 on rent, communications & utilities

$26,442 on supplies and materials

The investigation’s fund has been a hot topic among Republicans, and Trump has publicly tweeted about his disapproval for the investigation publicly calling it “costly” on Twitter.

“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!”

—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 6:33 AM – 27 Oct 2017

Now that Mueller’s expenses have been publicly released, it will be interesting to see if the president does in fact think $3.2 million is costly. Trump’s vacation golf trips to the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he owns, have been far costlier. While Trump’s travel expenses aren’t public, Politico has estimated that one trip to his Mar-a-Lago estate costs taxpayers around $3 million, and CBS reports that he has visited 8 times thus far this year with a ninth trip planned for this weekend.

From that perspective, Mueller’s costs seem quite lean.

While the release of Mueller’s budget was reportedly not mandated, it could be possible that the Justice Department released the expenses publicly for the sake of transparency, or to quell speculation. Recently, reports have circulated that Mueller sent a subpoena to a Deutsche Bank seeking information regarding Trump’s business dealings.

 

Behind Trump’s retweets, there’s an insidious strategy

On Nov. 29, President Trump retweeted a series of videos that purported to depict violence committed by Muslims. They had originated from the account of a far-right British ultranationalist who had been convicted for harassing a Muslim. The backlash was swift, with British Prime Minister Theresa May saying “the President is wrong to have done this.”

But Trump’s retweeting of controversial (sometimes outright false) content is part of a pattern.

For example, during the 2016 campaign, George Stephanopoulos asked Donald Trump about his retweet of a follower who insisted that both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were ineligible for the presidency.

Trump dismissed Stephanopoulos’ question with “it was a retweet” — as if to say that retweeting someone else’s claim meant that he wasn’t responsible for the content.

When pressed, Trump continued:

I mean, let people make their own determination. I’ve never looked at it, George. I honestly have never looked at it. As somebody said, he’s not [eligible]…and I retweet things and we start dialogue and it’s very interesting.

It’s a response that can be reduced to I’m not saying it, I’m just saying it.

As a scholar of American political rhetoric, I’ve previously written about the ways that Donald Trump’s rhetorical style mirrors that of polarizing figures like George Wallace and Joseph McCarthy.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that what sets Trump apart is his reliance upon paralipsis, a device that enables him to publicly say things that he can later disavow — without ever having to take responsibility for his words.

Just saying…

The art of rhetoric — or persuasive communication — can include any number of forms: speeches, essays, tweets, images, films and more.

Paralipsis (para, “side” and leipein, “to leave”) is a Greek term that translates to “leave to the side.” It’s thought to be an ironic way for a speaker to say two things at once.

For example, say you wanted to imply that your coworker takes too many coffee breaks without actually accusing him wasting time at work. You might say something like, “I’m not saying that he drinks more coffee than anyone else in the office, but every time I go to the break room, he’s in there.” You might also shrug and make a “something seems kind of off” facial expression.

Paralipsis is a powerful rhetorical device because it can also allow someone to make a false accusation — or spread a false rumor — while skirting consequences.

And Trump has become a master at wielding this tool.

For example, after he was widely condemned for retweeting a graphic of homicide data delineated by race, FactCheck.org found that “almost every figure in the graphic is wrong.” His response on the Bill O’Reilly Show was:

Bill, I didn’t tweet, I retweeted somebody that was supposedly an expert, and it was also a radio show…am I gonna check every statistic? …All it was is a retweet. And it wasn’t from me. It came out of a radio show, and other places…This was a retweet. And it comes from sources that are very credible, what can I tell you?

In other words: I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly used paralipsis to deflect criticism that he’s courting white supremacists.

In January 2016, Trump retweeted a photoshopped image of Jeb Bush from a user with the handle WhiteGenocideTM. In response to the backlash he received for retweeting a white supremacist, Trump simply shrugged: “I don’t know about retweeting. You retweet somebody and they turn out to be white supremacists. I know nothing about these groups that are supporting me.”

Likewise, he blamed a faulty earpiece for his unwillingness to disavow David Duke and the KKK in a CNN interview:

I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know. I don’t know — did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.

I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

And when Gawker tricked Trump into retweeting a quote from Benito Mussolini during the campaign, his response was “What difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else? It’s certainly a very interesting quote.”

Accountability and responsibility

Certainly it’s a good thing to “start dialogue.” Trump knows that “interesting” content attracts retweets, followers, audiences and media attention.

However, there’s danger in circulating accusations and rumors, even if the purpose is to “start dialogue.” Research shows that once an accusation or a rumor begins to circulate, it’s very difficult to retract. Often, a retraction or clarification doesn’t receive as much attention as the initial accusation. Meanwhile, the mere act of retracting misinformation can reaffirm the deceptive assertions as facts, even after the clarification.

So what does it mean when a political figure gains a devoted following and rises to prominence — yet consistently avoids taking responsibility for the content of his public messages?

Political theorists, rhetoricians and historians have grappled with this exact problem since the rise of the “demagogue” in Athens in 429 B.C., when Pericles’ death created a vacuum for “unofficial” leaders of the people to rise to power.

The danger, according to political scientist Ernest Barker, was that “such a leader — having no official executive position — could exercise initiative and determine policy without incurring political responsibility, since it was not his duty to execute the policy which he had induced the assembly to accept.”

In the Greek context, Barker described the danger of demagogues who weren’t tasked with implementing the policies for which they advocated. In our current political context, Trump can argue that he can’t be held accountable because he wasn’t the one who originally posted the tweet. He can shrug and claim that he’s simply giving a voice to an idea.

In both cases, the defining feature of demagogues is their refusal to accept responsibility for their actions.

Yet Donald Trump (the television star) routinely fired people on his show “The Apprentice” for failing to take responsibility for their team’s failures. And he’s often given lectures on “responsibility” to his Twitter followers, like on February 14, 2013 when he invited his followers to “take responsibility for yourself — it’s a very empowering attitude.”

To use the President’s brand of paralipsis: I’m not saying that Trump’s a hypocrite and a demagogue. I’m just saying that he doesn’t exactly follow his own advice.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on March 8, 2016

We are all students: The meaning of “free education”

(Credit: iStockphoto/samxmeg)

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders highlighted public, higher education in the national political discourse for the United States. He has since proposed a plan for tuition-free state universities and reducing student debt, paid for through a tax on Wall Street speculation, which “would require public colleges and universities to meet 100% of the financial needs of the lowest-income students.” In a speech on 10 October, 2017, Sanders reiterated his call for free public education, speaking eloquently on the problems associated with student debt and prohibitively expensive higher education. He called for support for the College For All Act, which he has introduced in the Senate.

Versions of free, higher education for all are being implemented at state, and even city, level. Rhode Island, Oregon, Tennessee, New York State and the City of San Francisco have recently offered limited forms of free higher education. In June 2017, Tennessee passed the Tennessee Reconnect Act, which enables “every Tennessean . . . to enter or reenter public higher education with no tuition expenses.” Funded by the state lottery, the act makes community college tuition free for one-year residents of Tennessee who do not already have an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, and Tennessee’s program is the most unrestricted plan to be implemented at state level. Meanwhile, similar to Bernie Sanders’s redistributive proposal, free tuition at the City College of San Francisco will be funded by taxes on luxury properties, and also offers a stipend for eligible students. All of these plans operate through some form of “scholarship” or “financial aid.”

These approaches to “free education” or “education for all” rely on certain political ideas. Whether characterized as a “service” or a “right,” education is something that is delivered to the people from the state. Federal or state government “possesses” free education, which it grants access to the population of the country or of individual states. People are its passive recipients. In this view, the opportunities for people to express their desire for education accessible to all is limited to electing a majority of politicians who support the initiative. Moreover, even Sanders, who speaks about a grassroots movement, frames access to higher education as the more equitable management of different financial needs — the College For All Act takes this approach — and investing in higher education, or an “educated workforce,” as wise policy in a “highly competitive global economy,” rather than as a political commitment to equality.

Sanders writes, “Germany eliminated tuition because they believed that charging students $1,300 per year was discouraging Germans from going to college. Chile will do the same.” On the contrary, Germany eliminated tuition because students resisted the introduction of tuition fees over a period of years, staging marches and occupations, allying with trade unions and other organizations, and ultimately forcing a referendum in which most Germans did not support tuition fees for higher education.

Chile may “do the same” because of the mass mobilization of students between 2011 and 2013, and continued student protest against consequent reforms proposed by the government. As one Chilean student observed during protests in May 2017, “We were told there would be free education for all, and what we have today is a discussion in Congress about student loans.” She continued, “So that is why we are pressuring the political class today, they must discuss free education, not a state loan program.” In South Africa, a scheduled national tuition fees increase for 2016 was scrapped after months of student protest that generated a country-wide student revolt in late 2015, in which students marched on Parliament and other sites of state power.

These protests mobilized important ideas: free education is not subject to the procedures of government or technical fixes and reforms; rather, it exists now, within the students — within the people — who demand to participate in decisions about their lives, who can be themselves the originators of free education. In the United States, is there a way to think about education for all that goes beyond state-led initiatives, and which has potential for articulating free education within a popular movement?

Rethinking “students” in the fight for a new social order

The near ubiquity of debt in the experience of American university students is important. Elsewhere, I have suggested that thinking about the US student debt crisis in terms of neocolonialism may be useful, if such a critique of student experiences of debt can form a foundation upon which real solidarity and struggle are possible. Chilean students, in particular, were motivated to protest by the oppressive, sometimes nearly life-long student debts which they acquired along with their degrees. It is crucial to recognize, however, that debt as a form of oppression affects current, former and future students. “Student,” understood in terms of an experience of oppression, is not limited to those people presently enrolled in universities, especially when debt continues to burden graduates for long years after they exit the university, and lenders await crops of freshman borrowers each year. In this way of thinking, “student” incorporates current, former and future accessors of higher education.

We must go further than recognizing a shared oppression, however. Writing in early 2016, Robin D. G. Kelley, an important scholar of the Black Radical Tradition, is critical of forms of American student activism that center victimhood or trauma, calling for diversity training and the creation of the university as a “safe space” for all. Oppression and its consequent traumas are real, but demanding recognition of these does not form the basis for an affirmative movement. Kelley writes, “the programmatic adoption of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism vampirized the energy of a radical movement that began by demanding the complete transformation of the social order and the eradication of all forms of racial, gender, sexual, and class hierarchy.” Inclusion in exclusionary institutions ultimately confirms liberal and neoliberal conceptions of individuality. In terms of struggle, a collection of oppressed individuals is not collectivism. Rather, collectivism emerges from thinking in terms of “we” and “us” and linking this to action and affirmation — what some call political subjectivity. We can propose here one possibility for affirmative, collective understanding: We Are All Students.

“As institutions,” argues Kelley, universities “will never be engines of social transformation. Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the university.” Thinking “student” as an experience not limited to enrollment in an institution enables us to expand the “student struggle” to people and communities outside the university. In South Africa, some students were able to link their struggle for change in the university to the struggles of academics, workers and communities. However, we must go beyond mutual advocacy. By locating education for all within the people, rather than within the state or institutions, the meaning of “free education” as a project can change: A “complete transformation of the social order,” to quote Kelley again, begins in people. This is especially true when people can exceed categories — such as “student” — that reserve specific technical fixes for specific groups of people.

Of course, this understanding requires future-oriented thinking — or, actually, thinking without time as the guiding principle. Free education exists now, within people. It is ours already; we are not awaiting its delivery. Rather than receive it, we can make it. We Are All (Already) Students.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted without permission.

Net neutrality RIP: Essential parts of America’s DNA are about to be destroyed

FILE - In this Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, file photo, Federal Communication Commission Commissioner Ajit Pai speaks during an open hearing and vote on "Net Neutrality" in Washington. (Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

Without network neutrality — the ability of individual citizens to get and share the information they want with a modicum of privacy and anonymity — the American Revolution wouldn’t have happened. Maybe that’s why the Trump administration wants to kill net neutrality now.

The flyer from “Rusticus” appeared on trees all over the community one morning in the Boston autumn of 1773:

“Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men.

“They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have centered in their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin.

“Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

“Resolve therefore, nobly resolve, and publish to the World your Resolutions, that no Man will receive the Tea, no Man will let his Stores, or suffer the Vessel that brings it to moor at his Wharf, and that if any Person assists at unloading, landing, or storing it, he shall ever after be deemed an Enemy to his Country, and never be employed by his Fellow Citizens.”

That flyer, in part, kicked off the first big event of what eventually came to be known as the American Revolution. Today we call the 1773 rebellion the Boston Tea Party (although for the first 50 years after it happened, it was simply known as “that incident in Boston Harbor”). But if the British of the day had been able to suppress the colonists’ free speech and anonymity, the USA might still be part of the UK.

You can arguably draw a direct line from Rusticus’ flyer to both the creation of our independing nation, and to the First Amendment, because Rusticus’ flyer was an important part of the “free and independent press” of the day.

Today that role is filled in large part by the internet. Instead of running around in the dead of night nailing flyers to trees, people now post their political missives to blogs and Twitter feeds, and those very posts, in overwhelming numbers, led former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to put net neutrality into law via Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Arguably, they also led to lots of political upheaval over the past few years, ranging from the Bernie Sanders phenomenon to the election (and impeachment investigations) of Donald Trump.

Consider how differently the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution might have gone down if the East India Company owned the right to regulate and censor all pamphlets before or immediately after they were put up. Or if the EI Company were able to track with great precision who posted a notice, when and where.

That’s what the big internet service providers want to do with you and me.

Once net neutrality is dead at the hand of former Verizon lawyer and now FCC-chief Ajit Pai, do you really believe Comcast or Verizon will let people click through to sites like “ComcastSucks.org” or “VerizonSucksAss.com”?

China locks down the internet to control politics, but here politicians are largely corporate-owned, so these big ISPs simply paid (er . . . ”donated”) to put their guy in charge of the FCC. Soon, they’ll be able to block any protest activity you may be considering, particularly if it’ll hurt their profitability. And, of course, ISPs want to stay in the good graces of the politicians they’ve bought, so if busting you on behalf of the State ingratiates them to the political powers-that-be, all the better. . .

Not only that, in order to lock down the internet and wring every single penny that can be wrung out of your identity and data, your ISP will, in all probability, radically ramp up their “oversight” (aka spying) of/on you so they can determine what you might want to buy, who and where you are, and what you might be able to afford.

This intense profit motive, to extract the last penny from every one of us, in both fees and by selling our browsing/posting/email history, has all but wiped out the possibility of anonymity.  As we can see with the J20 websites — where our government is demanding all the online activity related to protests against Trump on January 20, 2017 — once your ISPs begin monitoring and collecting all of your information, there’s nowhere left to hide.

Independence and privacy — the anonymity necessary to be able to participate in politics — are essential parts of the DNA of the United States. To destroy them on the internet, now that it has replaced the mail and the town square for communications of all sorts, will mean that there will be little or no protest in the future.

If we are to preserve democracy — what little we have left — in our nation, we must fight Verizon’s lawyer Mr. Pai’s efforts to destroy net neutrality. Call your senators and congressperson now, and check out //www.fightforthefuture.org, //www.battleforthenet.com, //www.savetheinternet.com, and //www.verizonprotests.com.

“Gay wedding cake” case poses a major threat to civil rights

(Credit: Getty// YinYang)

For more than 50 years, conservatives have been trying to find ways to wriggle out of public accommodation laws, which hold that a person who opens a business to the public cannot discriminate based on race, religion, gender or, in recent years, sexual orientation. Tuesday, the Supreme Court will be hearing another such challenge, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

This already-famous case involves a married couple, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, who went into a Denver-area bakery called Masterpiece Cakeshop, seeking to buy a cake for their wedding reception. Upon finding out that the cake was destined to be consumed at a same-sex wedding, bakery owner Jack Phillips refused to sell them one.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a far-right legal group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a hate group, is arguing that Masterpiece Cakeshop has a First Amendment right to refuse service, on the grounds that baking a cake (or at least choosing who gets to buy it) is a form of speech.

“Artists shouldn’t be forced to express what the government dictates,” ADF senior counsel Kristen Waggoner said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has never compelled artistic expression, and doing so here would lead to less civility, diversity, and freedom for everyone, no matter their views on marriage.”

It’s no surprise that civil rights lawyers see the case in a different light. “What the law is really about is the sale of goods and the sale of services,” Louise Melling, the director of the ACLU’s Center for Liberty, told Salon. “What’s perfectly clear here is that the bakery needed to know the identity of the couple here to make that decision — that the bakery refused service once it learned who wanted the cake, and that it was a same-sex couple.”

LGBT rights advocates don’t deny that baking is a form of creative expression. But no one is trying to tell Phillips how to bake his cakes — not what kind of mold to use, how to mix his batter or what frosting to put on top. What they’re saying is that if you bake cakes and then put them up for sale, you have to sell them to gay and straight couples alike, under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.

“If you imagine a scenario where the bakery refused to provide a cake for an interracial couple, a proposition that was true in other times in our history, we would understand that to be about race discrimination,” Melling said.

“If a chef offers a special dessert for Valentine’s Day, he cannot refuse to serve that dessert to an interracial couple,” wrote a group of chefs and bakers, including Anthony Bourdain and Jose Andres, in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court. “Similarly, chefs cannot refuse to host events for some customers that they would host for others. If a restaurant is willing to open its doors for a sweet-sixteen party, it cannot refuse to host a quinceañera.”

Attempts by conservatives to use First Amendment claims to shield businesses from anti-discrimination laws date back at least to 1964. That was when the head of the National Association for the Preservation of White People, Maurice Bessinger, claimed that his religion forbade race-mixing, and therefore, he should not be forced to allow black people into the main room of his restaurant, which was called (unbelievably) Piggy Park. Bessinger ultimately lost in court.

The ADF is trying to position itself as a pro-freedom group that is simply trying to protect the free speech rights of religious people. In reality, as Sarah Posner writes for the Nation, the group is virulently homophobic and requires its attorneys to sign a statement of faith asserting that homosexual behavior is “sinful and offensive to God.”

There’s also an effort to portray Phillips, the baker, as the victim here. “But why bully the baker?” protests the headline of a Washington Post column by George Will. Will admits that Phillips should lose his case, but then complains that “Craig and Mullins, who sought his punishment, have behaved abominably” and that “siccing the government on him was nasty.”

Will’s contempt for this couple is misplaced. Deborah Munn, Charlie Craig’s mother, accompanied her son to Masterpiece Cakes and later told NPR about the car ride away from the bakery. “I could see my son’s shoulders were starting to shake,” she said. “He had broke down and he was crying.”

Craig concurred, calling the experience “humiliating.”

The point of anti-discrimination laws, Melling said, is “to ensure, for example, that LGBT people would be free to go about their daily lives, would be free to walk up to the door to the store, would be free to walk up to the door of an inn without fear they would be turned away because of who they are.”

The bully here is clearly Phillips, who used religion as an excuse to demean a couple on what was supposed to be a exciting day of celebration. Now he’s party to a lawsuit that, if he wins, could open the door to people being turned away from clothing stores, restaurants, music venues or any other private business that could arguably offer “expressive” services, simply because the owners would like to express disapproval of who those people are.

Entombed BBC live recordings released by the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones from left to right, Brian Jones (1942 - 1969), Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman (Credit: Getty/Terry Disney)

There is some major art for the ages in the BBC’s tape archives. I would suggest, for instance, that if you were to visit any one single set of recordings to know what the Beatles were most about, you would turn to what they recorded for Auntie Beeb, as the broadcasting giant was known. Only a fraction of this music has gained official release, but intrepid searchers have always been able to locate it, with minds being blown in following. Jimi Hendrix taped some of his best early live work at the radio studios, and we also have, scattered here and there, veritable troves from the Kinks, Yardbirds, Van Morrison and Them, Cream. But what we haven’t had until now—not, officially, that is—is something from the Rolling Stones.

Appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” aside, it has never been easy to hear what the Stones sounded like as a live act in their early years when Brian Jones and Keith Richards had their unique guitar set-up. I say unique in that neither really played lead guitar, and neither really played rhythm. They both did both, weirdly, often within the same song.

But to give you an idea of what we’ve been missing, Stones-wise: You can listen to the Beatles in their pre-fame era at the Star Club in Hamburg in late 1962, there are fantastic recordings from Sweden in October 1963, a winner of a homecoming gig from Christmastime of the same year, and scores of recordings from concerts throughout 1964, 1965, and 1966. Stage equipment wouldn’t really start to get up to snuff until 1967, which is why we have so few classic live albums from guitar-based bands before that time. Chances are, if you were a loud rock ensemble and you cut a killer live LP, it came from 1968 or after.

But at least we have those Beatles recordings. We’ve been caught up short when it comes to the Stones. They released a live album in late 1966 for the holiday market called “Got Live If You Want It!” This was recorded, in part, on their UK tour of that fall, with some numbers actually waxed in the studio and thrown into the soup with fake applause dubbed on. Yes, before there was fake news, there were (piecemeal) fake live albums.

Critics have never liked the record, but I dig it — it’s loud, manic, and if it were the LP version of someone’s pulse rate, we’d be at 200 BPM. You need some lager to calm down after listening to it. But like I said, it’s very soupy, ramshackle to the point of chaotic, more Sex Pistols gone amok than Bo Diddley tending to his business.

The eighteen songs on this new BBC comp “On Air” will prove invaluable to Stones people who never heard this stuff on bootleg. I’d still recommend the latter, because this set makes the grievous mistake of not sequencing the material chronologically. Of course, you can resequence it yourself, but the thinking, I suppose, was that in our immediate gratification culture, we must have a hit every so often when we are listening to something. A sodding hit. Like we’re all eleven-years-old at the church social waiting for a song we know all the words to so we can dance. You do a release like this properly — meaning, you keep the historical record intact.

The deal with the BBC sessions was that a band like the Stones would turn up in between concert or studio dates, cut a handful of songs live-in-the-studio, and in the near future they’d be broadcast so that the youth of Britain could hear either different versions of songs they already knew, or else versions of songs that a band like the Stones played for them nowhere else. This, frankly, was beyond cool.

The sound on the boots was always excellent, and it’s been cleaned up here. I prefer a little more crunch than cleanliness, but no one will quibble. What’s fascinating is how un-bluesy the Stones can sound even when tackling the blues. This will come off as heresy; after all, the Stones were so black, they were such blues purists, etc. That’s hogwash. They were always pretty white no matter what music they were playing, and more white, I’d argue, than the Beatles were when they covered songs by Arthur Alexander or the Shirelles. Part of that is because the Beatles had more range and were just a far better band. They could go to places, occupy spaces, other bands could not. What you will hear, though, is what a lean, springy beast the early Stones could be, which, in turn, powered the all-timer of a band that the Stones became by the end of the decade.

Their music is riff-heavy. But often, a band will use a riff to underpin a song. Listen to the Stones’ cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” for instance, from October 1963. When it came to rhythmic motivic devices, Berry thought as the Stones did. He, and they, pitched their riffs higher up in the soundscape than is common. If we think of a song like a chariot, the riff is usually the wheels. That’s how it is with, say, AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” or the Who’s “My Generation.” The chugging-ness, the forward momentum, comes from the bottom. That’s not the case with the Beatles’ “If I Needed Someone,” Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” or the Stones’ own “Brown Sugar.” The riff is at the top, like it’s the bucket thing of the chariot that you ride around in.

Bassist Bill Wyman, as we hear on these airshots, keeps the mix from flying away. His job is to provide light ballast, rather than rhythmic bottom. Charlie Watts, on drums, plays a jazzer’s role of accentuation. The guts of the sound are higher up: those Jones and Richards guitars, the harmonica licks, and, naturally, Mick Jagger’s voice.

Their version of “High Heel Sneakers” is as good as the one Jerry Lee Lewis recorded during that same year of 1964 for one of his mighty live albums. The Stones are clearly having the gas that our man Jumpin’ Jack will treat himself to in five years’ time. There’s true buoyancy in this music, which can scarcely hold this band; alas, their songwriting had yet to catch up to their fluency and fluidity, though that would start to come in 1966.

If you enjoy comparing and contrasting, check out the Stones’ version of Berry’s “Carol” and measure it against the Beatles’ blast through the song from the same year of 1963, or the darker, more virtuosic rendering—courtesy of Mick Taylor’s lead guitar work — on 1970’s “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!” This is the bike, that was the sports car — albeit one that Ghost Rider might tool around in — but they work up such speed that you’re invigorated. Total adrenaline rush.

Can the Stones hang with the blues musicians they worshipped? The cover of Muddy Waters “I Can’t Be Satisfied” is earnest and winsome. It’s not the musical version of an acolyte sitting at a master’s knee, because it’s rammed with too much brio. Brio makes for confidence, confidence makes for swagger, swagger makes for deep-hued, lived-in music that you feel you can deliver in a way no one else can because while an earlier version of it might have been someone else’s, this is yours.

It’s also a declension of the acoustic plantation blues the Stones loved so much, for something more attitudinal and, well, teeny. They’re finding themselves, you see. What they will find is that they were less a blues band, and more an ostinato-swagger band that brought high-end intellect to bear on people who feel, as we all do, that the world is less cloud-wispy blue and more dead-of-night indigo. But, the purpling begins here.

“Fox & Friends” quotes Frederick Douglass and 2Pac while shaming black families

Frederick Douglass (Credit: Wikicommons)

Last week, the NFL pledged to donate $89 million dollars over seven years to various social-justice issues that affect African-American communities. These included proposed donations to criminal-justice reform, education, and law enforcement and community relations, ESPN reported.

On “Fox & Friends,” co-hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy and Brian Kilmeade discussed the deal with Fox contributor Amanda Head.

“The NFL’s multimillion dollar bribe to stop players from protesting is backfiring,” Campos-Duffy said. “At least 25 players either sitting, kneeling, or raising a fist during the national anthem during Sunday football games.”

While the agreement did not state that players must stop protesting racial injustice during the national anthem, many saw the effort by the league’s owners as a way to quell the demonstrations and the controversy that the president has helped to flame. Others saw the proposed donation as hush money and insufficient as long as ousted quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who started the protests last season, remains unemployed. If the NFL follows through, it will be the league’s largest contribution to a social issue to date.

Kilmeade said, “All right, this comes after the NFL agreed last week to commit $89 million to so-called social justice program and those causes in hopes of stopping the protests.”

“A hundred million dollars is a lot of money,” Campos-Duffy added, misquoting the pledge. “And, in my opinion, social justice causes is sort of code word for Marxist causes, organizations, probably, that just encourage minorities and inner-city kids to think they’re victims versus empowering them.”

She continued, “Frederick Douglass also said ‘it’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,’ which goes to your point that this would have been better, this money would have been spent better going to programs that help build up the black family, which is so broken right now.”

Surely, some of the programs the NFL is donating to will relieve stress on black families, allowing them to build themselves up as Head seems to talk about. But that’s not the real issue here.

Sweeping generalizations about the black family of the kind made here are often used as conservative talking points by the right. It’s a convenient way to remove culpability for backing policies that tear families and communities of color apart. The over-policing and incarceration of black communities is just once example of this, as well as an example of an issue the league says they plan to contribute money to reforming.

“All of these black players, I know that they like to hold pop culture figures up, as well as other athletes,” Head said. “So Tupac Shakur did an interview in the ’90s where he talks about how he would have been a much different and better man if he had had a father in his household. And at the root of all of this, it comes down to the breakdown of the family which doesn’t exist to the degree that it used to in black communities.”

For all races, the rise of single mothers and one-parent households shows an upward trend, according to the Washington Post. In an article about this phenomenon, the Post concluded that the rise of single motherhood “is an economic story as much — if not more so — than a cultural one.”

So, to review: Fox News broadcasters used the words of black firebrands, revolutionaries really, to berate a league for donating money to causes that would help to heal some of the problems the African-American community confronts, and then used those very same problems, many the result of systemic racism, as proof that such funds shouldn’t be given in the first place. Got it?

No you don’t.

These statements resist parsing and their literary meaning is almost impossible to fathom. The intention behind saying them, however, is easy to guess.