Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in baroness ilse von freytag-loringhovn's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 20th, 2009
12:25 pm	good news / bad news 1) for the "meet the new boss" file: interestingly, if not surprisingly, the obama administration's immigration policy is to expand the abuses of the bush administration. the Times reports that ICE will be going on a fishing investigation for employers of undocumented workers that will be nearly 1 1/2 times the size of the last one - targeting 1000 companies, rather than the 654 in the bush administration's round. now, as we know, these investigations actively interfere with efforts to protect the rights of these companies' workers, and generally have two effects: mass deportations of workers and dropped charges against bosses (as the Times reports here). even more interestingly, the companies have been "selected as a result of investigative leads and their connection to public safety and national security." translation: the obama administration is committed to continuing the "brown peril" rhetoric that mixes and matches 'terrorists' and 'illegal immigrants' whenever repression needs to be justified. ain't no surprise, it's just nice to have it in print. can we start using the good old "social fascists" framing yet? the KPD was right about the social democrats then, and it's just as accurate about the Democrats now... 2) zombies or vampires?: this gem is worth citing in full. NYTimes: WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE Moldova: Army Enlists Onions and Garlic to Ward Off Swine Flu By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: November 20, 2009 The Moldovan Army is issuing garlic and onions to help its soldiers ward off a growing epidemic of swine flu in Eastern Europe, The Associated Press reported Thursday. The chief medical officer for the Defense Ministry, Col. Sergiu Vasislita, was quoted as saying each soldier would get the equivalent of one small onion and two garlic cloves added to his diet as an immune-system boost. Moldova has about 6,500 troops. Onions and garlic are frequently credited with curative powers in folk medicine, but it is rare that they get official endorsement. A former South African health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, said garlic, lemons and beetroot could delay the onset of AIDS. Late Thursday, The Romanian Times reported that Romania would give Moldova 400,000 doses of swine flu vaccine. the reference to manto tshabalala-msimang is sharper than the Times perhaps wants it to be. she was a source of shock and horror as health minister, and directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands to millions of south africans. sergiu vasislita probably won't reach that level of mass murder - i mean, there aren't enough moldovans, much less moldovan soldiers, and H1N1 isn't all that lethal - but there is a certain lurching-from-the-grave quality to reviving a policy so useless that it shouldn't have needed to be actively discredited in the first place. 3) good news from the gulf coast! In a groundbreaking decision, a federal judge ruled late Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers' mismanagement of maintenance at the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet was directly responsible for flood damage in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina. here's the full article. it's more than a little bit too late. it's more than a little bit too small. but it's something. and perhaps it'll open a door or two to more direct ways of making state accountability for the 'disaster' concrete. however, the obama administration is opposing the decision: Indeed, the Justice Department is expected to appeal the decision to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. and has basically argued that the army corps of engineers couldn't be responsible because it was the government: [Judge] Duval dismissed Justice Department lawyers' arguments that the corps' decisions were discretionary policy judgements of their professional staff and thus protected under federal law. which is, of course, the state immunity argument beloved of any government that's in power, which liberals oppose heartily when it's coming from the right, and are shocked! shocked! to see used in exactly the same ways by one of their own. new boss? old boss? je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des patrons fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier député. ...that would be after we blow up the social relationship... Current Mood: cranky Current Music: velvet mafia "money can't buy you love / but it can buy you me" (Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
4:18 pm	apparently i'm writing on here semi-regularly again. right now, just to direct you (if you haven't seen it already) to the fantastic statement by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project about their opposition to the obama administration's hate crimes bill. below is the gist of it, but SRLP also makes the connections between this proposed law and the war funding bill it is attached to, among other things. What hate crimes laws do is expand and increase the power of the same unjust and corrupt criminal punishment system. Evidence demonstrates that hate crimes legislation, like other criminal punishment legislation, is used unequally and improperly against communities that are already marginalized in our society. These laws increase the already staggering incarceration rates of people of color, poor people, queer people and transgender people based on a system that is inherently and deeply corrupt. [...]this system itself is a main perpetrator of violence against our communities. queer liberation is prison abolition is queer liberation. Current Mood: determined Current Music: chris brown "tennis court" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
2:21 pm	dress codes redux(ish) the grey lady weighs in on the Morehouse College dress code! just kidding. friday's piece is just an article on high school "crossdressing" [sic?] and the use of dress codes to enforce gender borders. in the fashion section, no less, and illustrated with one photo of a female-assigned student in a tuxedo (banned from a high-school yearbook) and one of four kids in tuscon who don't appear to be presenting in a particularly gender-deviant way (unless floppy bangs and a pink knit scarf count). the article says nothing in particular, can't decide whether dress codes as gender enforcement are hostile or protective of students, and generally drips with exactly the kind of liberal incoherence that we expect from the Times. at least they don't fuck up the pronoun of the gender-deviant person in the last section. though they do seem to approve of her largely because she poses none of the problems their article is busy skirting. the student "is careful not to violate the dress code. She favors tops that are tapered but not revealing, flats, lip gloss." and, by choice or administrative mandate, she uses the male-assigned bathroom (this despite the fact that even the Times now admits that "bathrooms can be dangerous for transgender students"; though they're not yet willing to admit that this is primarily a result of gender segregation). Current Mood: irritated Current Music: rusty belle "stache" & "one of the ladies" (Comment on this)
11:19 am	in which new york city votes, sorta this rather boring election (technocrat vs. CEO? sigh. sob. holds nose; pulls lever.) had its deeply fascinating and odd moments. they still seem to be in my mind a week alter, so here goes. first the pagans, then the working families party. feel free to skip ahead. 1. in which germanic neoheathenism becomes a campaign issue, and hilarity ensues so, for those who missed it, bayside now has a city council member who is proudly outside the eastern mediterranean monotheistic tradition. namely dan halloran, a republican ex-cop raised irish catholic and now an adherent of theodism. the basic story is here, at the Paper of Record. in summary, various folks apparently tried to make an issue of halloran's beliefs, in particular theodism's sacrificial practices. now, one would think that this might not be a major issue in a city where blood sacrifice is practically the only thing the main religious practices can agree on: kosher slaughtering, catholic communion, afro-atlantic lwa/orixa feeding, &c. and in fact, it wasn't: halloran pulled off a narrow election victory over democratic candidate kevin kim, probably based on being a white guy in a white surburban queens district. but it made for a hellofa compelling human-weirdness story that the papers could run instead of serious reporting on bloomberg's time in office. now, having spent rather a lot of time out in the woods with the fae this year, i've been reading up a bit on wicca (the recent RFD issue on the connections between radical faerie and the reclaiming tradition of wicca is fascinating - if you're in NYC it's probably still on the top magazine shelf at Bluestockings). but not having looked too much into the broader neopagan zone, i found this all rather intriguing, and did a little reading around. and what i found was fascinating. in my circles, the pagans who're around are mainly from wiccan traditions, and mainly from the feminist-/queer-/environmentalist-oriented, not-too-theist, not-very-initiatory traditions within wicca. i'd guess that most are from traditions and circles that trace back to the reclaiming tradition, of which starhawk is the most prominent figure. halloran, a fairly right-wing republican, is clearly not from that planet. at all. so where's he from, and what's his theodism have to do with wicca? the below is my understanding, based on some limited research (links throughout, plus wikipedia). i'm writing about it because i think it relates interestingly to some of the thinking about religion i've been doing in other contexts - the relationship between the radical christian movements of medieval/early modern europe and both the protestant right and anarchism in the u.s.; "men's"/textual/hierarchical/border-policed and "women's"/folk practice/egalitarian/fuzzy-edged religious traditions in eastern mediterranean monotheisms (see lailah ahmed's a border passage for a great discussion of this in islam); liberation theologies vs. liberation politics; etc. within the broad array of folks who get lumped together as neopagans, there's a broad division around notions of authenticity, and the relation of current practices to historical ones. this divide gets talked about in terms of "reconstructionist" vs. "eclectic" approaches; or at times (among germanic-oriented reconstructionists) "heathen" vs. "pagan". wicca, generally, has a flexible and creative relationship to historical european pagan traditions, absorbing (in some cases through deeply problematic appropriations) aspects of past and present traditions from elsewhere in the world, inventing new practices and traditions, &c. an eclectic approach, and one that's not obsessed with authenticity or fealty to a specific historical model. theodism (remember theodism?) comes from the other side of that line. its entire basis is an attempt to reconstruct and revive the ways of a specific historical group: one writer, discussing the changes in theodism over its thirty-some-year history, says that "to go beyond saying that 'Theodish Belief holds that one should be true to the beliefs and practices of their chosen ancient Germanic tribe,' is probably a mistake." different groups have adopted different mythic ancestral groups from across northwestern europe; halloran's is "dansk/norman"-identified. theodism's approach is explicitly a reaction against wicca's eclecticism, and implicitly against the feminism and egalitarianism of the less theistic and initatory traditions within wicca (see here). it's based on a claim to authenticity through historical research* - each theodish group has different practices, according to those of its historical model - and to some extent on a notion of blood-lineage. the former can be seen in the statement i quoted above; the latter is made somewhat explicit here (emphasis mine): "The movement is at once a cultural, religious, and a social system; its purpose is to revive not only the religion of our ancestors, but also the fabric and folkways of the Germanic peoples of Europe – and to do so within a tribal context. [...]at its core it seeks re-tribalization." [* which clearly needs to be viewed rather critically, given the quantity of fakelore and bullshit out there, from The Golden Bough on down. theodism seems to have as two of its 'scholarly' keystones georges dumézil and mircia eliade, both rather sketchy in their scholarship, perhaps because of their racist and pro-hierarchial politics, which led both of them into pro-fascist positions in the early 20th century.] now, reconstructionist approaches seem to be a bit more recent than eclectic ones, emerging in their current forms in the 1960s/70s and later - after eclectic traditions like wicca had mostly stopped making active claims to an unbroken lineage back to before the burning time, and had often made clear their openness to absorbing/appropriating non-european traditions. they can, i think, be thought about as part of the same wave of religious movements as the 'fundamentalist' contemporary christian, jewish, muslim, and hindu religious right. they share the same obsession with authenticity, view of their project as a complete social system (cultural, religious, political, &c), commitment to hierarchical structures, ideologies with racial/ethnic/national-supremacist implications; and emergence into prominence in part as a reactionary response to feminism. which makes dan halloran perfectly sensible. he's a pure product of the u.s. right's racial identity politics and the american dream: why be an mere irish catholic parishioner when you can live on your hefty NYPD pension and be Ætheling of Normanskii Rik? and on top of that, a member of the new york city council. 2. in which the working families party WTF generally, i like the working families party. friends of mine have worked for them in various ways for a long time; when i was a UNITE shop steward i participated in their screening process for state assembly candidates; i often vote on their ballot line; i think their version of the "ballot fusion" tactic is better done than most. this year's ballot, though, gave me pause. first of all, the WFP joined the democratic, republican and conservative parties in giving their ballot line to unopposed brooklyn DA candidate charles hynes. there's something fundamentally wrong when the WFP is willing to endorse the same candidate as a far-right party whose legislative priorities include eliminating the estate tax, lowering corporate tax rates, opposing "any effort to increase welfare benefits. . . [or] mandate health insurance coverage" for anyone, and privatizing any state enterprise that competes with private business - and that's talking only about the economic sphere, not even touching the conservative party's anti-choice, anti-queer and trans, and anti-immigrant stances. an unopposed candidate has nothing to gain from any minor party's endorsement in the first place. and if hynes is willing to accept support from a party whose priorities are diametrically opposed to WFP's, he should never get their support. this would've been a perfect moment to make hynes choose between purveyors of favors and cash. more interestingly, my city council member, the pretty damn right-on tish james, did not get the WFP's ballot line. you read that right: the only member of the city council ever to be elected solely on the WFP line did not get the party's nod. why? ACORN. tish james has been one of the only council members to actively oppose the massive scam that is the atlantic yards project. ACORN, one of the WFP's main funders/sponsors, is mega-developer ratner's chosen astroturf contractor. i keep meaning to write a "the real trouble with ACORN" post, so i'll spare you a more extensive rant till then, but bear this in mind when thinking about WFP. they're willing to cast aside the person who gave them their most notable electoral success - and only elected official - for taking a position that's wildly popular in her district and throughout central brooklyn, and who exemplifies what the party claims to stand for: Real estate titans in New York City are used to running the show without interference from pesky tenants and the communities impacted by big development projects. The candidates that rode to victory in this year’s primaries have another vision: development that puts working families and neighborhoods first. Projects that build housing New Yorkers can actually afford, and that fit with the needs of New York’s neighborhoods. that ain't atlantic yards. but it sure is tish james. and the WFP's willingness to go along with ACORN's astroturf-for-hire relationship with ratner is a sign of bad things to come. Current Mood: awake Current Music: rusty belle (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
2:46 pm	assimilationism. surprised? so it's hard not to be upset at the new dress code imposed on students at (all-male, historically black) Morehouse College, which includes the following: No wearing of clothing usually worn by women (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events. CNN elaborates: "Those breaking the policy will not be allowed to go to class unless they change. Chronic dress-code offenders could be suspended from the college." i suspect this story may become a big deal, partly because i got to it by way of boingboing.net (which although pretty queer/trans-positive doesn't generally devote a lot of posting space to the likes of us), and partly because we all know how much the straight white media loves the blacks vs. gays narrative. so why bring it to your attention? because hidden in that same CNN article is a very good example of what i think is actually an important political conflict. surprising no one who knows me, i want to point to the gays vs. trans story here, or more accurately to the gays vs fems one. because it's where i live, of course, but also because i think the relationship between gay male communities and femininity is critical to the kinds of queer and trans feminist work that's especially important right now as we see what the Age of Disappointed Liberals is shaping up to look like. before i get to that, though, i need to nod to these two pieces from feministing.com, which talk about the class and culture assimilationism built deeply into Morehouse College's vision of itself as an agency of racial uplift, and the tension between that mode and the role of historically black colleges and universities as spaces that have fostered the vast diversity that comes under the umbrella of 'blackness'. now, on to the scary stuff. from the same CNN piece: "The dress-wearing ban is aimed at a small part of the private college's 2,700-member student body, said Dr. William Bynum, vice president for Student Services. "We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men," he said. Before the school released the policy, Bynum said, he met with Morehouse Safe Space, the campus' gay organization. "We talked about it and then they took a vote," he said. "Of the 27 people in the room, only three were against it." so: barely 10% of the folks who showed up at the gay students organization's meeting with the student services VP opposed a rule that enforces a rigid masculine presentation on its members, despite the policy being explicitly aimed at a specific group of five queer students (who may or may not be members of the organization). this is in part an anti-trans gesture by (presumably mostly cisgendered) gay men. but there's no clear indication of the gender identities of the five folks targeted by the rule. they may be trans-identified (and mean any of a number of things by it), but it's just as likely that they're genderdeviant folks who identify as men, as genderqueer, as both/and, as two-spirit, etc.* either way, it's not trans folks specifically (or exclusively) who're being targeted - it's fems. the rightward swing in gay male communities over the past forty years has led from a recognition of freedom of gender expression - the freedom to be fem, specifically - to an active collaboration in the restriction of gender expression. the gay group at Morehouse is not outside the "mainstream" of u.s. gay male politics; it's right in line with HRC, ESPA, and the rest of the 'virtually normal' crowd. and, more generally, in line with the broad trend in discrimination away from targeting folks on the basis of identity to the basis of unassimilated behavior - what Kenji Yoshino analyzes as enforced "covering" - not being black, but wearing braids or locks; not being an immigrant, but speaking your language at work; not being gay, but dressing fem; not being a trans woman, but having stubble. which is, of course, a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. and one which the gay male (and to a lesser extent lesbian and bisexual) mainstream have thoroughly bought into (the current near-exclusive focus on marriage and the military as political goals being a perfect example). at Morehouse we see the more active version of this collaboration between assimilationists and anti-queer/anti-trans forces, just as we see it on the piers of the West Village where wealthy white gay, lesbian, and trans folks are still trying to drive young queer and trans folks of color out of public space. the question is, can we (in our communities, at least) turn the conversation about Morehouse from a blacks vs. gays narrative into a gays vs. fems one? from a racist story about homophobia or transphobia into a radical story about assimilationism? * i resist using "trans" as an umbrella term for all genderdeviant folks, because it's based in a specific experience of 'crossing' that doesn't apply to many of us, and because transforming it into an umbrella either eliminates it as a widely known and used term for a specific group of genderdeviant folks or privileges one group of genderdeviant folks as 'the real thing' in relation to others whose connection to the term is more distant. it's like using "gay" to for everyone who's not heterosexual (which either makes gay men the normalized 'real thing' or makes it impossible to talk about them specifically). Current Mood: angry Current Music: antony. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, August 28th, 2009
12:11 pm	just another liberal with an asterisk a reminder for those like me, who sometimes forget who's on what side... so i'd been thinking pretty well of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) recently, mostly because he's been the most visible politician speaking up for a single-payer healthcare plan recently. and then i was reminded why he's evil. if you'd like to be, as well, read this article, which weiner's been circulating as "an article that highlighted my support of Israeli settlements." needless to say, this goes along with the usual race-baiting, red-baiting, opposition to free speech and academic freedom, and support for imperialism: most notably, calls for palestinian and other non- and anti-zionist faculty members at columbia university to be fired for their political views, attempts to block palestinian delegates from entering the UN building, and support for the invasion of iraq (he's since backtracked - now he just supports forming a cordon of u.s. troops around iraq, so those pesky arabs can kill each other without his active help and without the ability to flee and become troublesome refugees...). oh well, just another pro-single-payer, pro-genocide liberal. unlike anyone else in the NY congressional delegation, i'm sure. Current Mood: frustrated Current Music: aterciopelados (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
12:12 pm	boycott guidelines from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel this is the announcement that the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (see www.pacbi.org for more about them) have just released, making it extremely clear what they consider to be the targets of the boycott, and what they do not. i think it's one of the best and clearest statements of how to practically draw a line between kinds of complicity with a state structure that is a political target. there's one main area of ambiguity, which has to do with the line between accepting funding from state bodies and sponsorship by/affiliation with them. i think PACBI does as good a job navigating that terrain as anyone can in a short statement of guidelines. so, ultimately, here's what you're being asked to do by one of the broadest arrays of palestinian civil society organizations out there. now you know very precisely what they mean when they ask you not to support, patronize, or welcome artists, intellectuals and other cultural workers who are complicit with the israeli government's ongoing war on palestinians. your responsibility is to act on that request for solidarity. http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1045 PACBI | 20 July 2009 Guidelines for Applying the International Cultural Boycott of Israel Since April 2004, PACBI has called upon intellectuals and academics worldwide to “comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.” [1] In 2006, a decisive majority of Palestinian cultural workers, including most filmmakers and artists, supported by hundreds of international cultural workers, appealed to all international artists and filmmakers of good conscience to join the institutional cultural boycott against Israel. [2] In response, the renowned British artist and writer, John Berger, issued a statement that was backed by dozens of prominent international artists, writers and filmmakers calling on their colleagues everywhere to endorse the Palestinian cultural boycott call. [3] In the spirit of this cultural boycott and consistent with its logic, on 8 May 2008, in a half-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune under the banner “No Reason to Celebrate,” tens of leading international cultural figures -- including Mahmoud Darwish, Augusto Boal, Ken Loach, Andre Brink, Ella Shohat, Judith Butler, Vincenzo Consolo, Ilan Pappe, David Toscana and Aharon Shabtai -- signed a statement responding to worldwide celebrations of Israel’s “60th anniversary” saying [4]: “There is no reason to celebrate! Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are ‘non-Jews.’ It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.” The cultural boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa has been a major source of inspiration in formulating the Palestinian boycott calls and their criteria. In that context, the key argument put forth by the South African regime and its apologists around the world against the anti-apartheid cultural and sports boycott -- that boycotts violate the freedom of expression and cultural exchange -- was resolutely refuted by the director of the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, Enuga S. Reddy, who in 1984 wrote [5]: “It is rather strange, to say the least, that the South African regime which denies all freedoms ... to the African majority ... should become a defender of the freedom of artists and sportsmen of the world. We have a list of people who have performed in South Africa because of ignorance of the situation or the lure of money or unconcern over racism. They need to be persuaded to stop entertaining apartheid, to stop profiting from apartheid money and to stop serving the propaganda purposes of the apartheid regime.” Similarly, the Palestinian boycott call targets cultural institutions, projects and events that continue to serve the purposes of the Israeli colonial and apartheid regime. During five years of intense work with partners in several countries to promote the cultural boycott against Israel, PACBI has thoroughly scrutinized tens of cultural projects and events, assessing the applicability of the boycott criteria to them and, accordingly, has issued open letters, statements or advisory opinions on them. The two most important conclusions reached in this respect were: (a) many of these events and projects fall into an uncertain, grey area that is challenging to appraise, and (b) the boycott must target not only the complicit institutions but also the inherent and organic links between them which reproduce the machinery of colonial subjugation and apartheid. Based on this experience and in response to the burgeoning demand for PACBI’s specific guidelines on applying the cultural boycott to diverse projects, from film festivals to art exhibits to musical and dance performances to conferences, the Campaign lays out below unambiguous, consistent and coherent criteria and guidelines that specifically address the nuances and particularities of the field of culture. These criteria are mainly intended to help guide cultural workers and organizers around the world in adhering to the Palestinian call for boycott, as a contribution towards establishing a just peace in our region. Cultural Boycott Criteria In all the following, “product” refers to cultural products such as films and other art forms; “event” refers to film festivals, conferences, art exhibits, dance and musical performances, tours by artists and writers, among other activities. Before discussing the various categories of cultural products and events and as a general overriding rule, virtually all Israeli cultural institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence or actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights. Accordingly, these institutions, all their products, and all the events they sponsor or support must be boycotted. Events and projects involving individuals explicitly representing these complicit institutions should be boycotted, by the same token. The following criteria may not be completely exhaustive and certainly do not preempt, replace or void other, common-sense rationales for boycott, particularly when a cultural product or event is shown to be explicitly justifying, advocating or promoting war crimes, racial discrimination, apartheid, suppression of fundamental human rights and serious violations of international law. Based on the above, the Palestinian cultural boycott against Israel applies in the following situations: (1) Cultural product is commissioned by an official Israeli body All cultural products commissioned by an official Israeli body (e.g., government ministry, municipality, embassy, consulate, state or other public film fund, etc.) deserve to be boycotted on institutional grounds, as they are commissioned and thus funded by the Israeli state -- or any of its complicit institutions -- specifically to help the state’s propaganda or “rebranding” efforts aimed at diluting, justifying, whitewashing or otherwise diverting attention from the Israeli occupation and other violations of Palestinian rights and international law. However, this level of explicit complicity is difficult to ascertain quite often, as information on such direct commissioning may not be readily available or may even be intentionally concealed. (2) Product is funded by an official Israeli body, but not commissioned (no political strings) The term “political strings” here specifically refers to those conditions that obligate a fund recipient to directly or indirectly serve the Israeli government’s “rebranding” or propaganda efforts. Products funded by official Israeli bodies -- as defined in category (1) above -- but not commissioned, therefore not attached to any political strings, are not per se subject to boycott. Individual cultural products that receive state funding as part of the individual cultural worker’s entitlement as a tax-paying citizen, without her/him being bound to serve the state’s political and PR interests, are not boycottable, according to the PACBI criteria. Accepting such political strings, on the other hand, would clearly turn the cultural product or event into a form of complicity, by contributing to Israel’s efforts to whitewash or obscure its colonial and apartheid reality, and would render it boycottable, as a result. While an individual’s freedom of expression, particularly artistic expression, should be fully and consistently respected in this context, an individual artist, filmmaker, writer, etc., Israeli or not, cannot be exempt from being subject to boycotts that conscientious citizens around the world (beyond the scope of the PACBI boycott criteria) may call for in response to what is widely perceived as a particularly offensive act or statement by the cultural worker in question (such as direct or indirect incitement to violence; justification -- an indirect form of advocacy -- of war crimes and other grave violations of international law; racial slurs; actual participation in human rights violations; etc.). At this level, Israeli cultural workers should not be automatically exempted from due criticism or any lawful form of protest, including boycott; they should be treated like all other offenders in the same category, not better or worse. (3) Event is partially or fully sponsored or funded by an official Israeli body The general principle is that an event or project carried out under the sponsorship/aegis of or in affiliation with an official Israeli body constitutes complicity and therefore is deserving of boycott. It is also well documented now that Israeli artists, writers and other cultural workers applying for state funding to cover the cost of their -- or their cultural products’ -- participation in international events must accept to contribute to Israel’s official propaganda efforts. To that end, the cultural worker must sign a contract with the Israeli Foreign Ministry binding her/him to “undertake to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.” [6] (4) Product is not funded or sponsored by an official Israeli body Unless violating any of the above criteria, in the absence of official Israeli sponsorship, the individual product of an Israeli cultural worker per se is not boycottable, regardless of its content or merit. (5) Event or project promotes false symmetry or “balance” Cultural events and projects involving Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis that promote “balance” between the “two sides” in presenting their respective narratives, as if on par, or are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the “conflict,” are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. Such events and projects, often seeking to encourage dialogue or “reconciliation between the two sides” without addressing the requirements of justice, promote the normalization of oppression and injustice. All such events and projects that bring Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis together, unless framed within the explicit context of opposition to occupation and other forms of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, are strong candidates for boycott. Other factors that PACBI takes into consideration in evaluating such events and projects are the sources of funding, the design of the program, the objectives of the sponsoring organization(s), the participants, and similar relevant factors. References: [1] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869 [2] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=315 [3] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=415 [4] http://www.pngo.net/data/files/english_statements/08/PNGO-THT-HP5208 or as a .pdf http://www.pngo.net/data/files/english_statements/08/PNGO-THT-HP5208%282%29.pdf [5] http://www.anc. org.za/un/ reddy/cultural_ boycott.html [6] http://www.haaretz. com/hasen/ spages/1005287. html Current Mood: determined Current Music: azis: "obichaj me, dokosvaj me" (Comment on this)
Friday, July 17th, 2009
3:50 pm	the face of phineas gage just a quick and not-so-serious one... apparently a daguerrotype of a person i've found fascinating for years has turned up: phineas gage, a railroad blasting-gang foreman from vermont who survived an 1848 worksite accident that blew a 3'7" iron rod through his head, with fairly few aftereffects. it's nice to be able to see his face; look here. gage is famous for his accident and survival, and for the personality changes he's reported to have shown afterwards (though see here for some criticism of the reporting). his case has been absolutely foundational to theorizing about personality and behavior as brain-based phenomena. gage is reported to have become irreverent, profane, obstinate, moody and undeferential after the accident - which has led to a lot of high-flown inferences about the alleged role of the frontal lobes (through which the rod passed) as the seat of discipline, emotion, and decision-making. gage's story was involved to some degree in the popularization of lobotomies and other kinds of brain surgery. i've always been a bit skeptical of any such theorizing based on gage. not only do irreverence and a lack of deference seem like good things to me, they (and the rest of the described changes) seem to me absolutely understandable results of surviving having an iron bar blown through your head. trying to attribute them to the site of the injury seems like so much phrenology to me. Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: black patti (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 10th, 2009
11:18 pm	bosses, new and old... musings, probably more entertaining to me than you, on the axes that political elites use to assess past rulers... i found this typology of the past near-century's rulers of a major imperial power, as proposed by its current ruler to the writers of the New Approved History Textbook for the country (it's in a not-too-interesting article in the current - 4/30/2009 - New York Review of Books). and it seemed to me to apply interestingly to the current situation in our own major imperial power. here it is in a redacted form: [Ruler A] - good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); [Ruler B] - bad (weakened vertical power); [Ruler C] - good (for the same reasons as [Ruler A]); [Rulers D & E] - bad (destroyed the country but under [Ruler E] there was private property); [Ruler F] - the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property). now, it's not such a stretch, i think, to suggest that this reflects the perspective of the democratic party's core neoliberal segment on the u.s. presidents of the past while. the rulers (in order) can be read as FDR, Johnson, Carter or Clinton, Reagan, Bush II, and Obama. which is more interesting given that the originals are Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. (Comment on this)
11:17 pm	(not-so-)recent reading for some reason i never made this public after i finished the book. so here it is. the book finished up good, too. though it raises all my usual questions about the worth of seeking the reclaimable fragments in high-prestige traditions that are overwhelmingly controlled by folks who want me and my friends and family dead. ------------ so i picked up on the street a while (year? years?) ago a book called the man jesus loved, figuring that gay wingnuts are often good for an entertaining evening's read. picked it up for lunchtime reading today and discovered that it's actually quite wonderful, and its author, one theodore w. jennings jr., is something like the methodist daniel boyarin... which is to say, a heterosexually-married Person of Faith who seems to be in the business of giving atheistic anarchistic types religious exegesis they can enjoy. i'm maybe a fifth of the way through what i can only call jesus' boyfriend and why he matters to pro-sex pro-feminist christianity, and he's already made it clear that he's throwing down not only with anti-sex and anti-queer christians, but with misogynist gay men, apologetic and assimilationist GLmaybeBfakeT types, and anyone who thinks the normative family is a good idea in any way shape or form. kinda fabulous. so i googled the fella, and found this talk. and since the title was "a god without sovereignty", and my light reading this week has been foucault on sovereignty/disciplinarity/governmentality - and fascinating it's been, too, but that's another story - i had to read it. and you should, too. just slog through the first few pages, where heidegger and agamben turn up to no particular effect, and then suddenly you'll find him talking about the need to jettison the idea of a Powerful Saving Force, whether divine or political. he's operating in a christian context, but most of it could apply with barely ten words changed to jewish messianic notions. and, more interestingly to me, most of it could apply with barely a few dozen words changed to radical political messianic notions. so there you have it. beats the hell out of negri/hardt's mystical crap, not to mention other, even sloppier, versions of the messianic political dream. and starts to make the kid i saw on the subway years ago with the gigantic christian anarchist chest piece look either more sensible or even more nuts than he did already. Current Mood: retrospective Current Music: pet shop boys immediately followed by Die Internationale (Comment on this)
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
3:06 pm	more good things. or, APOC-DC brings it. or, if that's the A.N.S.W.E.R., what was the question? perhaps i'll stick to the uplifting and hopeful for a while. i won't even mention the obama administration's latest Meet the New Boss moment. i'll just say this: the DC anarchist people of color crew blockaded the ANSWER anti-war march this weekend. they allowed the palestinian and iraq veteran contingents to pass, and then cut off the Very Important Vanguard and its sound-truck. as well as an effective intervention into one of the more elaborate webs of tokenization, co-optation &c on the left (if you want to call them left), the APOC action also shifted the march route closer to a war-profiteer company's building, which got a bit damaged in the process. even an ANSWER march knows what to do with plate glass when its allowed to do what it wants... (and the NKVD - sorry, i meant marshals - are too busy to call the cops on them). the action call is here the DC indymedia coverage afterwards is here and one APOC commentator's take on the online response to the action is here Current Mood: giggly Current Music: Drumadics subway band CD (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
11:04 am	because sometimes it's just not that subtle. this is an article on a depressingly elegant example of how the radical analysis that links the prison-industrial complex and the international corporate traffic in labor looks when it's made really easy to see: housing for imported workers in a converted prison ship. as the article says, Particularly eerie to me in this picture is the spatial intermixing of incarceration and migrant labor, and how architecturally speaking the surplus of global capital's industrial bodies are rounded up at sea inside the old remains of an overcrowded penal system, once oceanic jails now filled with a new kind of transient inmate, a new kind of quasi-prison labor force. Is it the prison industrial-complex and the floating populations of globalization's labor excess passing the baton in some sort of spatial relay? -- the recycling of old prison architecture for the expansion of labor marketplace exploitation? do we really not know the answer? and doesn't this look rather familiar? i mean, ships as prison sites for politically restless populations intended to be used in fucked up ways by governments and industries? and simply as legal vacuums. francisco goldman's more-interesting-than-great novel the ordinary seaman comes to mind. as does australia, in general and in particular: In New South Wales, hulks were also used as juvenile correctional centres. Vernon (1867–1892) and Sobraon (1892–1911) - the latter officially a "nautical school ship" - were anchored in Sydney Harbour. The commander of the two ships, Frederick Neitenstein (1850–1921), introduced a system of "discipline, surveillance, physical drill and a system of grading and marks. He aimed at creating a 'moral earthquake' in each new boy. Every new admission was placed in the lowest grade and, through hard work and obedience, gradually won a restricted number of privileges." Current Mood: melancholy Current Music: still araca la cana (Comment on this)
Friday, February 20th, 2009
12:52 pm	in which the trans and the greeks, perhaps predictably, don't mix so well sent to me by the redoubtable emmala, but somehow not yet (as far as i can tell) in my LJ zone or my favorite feminist & queer blogs... this is a fascinating and sad-making article from the washington, DC "city paper" about an attempt by Devin Alston-Smith, an out trans man at george washington university to join zeta phi beta, a historically black sorority. he wound up being essentially driven out of the chapter by transphobia (at least some of which, reading between the lines, was driven by right-wing christianity). it's unclear whether the case will wind up in court, or in GWU administrative processes. DC's human rights law includes protection for gender identity (and presumably expression); federal law and GWU allow "social fraternal organizations" to discriminate on the basis of sex. according to the article, this, interestingly, means that while zeta could exclude a trans woman (on the basis of sex), they can't exclude a trans man (on the basis of gender identity). the GWU administration, for its part, maintains an internal policy that explicitly (and pretty rigorously, it seems) protects "sexual orientation or identity" but not gender identity and expression, but says that the DC law applies to its students and registered organizations. the whole sex/gender mess our society is in around these things is amazing. leaving out the glaring question of why a trans man would want to join a sorority dedicated to the cultivation of "Finer Womanhood", which is only cursorily dealt with, the piece an amazingly clear, reasonably respectful treatment of the day-to-day face of institutional transphobia. i couldn't face the comments; emmala reports that they're mainly homophobic as opposed to transphobic. not surprisingly. the article itself, however, is remarkably clear on the distinction between gender and sexuality, and impressively respectful of Alston-Smith in its (correct, i'd say) refusal to even inquire about his sexuality. the zeta phi beta sisters, interestingly, also seem to have been clear that what they were having was a transphobic panic, not a homophobic one. none of their quoted statements or acts of harassment raise the specter of the lavender menace, much less mention the L (much less D, S or A) word. Current Music: "se se calla" [mirah]; "mientras escriba y cante" [araca la cana] (Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2009
1:58 am	Jews Against the Occupation/NYC Banner Drop at the U.S.S. Intrepid For Immediate Release Friday, January 16, 2009 NYC Jews Call for an Immediate End to Israel's War on Gaza Banner Drop at U.S.S. Intrepid Marks Spread of U.S. Jewish Solidarity With Palestinians Press Contact: [redacted] A banner drop over New York City's West Side Highway, carried out by members of Jews Against the Occupation/NYC, declared “Jews Say: End Israel's War on Gaza NOW!” This action by Jewish New Yorkers continued the wave of increasingly public Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians targeted by the Israeli government's ongoing attack on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 1,000 people, nearly 1/3 of them children. The banner, which was seen by thousands of commuters during morning rush hour on Friday, January 16th, 2009, expanded the public presence of the many New York Jews who strongly disagree with the self-appointed community spokespeople who have repeatedly expressed support for the bombing and invasion of Gaza. “We are standing up for justice,” said Niuta Teitelboim, one of the JATO/NYC activists, “which is a Jewish tradition that many Jewish organizations seem to have abandoned. Too many have vocally endorsed a war which has involved a continuous string of Israeli war crimes: the mass killings of children and families at UN schools designated as places of refuge; the targeting with bombs and artillery fire of hospitals and ambulances; and most recently the destruction of food and medical aid supplies in a UN facility.” JATO/NYC placed the banner at the U.S.S. Intrepid to highlight the role of U.S. aid to Israel in the current war and massacres. “Palestinian doctors, ambulance drivers, and children are being killed by bombs paid for with U.S. taxpayers’ money, dropped from planes paid for with U.S. taxpayers’ money, sent by an Israeli administration that could not maintain one of the world's largest militaries without a constant flow of cash from the U.S. treasury,” elaborated R. Rosenthal, another JATO/NYC member involved in the action. “That means all of us are involved in this bloody war. Even if foreclosures and unemployment weren’t decimating our neighborhoods, surely there are better uses for $3 billion a year than helping the Israeli government commit war crimes.” Over the past week, Jews across North America and Europe have shown their opposition to Israel's latest war, as well as its ongoing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and denial of Palestinian refugees right to return home. Jewish groups have held sit-ins at Israeli consulates in Toronto, Montréal, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; taken it upon themselves to declare the cancellation of a London rally in support of the war; participated actively in the many demonstrations calling for an immediate end to the bombing and invasion of Gaza; and joined the worldwide campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel until Palestinian rights under international law are respected. “Today’s action is one small contribution to the growing movement in solidarity with the 1.5 million Palestinians being bombed, shelled, and shot by the Israeli army," JATO-NYC member Sholom Schwartzbard explained. "We know from our own history what being sealed behind barbed wire and checkpoints is like, and we know that ‘Never Again’ means not anyone, not anywhere - or it means nothing at all." -30- Current Mood: content Current Music: DAM, "g'areeb fi bladi" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
12:52 pm	because there are still some good things in the world... ...this has nothing to do with gaza. why did i need greil marcus to lead me to this amazingness??? sure, i was of an age in 1993 that i could've seen it, but i was (a) straight, (b) hostile to pop music, and (c) not watching television. assuming you, my friends, can at least pretend to be none of those things, don't make the same mistake i did! i mean, the red army proposing that queer liberation is 20th century americanism? by way of the pet shop boys doing a village people cover? i feel like i've wasted 15 years... Current Mood: thankful Current Music: oh, just read the entry already (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
2:05 pm	der khurbn gaza tzipi livni says the massacres will continue "until a new reality has been created in the gaza strip". [BBC] not only is the israeli government surpassing even its own past achievements in bloodshed, they're pushing onward into cosmology. how many tons of explosives do you have to drop on people's houses to create a singularity, anyway? does string theory give predictions that livni's trying to test? and if so, do the bombers get to create any alternate reality they want? one where the speed of light is no longer the speed limit, say? or one where the israeli government's ten-dimensional colonialist genocide is so small it can be folded away into invisibility? Current Mood: infuriated Current Music: bombs falling (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
12:28 pm	catastrophes and apertures. or something like that. i seem to be trying to get back in the LJ swing of things. this one is all about the economy. ----- first of all, have you heard about this (this)? y'should. chicago workers occupying their factory against a Bank of America-driven mass firing. hopefully the first of many. the question is this, though: will these workers (mainly, by the few names i've seen, latin@s) and the union which represents them (the UE, with its long history of opposition to AFL-CIO business unionism and red-baiting) demand more than the severance pay which was the spark for the action? will they foreclose on their bosses and start operating the factory themselves? they certainly seem to have the community support to do so, and i can't imagine the company's customers would be anything but pleased to actually have their orders filled... ----- last night i went to hear richard wolff talk at the brecht forum. he's a UMass professor, and a marxist political economist of a rather practical bent - you can find a fair amount of his recent writings on the Origins of the Present Crisis and so on at the Monthly Review website. a few things he said struck me as particularly interesting. 1) this crisis is not a crisis of the financial system. it's a result of the end of the 150-year period from ~1820 to ~1970 in which average real wages rose steadily in the u.s., the shifts (first to more hours of work, then to borrowing) folks have made since then to try to keep that accustomed pace of increasing income, and the resulting amazing situation in which capitalists get more of the surplus that's produced ('profits' rising as opposed to wages) and then lend workers the difference at interest, and the structuring of all forms of business around a small board of directors whose decisions will (of course) serve their interests rather than those of workers or communities or even at times the companies themselves... 2) there's no way out through 'fiscal policy'. small-scale, large-scale, whatever. all basically a sideshow to the actual structural problem. 3) the intriguing re-appearance of 'socialism' in public discourse - thanks, comrade palin! now please get back to the equitable redistribution of alaskan oil-industry profits... - is an opportunity that we desperately need to take advantage of. which means actually thinking about what we mean when we say "socialism" - and probably having the arguments with each other that will sharpen that thinking and perhaps even lead to some agreement... his proposal for the short version is in some ways a very old answer to the question: the extension of democratic principles to the workplace. in other words: everyone should be directly involved in making the decisions which affect the 40+ hours a week we spend at work, just as everyone agrees (in principle at least) we should in the other parts of our lives. it's one part 'communism is 20th century americanism', one part IWW shopfloor syndicalism, one part zapatismo, and one part argentine autonomism. which sounds like a pretty decent cocktail, and one that as a minimum statement might be able to bring together a pretty wide range of socialist positions, from (non-primitivist) anarchists to (non-hierarchical) communists to (non-'3rd way') social democrats. folks committed to leninist notions of centralism are likely to have some problems with it, but i really can't say i mind that. aside from "democracy's good, right?", and "this is the most likely way for you to 'be your own boss' in your lifetime", wolff's suggested selling points for this definition include pointing out that every year hundreds to thousands of engineers and techies leave corporations to found small collectively-run businesses (those famous 'garage start-ups'), because they find them more productive as well as pleasant workplaces... (he doesn't deal with the question of why these have invariably ceased to be in any real way collective as soon as the founders hire a new person or two...) wolff is nothing if not a pragmatist, though, so this comes with a concrete suggestion, too. make the price of bailouts the elimination of boards of directors and their replacement by the workforce of the company. not by representatives of the workplace, which would recreate the structural problem (as we know from the leninist model of the 1920s USSR), but by the workers as a group. who would then make all the decisions about production, wages & benefits, distribution of profits, &c that boards currently make. wolff suggests this could be done by setting fridays aside for 'management' work. this model is itself a proposed answer to the 'transition question' as well - such organizations could exist in a mixed economy, wolff insists, and would likely expand, since they'd be pretty desirable workplaces. the biggest gap, to me, in this is the question it begs about production as such. if these collectivized businesses are going to operate in a capitalist context, they're bound to the logic of ever-increasing production. which is emphatically not a desirable thing in most parts of the economy. wolff doesn't seem to have considered this at all - either its implications for the ability of these organizations to survive if they refuse that logic, or the value of collectivized businesses which operate within it - much less the broader question of accountability to something beyond profit which it raises. a collectivized business could easily make exactly the same decisions as a capitalist one about waste, consumption, and so on (though probably not ones about workplace safety & health and local pollution), for exactly the same reasons: maximizing income to the 'stakeholders'. 4) (briefly, because i'm running out of time) we should be very worried about an exclusive progressive focus on universal healthcare. while it'd certainly be a good thing, wolff persuasively argues that it's the obvious issue to be used to divert attention from these structural questions. it benefits bosses at least as much as the rest of us; it can be blow up into a hard fight and satisfying victory that take up a huge amount of progressive energy, or used explicitly as a bargaining chip and concession to forestall other changes; it can be structured to be expensive enough to implement for there to be 'nothing left' for other issues... think of it as the guantanamo of domestic issues - shutting it down would be a great win, but a tight focus on that can also be a damn effective way of making it easier to slip by with permanent bases in iraq and another decade of occupation in afghanistan. just to make it explicit: that analogy was specifically chosen because it shows the way that this has been the incoming president's basic political strategy when dealing with the left. we can expect a lot more of the same. Current Mood: optimistic Current Music: "happy birthday, abie baby, happy birthday to you - bang!" (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
3:50 am	carnival in brooklyn / short-term autonomous space.... so, i'm feeling the urge to testify. because i've never seen anything like this, and it's wonderful. or, okay, i've seen one thing that felt a bit like this, but it involved being pretty scared of being shot at, which made the sensation pretty different. [a moment of full disclosure: i voted for mckinney. she may be a wingnut, but she's our radical wingnut. the vote results in new york have never in question - it's obama's state. given the electoral college, i think there's no way to gauge the difference any third-party votes make unless the candidate's got enough of a chance of winning to break the duopoly.] so, i was watching the returns, alternating with state of the union (spencer tracy/katherine hepburn/angela lansbury) at my neighbor Functionary's place, with a batch of disreputable anarchists, queers and punx. a few minutes after the jump from 207 to 283 (how long will we remember those numbers, and where we were?) as CBS and MSNBC decided that the west coast was safe, we heard yells from the street. so we went downstairs, tugging on jackets, reaching for bikelock keys, beers still in hand. and saw our neighbors leaning out of windows, stepping out of doors, driving a bit too fast down the block - yelling, whistling, honking. obama? obama! was the greeting in all directions. or obama? yeeeeah! uh-huh! and after a while of laughing, looking up at the windows, seeing folks incredulous and reeling, we decided the noise was louder on washington avenue and that was where we should go. as we reached cafe shane, mccain began his concession speech and a few of us turned inside. the folks behind the bar opened bottles of champagne and poured us glasses. then they opened more and took them to the folks outside. then the door next door opened, and the latin@ family from the next building came downstairs with pot lids and spoons, making a cacerolazo rhythm. the cafe shane crew told us to go to soda, but instead we drifted slowly away to the corner of washington and park place, where there were already about a hundred folks in the street and on the sidewalk.it was two hundred by the time Ariellabella texted me to say they were dancing in the street at greene avenue and st. james place. and a guy with a trumpet was still blowing in front of cafe shane. and cars were stopping and honking and guys were leaning out to fire champagne corks down the block. and someone was setting off fireworks. the infallible sign of true carnival in new york is folks drinking alcohol in public - beer without bags. that's how you know the rule of law has been suspended. during september 2001, couples drank wine from open bottles on their stoops in the east village; at a real parade, no one worries. i took off with a few folks to see what franklin avenue was up to... not much (more immigrant non-voters? fewer bars?), so back to washington, to find Functionary (trombone) and Cohen (alto sax) holding down the festivity, with a snare drummer and our crew using half of Functionary's kitchenware. Push It. Crazy in Love. Sweet Tater Pie. and then the crowd started to thin out. we realized that obama was giving a victory speech, and headed towards Functionary's, only to miss it entirely. yells, whistles, howls, fireworks, all over central brooklyn. partying in the streets. carnival traditions. demonstration traditions. a goodnight hug to all... Current Mood: excited Current Music: joyful noises (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
11:55 am	for the fermentation files "from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense to be drunk anyway" so says the paper of record. if so, how do you explain the shrews. in other yeast news: plum wine v2 is in secondary and almost ready for bottling. and it's sour cherry season! Current Mood: enthralled Current Music: lisa lisa (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 7th, 2007
5:20 pm	to envy just look at this. and perhaps remember that the "hill" in richmond hill is kinda nominal. and then think about your knees, and reassess the envy. Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)