The Hackenblog

And they’re wrecking it for the rest of us.

“We need not countenance their existence forever. One need not bring back Stalin to reduce or eliminate the rich. Scandinavian countries do quite well in minimizing their presence. And there is little mystery in how to reduce or eliminate the economic power of the rich. Steeply progressive income taxes, elimination of inherited wealth through estate taxes, and income redistribution along with a robust welfare state can do it.

“If Americans examined the deeper damage that the rich do to society, perhaps they might be willing to try cutting the rich down to size.

“Let’s look at how the rich damage American society.”
A World Without the Rich, Michael Blim, 3 Quarks Daily, October 29, 2007 (via Wood S Lot)

But, as the French Revolution so thoroughly proved, the rich will always be with us.

(more…)

After shooting your lover.

Ah, YouTube, the internet loves you.

I was listening to the radio this morning and here’s the story: If you turn left into a driveway, pull halfway into the driveway and back out to go the other direction, this is considered an illegal U-turn in California. Since when?

“Never make a U-turn:

* On a divided highway by crossing a dividing section, curb, strip of land, or two sets of double lines.
* Where you cannot clearly see 200 feet in each direction because of a curve, hill, rain, fog, or other reason.
* Where a “No U-Turn” sign is posted.
* When other vehicles may hit you.
* On a one-way street.
* In front of a fire station. Never use a fire station driveway to turn around.
* In business districts. Areas with churches, apartments, multiple dwelling houses, clubs, and public buildings (except schools) are also considered to be business districts. Turn only at an intersection or where openings are provided for turns.”
CA Drivers Handbook

Hm.

“No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you’re fine: that’s just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.
That’s how we dooz it. L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there – that’s the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic. It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.

“What matters is what you do there.”
Greater Los Angeles, BLDGBLOG, October 12, 2007

Of course this is true, I just never thought anyone would actually write it somewhere on the internets.

Would be nice.

“Disasters, though, have a way of stripping away those signs of comfort and rather starkly revealing land-use patterns as well as the philosophies that underpin growth. The flooding in New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina, for example, wiped out mostly suburban-style ranch houses that had been built slab-on-grade, without the raised foundations and other low-tech flood-protection mechanisms that once distinguished the city’s houses.

“There is a reason that the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans virtually never flood. They were built on naturally high ground, produced over the centuries by deposits of Mississippi River silt. And there is a reason that wildfires in Southern California prey mostly on subdivisions built in the last 50 years or so, when suburban expansion and faith in American know-how were at their height.

“We can draw a final connection here, even if it is only a metaphorical one. The way that American home builders keep pushing out into new territory, developing parcels of land once considered unsafe for residential construction, is an architectural version of the way that banks and lenders have acted over the last decade, practically tossing money at borrowers once dismissed as too much of a credit risk. The goal in both cases is to maintain a pace of growth and expansion that is ultimately unsustainable.

The crisis in the credit markets, by pulling down the broader economy, has shined some needed light on predatory lending and slowed its spread. Though history suggests that we probably shouldn’t hold our breath, perhaps the fires, by the sheer scale of their destruction, will have a similar effect on the way we build.”
It’s time to recognize, not defy, wildfire risks. To break the cycle of build and burn, those who create and approve subdivisions in Southern California must take site and climate into consideration, by Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 28, 2007

Sustainable development? We don’t need no stinking sustainable development.

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
(via WTF is it Now?)

Gonna be a long long long year for me.

“The pairing of the rabbi and the firefighters was a natural one.

“He had beds. They had been sleeping on asphalt. He had food and showers. They were grateful.

“Rabbi Yosef Brod should have rushed down the mountain a week ago, when the Slide fire was burning toward Camp Gan Israel, the 75-acre Jewish camp he runs in the San Bernardino Mountains. The fire charred nearly 13,000 acres and wiped out 201 homes as it spread.

“But Brod, a rabbi with the Chasidic Lubovitch, or Chabad, sect, stayed. ‘Have a nice day,’ he told his employees as they evacuated. ‘Drive carefully.’”
Camp offers shelter, peace amid fire chaos. Refusing to leave his retreat, rabbi devotes himself to serving crews battling the Slide blaze, by Ashley Powers, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2007

“On Thursday Kirk Murphy wrote a compelling piece at Firedoglake, ‘Drown it in a Bathtub?’ – How Grover Norquist, the Club for Greed, and Arnold Let SoCal Burn, explaining how anti-tax sentiment in San Diego County left firefighters without adequate resources to respond to this week’s inferno.

“Unsurprisingly, this has happened elsewhere. As firefighters battle to save Silverado Canyon and prevent the Santiago Fire from reaching Riverside County homes, we are now learning that Orange County firefighters faced similar crippling shortages of equipment and personnel – shortages that prevented them from being able to quickly extinguish the Santiago blaze.

“Specifically, Orange County Republicans campaigned hard against Measure D, a 2005 ballot proposal that would have diverted $80 million in surplus public safety funds from Proposition 172 to help properly staff Orange County fire departments. The failure of Measure D leads directly to the OCFA’s inability to quickly contain the Santiago Fire when it broke out Sunday evening.”
How Anti-Union, Anti-Tax OC Conservatives Defeated Adequate Fire Protection in 2005, by Robert in Monterey, Calitics, October 28, 2007

Hmmmm. Although funding was probably the very last thing on those firefighters’ minds last week, it should be the first thing on everyone’s minds now.

Is the wisdom of separating church and state that hard to understand? I wonder. I have nothing against God, I just don’t like other peoples’ ideas of God shoved down my throat. Thank you very much.

“BAKERSFIELD — Next time you see God in City Hall, you might have Jacquie Sullivan to thank — or blame, depending on your point of view.

“Five years ago, the Bakersfield City Council member lobbied hard to get ‘In God We Trust’ displayed over the city’s seal in the council’s meeting room.

“In the years since, she has persuaded 25 other California cities, from Kerman to Compton, to do the same, sometimes over strenuous protests from residents who see the mounting of the motto as a backdoor effort to foist a religious agenda on local governments.

“At 67, Sullivan is undaunted by people she describes as ‘wanting to remove God from everything.’ Through her nonprofit, In God We Trust — America, she aims to have the phrase prominently featured in all 478 of California’s city halls and every other city hall in America.

“That’s just the beginning.”
She wants a higher power at City Hall. Five years after getting Bakersfield to place ‘In God We Trust’ in its council chambers, activist takes her motto campaign national, by Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 28, 2007

Got top-notch crazies in California, don’t we? And Bakersfield? Are you nuts, too?

“Next, we come to the purported hypocrisy of doing what they accuse others of doing. Feminism is not about replacing injustice with injustice. It is not about diminishing the humanity of anyone. It’s about unearthing the ways our traditional understanding of gender has unknowingly shaped beliefs in places we may not have realized and figuring out what more apt understanding of gender ought to replace it. This hardly seems like hypocrisy.

“But it’s the conclusion that warrants the closest discussion. ‘I’ll make a moral assessment of myself and others that is based on my religion, my values, and my experience, not some historical grievance theatre that is, quite often, more about revenge than justice.’ It’s the old, I’ll just treat people like people. Just like the ‘let’s not quibble over how we got into this mess in Iraq, let’s just focus on what to do from here’ canard, the idea is that somehow the history, the context, and the failures and injustices of the past have nothing to tell us about the details of the situation that we need to know to move forward successfully.

“Here is the one major point where Sweating Through Fog does radically disagree with the core of feminist thought and the one place where we really can explicitly set out that characteristic which is essential to feminist thought. Feminism begins with the acceptance of the existence of sociological facts involving sex and gender. They may disagree about what these facts are, how to determine them, where they come from, what they mean, and whether and/or how to change them. But the entire tradition is founded on the central claim that our concept of gender and our beliefs about it play a role in what else we believe, how we behave, and the how we design our social institutions, and what we see from Sweating Through the Fog is a denial of the existence of, or at least a sweeping under the rug of, sociological facts. It’s the conservative/libertarian move I’ve called ‘limiting the scope of discussion.’ Sociological facts are ignored and the scope of discussion is limited strictly to the personal. It’s the gender version of Stephen Colbert’s ‘I don’t see race.’ We deny that broader influences play any role in our understanding of the world by forcing the conversation to focus on ‘personal responsibility.’”
Straw Feminists are scary, real ones…not so much, Philosophers’ Playground, October 26, 2007

Thanks, I needed this.

“As much as the HangUp Team has relied on distributed pain for its success, financial institutions have relied on transferred risk to keep the Internet crime problem from becoming a consumer cause and damaging their businesses. So far, it has been cheaper to follow regulations enough to pass audits and then pay for the fraud rather than implement more serious security. ‘If you look at the volume of loss versus revenue, it’s not horribly bad yet,’ says Chris Hoff, with a nod to the criminal hacker’s strategy of distributed pain. ‘The banks say, ‘Regulations say I need to do these seven things, so I do them and let’s hope the technology to defend against this catches up.’

“‘John’ the security executive at the bank, one of the only security professionals from financial services who agreed to speak for this story, says ‘If you audited a financial institution, you wouldn’t find many out of compliance. From a legal perspective, banks can spin that around and say there’s nothing else we could do.’”
Future of Malware, Bruce Schneier, October 17, 2007

aaand

“Last month, I wrote about US financial institutions, their failure to implement two-factor authentication, and the absurdity that has become Wish-It-Was Two Factor authentication. I thought that’d be the last I’d write about the topic, but when Steven King pointed me towards his bank, Synergy One. I couldn’t resist a follow-up.

“First and foremost, Synergy One seems to be a great, local institution. They invest in their community. They offer college scholarships. Heck, they even have student-run branches to encourage saving money while in high school. And this is exactly why it’s such a shame that they’ve fallen prey to the Wish-It-Was Two-Factor placebo.

“Being such a small institution, Synergy One does not develop their own banking software. They rely on Harland Financial Solutions, who provides ‘strength and industry leadership within each product’ and boasts ‘over 7,000 clients’ to make them ‘the number one choice for many financial institutions.’ With a reputation like that, it’s no wonder so many banks look to Harland for their technology solutions.

“Unfortunately, Harland’s online banking product – Cavion® Internet Banking – is woefully inadequate. It does, however, sport several impressive-looking ‘multi-factor’ authentication and security methods.”
Banking so advanced, Worse than failure, October 17, 2007-10-26

Why do things like the internet and capitalism bring out the absolute worst in people? Why is that? I guess we’ll have to rely on banking fraud insurance and hope for the best on their security software.

“Boy, this story begs for followup with more, expert opinionizing. In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andrew Schneider reports a case of glowing shrimp in the kitchen. A fellow bought them at the market, ate a few, turned out the lights, and “it was like a bright eerie light was shining on it.”
Seattle PI: Those shrimp are glowing…and they’re cooked.

“Withdrawing a paper usually evokes a bit of embarrassment and sometimes means scandal for the authors taking it back. Not so for a retired chemist in New York state. He is getting pats on the back. The NY Times’s Cornelia Dean today brings to readers the tale of a man who, partly from self-confessed vanity, decided to check Google for a tracery of his life and publications. Most of it was fine – except for one paper of his half a century ago now being cited at creationist sites as evidence why random chemistry could never produce living things.”
NYTimes: Retired chemist, sad to see his old paper feeds creationist claptrap, puts kibosh on it.

“A University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Hall of Science study released this week paints a pretty sparse and distressing picture of what local school children are learning about science. Some kids asked reporters following the story “Science, what’s that?” It turns out that most teachers devote less than an hour a week to topics that pass as science, and the time seems to be shrinking. About one in six spend no time at all on it. Nearly half the teachers say they know they aren’t prepared to teach it.”
Nor. Calif. Papers: If local kids are science ignoramuses, here’s a reason…

“In Nature members of the Cassini imaging team — from many nations and with headquarters at the U. of Colorado — see propellers in Saturn’s broad “A” ring, outermost of the prominent ones. (The newly found features look more like bow ties to The Tracker.) Ah ha! they say. Thus is betrayed the gravitational mischiefs of moonlets. There must be thousands of them. They confirm that this belt is debris still being ground down to powder — but still sporting chunks up to the size of hillocks, leftovers of from some kind of smash-up by larger bodies. A passing comet or asteroid may have instigated the ruckus. The general picture has been bruited about before. The new images seem to advance the ball a good bit.”
Mainly Brit Press, Boulder Camera: Saturn’s outermost ring’s secret: scads of moonlets.

All of the above, KSJ Tracker, October 25, 2007

Mmmmmmm…science!

Sanity and Justice have prevailed in Georgia. Thank you Sanity and Justice and four members of the Georgia Supreme Court. You other three…

“But Wilson is not the only young offender caught in a maze of draconian sex laws. Many young people are trapped on the state sex offender registry for nonviolent and consensual sex acts as teens.

“The registry is a prison sentence in its own right, fencing even low-risk offenders off from most of society. Georgia law bars offenders from living or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks. Last year, the General Assembly added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops to the list, and, for the first time, placed limits on where offenders could work. Now, sex offenders can’t hold jobs near schools, child care centers or churches.

“In his long journey toward freedom, Wilson turned down plea deals that would have sprung him from jail because he felt that he’d never be free if he were on the sex offender registry. ‘I just don’t feel I’m a sexual predator,’ he said.

“Those sweeping limits have stranded other young offenders with virtually no place to go. Also convicted at age 17 of having oral sex with a 15 -year-old, Jeffery York, 23, of Polk County has resorted to sleeping in a camper van in the woods to comply with the registry. When she was 17, Wendy Whitaker, 28, of Harlem had oral sex with a teen about to turn 16; her sodomy conviction landed her on the registry and forced her and her husband to move twice already.

“Now that the Supreme Court has issued a common-sense ruling that sex between teens is not the equivalent of adults preying on children, it’s the Legislature’s turn to act on reason. Lawmakers must amend the sex offender registry law so that it distinguishes between two immature high school kids hooking up at a party to a pedophile molesting the toddler next door.”
Genarlow Wilson is free … but others are not, Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 28, 2007

“The Georgia Supreme Court earlier Friday ordered that he be released, ruling 4-3 that his sentence was cruel and unusual punishment.”
CNN.com, October 26, 2007 (via ABB)

They ruled 4-3 on this? It should have been 7-0. Teens beware! They still crazy in Georgia.

“He’s there to assuage white ‘guilt’ (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

“As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that’s not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is ‘Magic.’

“Poitier really poured on the ‘magic’ in ‘Lilies of the Field’ (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and ‘To Sir, With Love’ (which, along with ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

“The same can’t quite be said of Freeman in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ ‘Seven’ and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in ‘The Shining,’ in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant.’ The film’s sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you?”
Obama the ‘Magic Negro’, The Illinois senator lends himself to white America’s idealized, less-than-real black man, by David Ehrenstein, LA Times, March 19, 2007

I dunno, David, if Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, or Don Cheadle was running for President, I’d probably vote for them. Unless they were running against Jessica Lang, Sissy Spacek, or Sigourney Weaver or a Democrat with years of real political experience, like, Barbara Boxer or Al Gore.

(via Bruce Schneier)

“Well you weren’t singing Wagner, were you dear. (Or Nazi-er still Richard Strauss.) We all know about the ‘lifestyle’ changes of ‘Ex-Gays.’ They ‘renounce’ their pasts, marry similarly-disposed lesbians and crawl into the closet — like so many of today’s Republicans. It’s easy to pray when you’re already on your knees – though those Men’s Room floors tend to be a tad damp.

“We shall doubtless hear more of this masquerade.”
Memo to Robert Greenwald, Fablog, October 22, 2007

Wow…Robert Greenwald directed Xanadu and half the TV movies I watched as a kid. Wild.

I guess if I wanted to live in the forest, this

Low impact woodland homes and other tree houses

and a few of the other options might be quite pleasant (with proper catering and electricity and hot water and—nah, I better stay home).

Manuel Álvarez Bravo in the Country, México, 1970s. Photograph by Graciela Iturbide

Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography.

“About 10 years ago, a group of graduate students lodged a complaint with Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University: All their male counterparts in the university’s PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants.

“That mattered, because doctoral students who teach their own classes get more experience and look better prepared when it comes time to go on the job market.

“When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: ‘The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, “I want to teach a course,” and none of the women had done that,’ she said. ‘The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, “Who wants to teach?”‘ The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations.”
Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling, by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, July 30, 2007 (via KSJ Tracker)

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.” — Joseph Wood Krutch

“Anyemaqen Mountains, China — More than 3 miles above sea level in these jagged, wind-scoured mountains, there’s little doubt that global warming is endangering China’s future.

“The glaciers that ripple off the peaks of Anyemaqen, a mountain range in the western China province of Qinghai, are shrinking rapidly, endangering hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters flowing eastward through the Yellow River.

“With the rest of the country punished by record heat waves, floods and droughts this summer, it’s no wonder that Beijing, which has long viewed global warming as a problem that rich nations should solve, is waking up to the fact that China may be especially at risk.”
Warming of glaciers threatens millions in China, by Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer, August 1, 2007 (via KSJ Tracker)

So what happens when we start fighting over water instead of oil?

I want to go to this store so bad I can taste it. I did order a year of their Little Book Club because getting a little handmade book every month delights me very much.

(Did you know the Canadian dollar was at 1.03 to the USD yesterday? I was horribly shocked by this. And so was my credit card.)

Just when I thought FEMA couldn’t get any stupider…they do:

“This is a violation of several laws, including the Hatch Act, and domestic propaganda (National Security Act 1947, Section 503 (f)). This is also censorship and a direct assault on freedom of the press.”
FEMA staffers impersonate reporters…, at-Largely, October 26, 2007 (via Cursor.org)

Good to know at least this part of The Spectacle is illegal.

“S Brennan might be right when it comes down to an actual Republican nominee. But I’m down the road a ways from suburban Des Moines, and I can tell you (anecdotally, of course) HRC will a) not win the Iowa Caucus and b) will have a really hard time carrying the state if she gets the nomination anyway. And I’m in liberal enclave Iowa City. Lots of people are tired of seeing a Bush or a Clinton on the ticket.”
Comment in “How Could Clinton Win? Nobody I Know Voted For Her.”, Nicholas Beaudrot, October 20, 2007 (via Brad Delong, I think)

Y’know, I’m one of them: I’m sick of the Clintons and the Bushes. I said that to someone recently and got a lecture on what a great president Bill was. Well, he was, but that doesn’t mean I want Hill in 08. Nor did I want Bush II in 2000, dear God, did I NOT want that. I think Bush, Clinton, bush, Clinton is going to look really bad on the records, like we ran out of talent and/or imagination in the 21st Century. (Have we? Sorry, bad question.)

Christ, this is the weirdest election in my memory and all thanks to the hellish mess the bush mafia has made of things. Are there no other worthy Dem women who want to be president?

But, oh well, I’ll vote for whoever gets the Dem nomination because that’s the kind of Dem I am. Chris Dodd is looking good-ish these days. I’m sick of Southerners, let’s have a nice, hard-headed Yankee prez for a change.

All proceeds go to Cancer research!

Tastefully Done – Webcomic Artists Showing It All (2008)

Act now! Only whatever it is shopping days until the Solstice!

(Hmmm, a fundraiser for a worthy cause at lulu.com…why does that seem so very familiar?)

I am so sick of candidates and nominees for high office being okay with waterboarding.

Is anyone who’s ever been waterboarded going to say it’s okay? I doubt it.

Is anyone who’s almost drowned going to say waterboarding is okay? Again, I doubt it.

Are any of these candidates and nominees for high office going to offer to voluntarily be waterboarded and then say it’s okay? I really fucking doubt it.

Giuliani Leaves Door Open to Waterboarding, ABC News, October 25, 2007

That should cause it to be outlawed immediately.

Could my country please get some counseling? Or at least try to remember the Golden Rule? It’s really very simple if you think about it for 2 seconds.

Grrrrrrrr.

“I would like to believe that we are beyond sexism: that women do,in fact, get judged and treated exactly the way men do. But, it doesn’t happen. One of the ways this really hits me is how women are punished for ‘emoting’ in the workplace.

“I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. While she was in her residency, she had a real asshole as her chief resident. She is a very, very bright woman (with a Ph.D in Philosophy, specializing in Philosophy of Science and a MD). She is also likely to speak up when she finds reasoning or practices to be flawed. Because she had been dressed down multiple times when she expressed her reservations or criticisms, she held her tongue, yet her face showed what she was feeling. Her boss starting criticizing her display of ‘affect,’ which he said was not professional for a training psychiatrist. So, to deal with this situation, she did something quite interesting: she got botox so that she literally couldn’t show what she was feeling.”
Why Does a Reformed Republican Chick Need Prozac?, Mad Melancholic Feminista, July 21, 2005 (via Feminism 101)

It. Could. Work!

Couldn’t hurt. Most men either don’t care what a woman is thinking (and saying) or get it wrong, so we might as well save a little collagen and grief. Emoting in the workplace, for God’s sake.

Or so they tells me:

“Actually, the older woman carries just as heavy a load after 40/50/60 as she does when she is 20, her ‘load’ changes slightly. Would I have used the word necessity in that sentence? No. Perhaps I might have used the word ‘benefit.’”
Evolution Depends on Crones Crone Speaks, October 17, 2007

I think the benefit of being in my late forties is that I’m so much smarter than I was in my twenties, it’s all just so much easier to deal with. So, the load is probably just as heavy, I’m just managing it better. Being invisible is a mixed blessing though.

And then there’s Joe Bob:

“I’ve been thinking about this because of a recent New York Times report on an international conference of anthropologists and ethnographers who are puzzled by recent research showing that families with a resident maternal grandmother are healthier than families without one, even if everything else about the family is normal. In some societies, the survival of the family–actual life and death–is more often preserved by the presence of a grandmother than by, for example, a mere father.”
The Grandma Mafia, Joe Bob’s America, November 8, 2002

Ah, Joe Bob. Only you could write the words “mere father” with such aplomb.

“Looking for a perfect little weekend vacation this fall? Here’s a travel tip you don’t hear very often: Head to Pittsburgh. Right away.

“Seriously, get in the car and read this story later, because when you’re done reading, you’ll wish you’d left 10 minutes ago. There are towns with better vistas, sure, and there are getaways with more sunshine. But only Pittsburgh is the scene of the fabulously tawdry and surpassingly vicious spectacle that is the divorce of Richard Mellon Scaife.

“Remember him? The cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire who’s spent a sizable chunk of his inherited fortune bankrolling conservative causes and trying to kneecap Democrats? He’s best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he’s given in excess of $300 million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as ‘Restoring a Culture of Marriage.’

“The culture of his own marriage is apparently past restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery.”
Low Road to Splitsville, Right-Wing Publisher’s Breakup Is Super-Rich In Tawdry Details, by David Segal, October 22, 2007, Washington Post

You Hollywood cretins, you steal my idea, you give me a cut.

I’ve been busy with other things so I’m late to the Tigra assault and JLA chamber of horrors pages party.

But, then again, I was trying not to notice them. Snuff and porn comics will always be with us, but usually as a micro-niche market. So what I want to know is who’s buying this stuff and why aren’t they getting the kind of help they need? JLA bondage, meh, okay; nobody seems to be bleeding. They all look kind of dead, so the necrophilia content ups the revulsion level.

But a woman beaten senseless on camera? What kind of sick pleasure is there in that? I’m not a boxing fan, but I can appreciate that there are rules to make it a more or less even match. But breaking into a woman’s apartment, (which is a real fear for many women as well as men in real life [and, no, I don't want to know the backstory, I don't care about the backstory]) superheroine or not, taking her by surprise and beating the shit out of her for the enjoyment of other men? I just don’t have any words for that except, please get some help.

And DC is making money off these images, well, that’s commerce for ya. No one is forcing anyone to buy this stuff. As for me, I will be dropping all Marvel and DC titles except Jonah Hex and All-Star Batman and Robin. I know those titles aren’t exactly Sunday school lessons, but I have Jonah Hex issues to work out and ASBAR makes me laugh.* Otherwise I’m just tired of giving my money to two male-dominated corporations that hate me. My comic shop will have to make up the dough they’re losing on me in doll, sorry, action figure sales.

(Images via Journalista October 16 and 22, 2007. Thanks, Dirk…I think.)

*Why does everyone hate ASBAR? For me, whose very first exposure as an innocent child to Batman was the TV show, ASBAR is like the Star Trek Original Series Mirror Universe version of that show. I expect a bearded Spock and Uhura’s midriff any page now. This being the case, ASBAR hits me on levels I’m just beginning to understand. Too bad they didn’t have Black Canary in the TV show. Any suggestions on which 60s blond bombshell the producers could have gotten for her? I vote for Mamie Van Doren.

Update October 26, 2007: Laura Hudson weighs in on the subject. Well said, Laura.

Quentin Tarantino explains why Top Gun is very very gay:

(via Loganotron)