The Invisible Library

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
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Greetings to all my Communist Comrades!

Secret handshakes to my Anarchist buddies!

For all you Socialist Workers out there, keep up the good work!

I hope all you Witches had a lovely Walpurgis Night and many happy turns around the May Pole! Think of me whilst you frolic.

It’s a joy to see hundreds of little Catholic School Children twirling around a fertility symbol, all in honor of the Virgin. Wink.

Happy Birthday Ma Sanchez!

Unfortunately, May 1st is The National Day of Prayer, according to the Bush Administration*. Fuckers know how to spoil a good thing, that’s for damn sure.

A holiday about activism and social reform? Not anymore! Now it’s a day to commemorate the absolute, literal least you could possibly do to change anyone’s situation, anywhere.

The Independent:

The tape recordings that Richard Nixon made, almost obsessively, of everything that went on in the Oval Office helped bring down his presidency. And now a similarly thorough archive of video footage threatens to create a world of embarrassment – and legal liability – for Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

About 15,000 videotapes of Wal-Mart executives at work and at play over the past 30 years have suddenly become available to the public thanks to a series of blunders by the retail giant – which paid too little attention to the company it hired to make the tapes before abruptly terminating their relationship two years ago.

[…] Now they are available – for a price – to researchers, labour rights campaigners and lawyers looking for dirt of all kinds. It’s turning into quite a lucrative business.

A Kansas City lawyer representing a 12-year-old boy who suffered extensive burns when a gasoline can bought at Wal-Mart blew up in her face was astounded – and delighted – to find footage of employees making jokes about their gasoline cans blowing up at a Christmas party.

The lawyer, Diane Breneman, is hoping to present that footage in court to challenge Wal-Mart’s claim that it couldn’t have known the gasoline cans it sells “presented any reasonable foreseeable risk”.

The archive also includes footage of Hillary Clinton, who served on Wal-Mart’s board from 1986 to 1992, praising the company to the skies – a position she has since sought to mute.

“I’m so proud of this company and everything it represents,” Mrs Clinton said at a store opening in Arkansas in 1991. “It makes me feel real good about what we’ve been able to do.”

While I’m glad that this archive of video will be able to help people reclaim some of the dignity that was sold off at cut rate prices by Wal-Mart, the thought that it might also bring Clinton’s perverse bid for the White House to a close is heartening. Anything to get this opportunistic freak show to end just a little sooner would be a good thing.

Normally, April 1st is a black day on these, our United Internets. Everyone takes a whiff of crazy gas and tries to pull an elaborate quasi- joke that gets old and starts to stink after about the first paragraph. Except for Google. They’re always good for a laugh.

But I’m not even going there. Instead, the Truth (with statistics):

Only 1 in 10 Americans are fucking stupid enough to think Barak Obama is a Muslim. This is actually a lot lower than I thought it would be, what with the endless repetition of Barak HUSSEIN Obama by mindless twits like Bill O’Reilly. This bit though is just icing:

Conservatives, less educated voters and white evangelical Protestants are likelier to believe Obama is Muslim, as are people from the South, the Midwest and rural areas, the poll showed.

You don’t say!

Link via Wonkette.

Remember back in 2003 when Donald Rumsfeld (hereafter referred to as The Butcher of Baghdad) said the war would pay for itself in Iraqi oil revenue? Remember when the dunderheads at the DoD were tossing around figures like $200 Billion, as if it was pocket change we were scraping together to buy a pizza? Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Baghdad. The war in Iraq has actually cost $3 trillion. for the number-inclined that looks like this:

$3,000,000,000,000.00

And I wonder, what could this amount of money have been used for instead? According to my back of the post-it note math, quite a lot:

We could have bought 12 trillion gum balls.

A 30 inch plasma screen TV for every home in America with enough left over for a year’s subscription to Tivo.

We could buy a 100 foot yacht for every one of the 3,077 counties in the the Continental United States.

We could buy 3 ponies for every child in the US, and pay for their feed and upkeep for 5 years.

Every US citizen could have received $10,000 apiece. Talk about economic stimulus!

Any high school senior who graduated in the last five years could have gone to any Public University they wanted to, all tuition and books paid for.

It would also provide $2000 worth of Universal Health Care coverage a year for the last five years for every single American.

And:

[…] in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops by 2012 and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, [estimates range] to more than $5 trillion. Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.

You know what that means! More ponies for everyone!

You and I need to have a talk, Ralph.

I voted for you in 2000, because I live in Georgia, a forgone Republican Conclusion. My vote would have been nullified by the GOP majority rule, even if Jesus and JFK were the Democrat nominees. But I was young and idealistic than. After eight years of Bush in the White House, I’m a lot less idealistic and a hell of a lot less patient with self aggrandizing kooks.

When you only step into politics once every four years it’s obvious you aren’t really interested in amending the two-party system, as you claim. If you were, you’d be a year round political activist, starting a grass roots campaign and maybe getting yourself, or someone, elected to the House or Senate as representative of a third party, and building a coalition from there. But you haven’t done that. As far as I can tell, you aren’t even advocated for anyone to do that.

What is obvious is, you like the attention. But being Ralph Nader, it isn’t enough for you to just want a few moments in the spotlight. As America’s number one moral scold, you also need to teach us all a lesson. And there’s no better way to do that then to tap into the disaffected voters out there and draw them away from the real, legitimate candidates like Gore or Kerry, either of which could have done some good as President. And now you want to try and do it to Obama, because handing the country to Bush wasn’t enough and now you’d like to see President “100 years in Iraq” McCain have a go as well.

But then you are no longer interested in doing what is bets for the country. You just want us to all learn a hard lesson for not being as ideologically pure as you.

Please, go away. We’re all adults of voting age and can make up our own minds. We don’t want or need to learn your sort of lessons anymore.

Free Culture Guru, tech savvy superhero and all around mensch, Larry Lessig is considering a run for Congress.

We need guys like Lessig in Congress. For far too long, elderly Ludites like Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens have been drafting our policies on everything from Telecom regulation to how copyright laws are altered to keep cultural icons in the hands of corporations, rather than in the public domain where they belong. Lessig is a clear and smart voice who could help change all that.

If you live in California’s 12th District, drop by the Lessig 08 website and show your support. And if you don’t live in CA 12, write your Rep and tell them you want them to be more like Larry and less like Ted and that if they don’t change, you’ll find someone who will.

Belle Waring brings to our attention this hand crafted, bronze dipped piece of nonsense from Lisa Schffrin, who obviously has access to a higher grade of cannabis than you or I could ever possibly afford:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

[…] It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

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Fidel Castro has resigned as Supreme Grand Poobah or whatever of Cuba. Yippee. His hip younger brother, Raul Castro Ruz, 77, will take over and maybe Fidel will start blogging or something.

Not to belittle the plight of the Cuban people under that horrible dictator Fidel, but, really the man wasn’t a complete monster. Swap out a Castro here and there, so long as the US maintains its embargo, not much is going to change there. Crippling poverty and a complete and total lack of freedom. Or The US under President McCain.

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For what it’s worth, I’m supporting Barack Obama for President. I’m sure the six people who read this blog are thrilled at the endorsement. Still, it needs to be said and in a Democracy we all get our votes (in theory) even us Socialistic Atheist Librarians.

I’ve been hard on Obama in the recent past but only because I really want to like him more than I do. I didn’t much care for his pandering to religious kooks and think some of his posturing as a Reagan-esque Democrat is both silly and sad. How far to the Right has our country veered when a centrist Democrat can legitimately be compared to Reagan and that be a good thing? Still, he’s got my vote. Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it far more eloquently:

[…] I know perfectly well that Obama, for all his idealism, is well inside the “centrist” consensus on how America ought to conduct itself in the world. He was against the Iraq war from the start, and that means a lot to me, but he’s also not someone who’s going to make the kinds of radical changes to American foreign policy that I would make on Day One if I were in charge. He’s not an insurgent; he’s the standardbearer for a faction of the country’s political elite. I believe that, on balance, this particular faction happens to comprise many of the the smartest and most conscientious individuals from within that elite. So I’m supporting Obama and his train, people like Samantha Power and Robert Malley and Lawrence Lessig, just as a peasant might cheer for an aristocratic faction made up of reasonably decent individuals against other factions made up of out-and-out thugs. Not because the peasant doesn’t know the game is rigged, or doesn’t have the wit to imagine a better world. But because incremental change matters, and because the right incremental changes can lead, like water flowing downhill, to bigger and more profound ones.

I can generally feel good about supporting Obama, confident that he won’t totally fuck shit up during his four to eight years. Sadly, this in itself will be a major improvement. Way to go George, you’ve set the bar so low that as long as your predecessor manages to get through his term without blowing up the planet, it will be considered a net improvement. Not that I think Obama will be this bad. He’ll be quite a bit better and may even be able to effect significant improvement on the state of our lives and our standing in the international community. Grant it, Hillary could do this too, but Obama could take it a few steps further. And further is the way to go.