Camille Paglia, shut up. First of all:

"One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil)."

Did you really just pat yourself of the back for living anywhere in America other than New York and Washington, like it's your academic street cred? "I eat fast food, I'm SOOOO in touch with America and its little folk, and not a pretentious intellectual at all, even though I followed up describing my trips to Wal-Mart with the term 'nonpareil.'" Can I jump on this band wagon of self-congratulations, too?

"As a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life, so I live in Pittsburgh instead of Manhattan and work a shitty job, because I don't want to be too isolated from the common people of this country. I don't frequent fast-food restaurants or Wal-Mart because I have principles, but I do drive a 10-yaer-old car and drink I.C. Light and do my laundry at the laundromat -- laud me for my sacrifices! It's all just so I can continue to understand you, regular America, and then tell you about you, better than you could ever understand and describe yourself!"



Secondly, this, speaking of Sarah Palin:

"A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit."

Well, call me a cold bucket of spit, because I'm no more ready to declare that Sarah "Yes, you have to bear your rapist uncle's baby and then teach it Creationism" Palin "represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism," than I'm ready to drink your bucket of spit, Camille. Your second-wave feminism is so far out of touch and off base with my generation of women that it's literally inconceivable to me that I would praise as a feminist a woman who is forcing her 17-year-old daughter to marry; who is a ready-made argument against maternity leave and day care for working women because of the "frontier-tough" way she went back to work three days after having her baby; who, in the speech you praise, predicated her "toughness" on nastiness and outright lies; and who, yes, wants to take away my right to refuse to procreate by any means necessary.

And your arguments about how liberals refuse to see the moral conundrum of abortion is bullshit, too, Camille. Really, you're praising Sarah's defense of the little babies as more ethical than your own stance, that abortion is justifiable murder? How could you possibly say that an ideology that places the most under-educated and under-cared for women in America in the position of forced reproduction and economic hardship "moral" or "ethical"? Look, here's what I can discern about abortion: it may or may not be a moral evil to commit abortion, as a fetus may or may not be a human being. This, to me, is an as-yet unanswered question (and may prove to ultimately be unanswerable). My personal opinion is that a fetus that is not self-sustaining outside the womb is not a human being, but that is only my best guess based on my understanding of science and my intuition about what makes human life a thing of substance and value. I may be wrong, though (my Church says I am, as do other people of good faith and reasonable intelligence). What I am certain about is that creating an environment in which a woman does not have access to good education, particularly sex education (as Sarah Palin and the vast majority of pro-life activists would do); does not have access to free, quality health care (as Sarah Palin and the vast majority of Republican pro-life activists would do); does not have access to free, easy-to-acquire and easy-to-take birth control (as ditto); and does not, because of her economic and educational background, and possibly because of her youth, her marital status, her race, or her other mental/physical health problems, have the opportunity to secure a job that would support both she and her child (not to mention that the job would likely not provide adequate day care, health care, or maternity leave); and then telling that woman that she is legally obligated to give birth to a child that she will be unable to provide for, and the having of which will leave her unable to provide for herself, is absolutely and certainly morally wrong. Now, Ms. Palin and Ms. Paglia, if you're willing to order society in such a way that access to education, health care, birth control, economic opportunity and post-pregnancy support in the work place is universal and easy, then we can go back and readdress the morality of abortion, and perhaps err on the side of caution and make it illegal. Until then, no one should be willing to legislate against what may or may not be immoral at the cost of forcing into law a practice of forced reproduction that is certainly immoral, given the straits and circumstances a pregnant American woman may find herself in. (And all of this, of course, leaves aside the immorality of forcing onto a pluralistic and multi-religious society the religiously based morality of one spiritual vein of thought, and the essentially American illegality of violating the Establishment clause in this way).

Point is, Camille, don't tell me I'm a reactionary liberal who hasn't thought about the moral consequences of abortion, and FOR REAL don't tell me that Sarah Palin might hold the moral high ground -- a woman who would knowingly and willingly cripple the lives of other women through a variety of policies and put the cherry on it by not allowing them to prevent the further hardship of reproduction is not a feminist, and is not a moral person.

So seriously. Shut. Up.

Today's stuff largely concerns the Large Hadron Collider, which started up today, and which has me super pissed off. Look, I don't want to come off like a Republican: science is good. Even "pure" science is good -- hooray for the Hubble Telescope, and all that. But I am enormously against this LHC business.

In case you're not up on particle physics and giant wastes of money, what I gather is, physicists have equations that predict the existence of some wee particle, called the Higgs, but also, irritatingly, the "God Particle." Apparently, math predicts that this thing exists, though there's no evidence for it. But if it doesn't exist, that means the scientists are wrong -- and surely that can't be! So to prove themselves right, the scientists built an $8,000,000,000 particle accelerator under Europe -- yes, I said eight billion dollars. The Higgs particle is supposed to, somehow, again involving math, answer the question, "Why do things have mass?" This sounds suspiciously like a non-science question to me: why is there something rather than nothing? That's a question for religion or philosophy, not for $8,000,000,000. Besides the hubris involved in the scientists' declarations that they're finally going to solve the universe, or whatever, Stephen Hawking is betting they won't find the particle, and James Owen Weatherall, on Slate.com, also says they probably won't find the thing, and that it doesn't matter if they do.

You might say to yourself, oh, hell, whatever, eight billion dollars is nothing compared to what we're wasting in Iraq, let them have their fun. Except it turns out that there's a slight possibility that when they begin, in October, to conduct their new, Higgs-finding experiments, they'll destroy the Earth. This article is pretty cavalier about the whole affair, but several philosophers are saying that it doesn't matter that the likelihood that this thing will destroy the world is diminishingly small -- what matters is that the likelihood exists at all, and since it does it raises an ethical question that the scientists are disconcertingly unwilling to fully address. If there's even the slightest chance that they can destroy the world, is it within their right to take everyone's lives in their hands and take the chance? No. At least not to my thinking, and especially in light of such small returns. I have yet to find online any mention of a single, applicable result of finding this particle -- it's not as though they're balancing the small risk of something horrendous against the certain return of massive good. They're spending eight billion dollars to confirm their math problems' accuracy, and maybe destroying the world.

Assholes.

Personally, though everything started up fine today (for the next month they're only conducting previously conducted experiments to get the LHC warmed up), I'm hoping that the damn thing explodes, and hopefully doesn't take most of France and Switzerland with it. Harsh? Maybe, but if they're willing to take my life and the lives of everyone I love into their hands, I'm willing to wish localized calamity on them and their hubris. God hates hubris. So I hear, anyway.

As I write this, I'm at work and bored as shit, so I'm checking the news. The upside to the typing is that it makes me look busy when people come by, thus keeping them from talking to me. The downside is that the county's Outlook email system doesn't work very well, so I may or may not be able to send this to myself to post anywhere. I was considering starting my website up again with a revised, sort of The Daily Kos of Everything blog format… did I mention I spent an hour this morning job hunting? All the good places to work, like the library or the museum, only seem to be offering part-time jobs. Or rather, they're offering full time jobs for people with master's degrees in art history or library science and 10 years experience, but that doesn't much help me. There's a part time clerk position open at the Downtown branch of the library, but Ted says I'd need two part time jobs, and the application deadline is today … the point is, I am officially ready to do anything to quit this job, and I no longer care if I have health insurance, because working this job to have health insurance has left me fatter, less healthy overall, and psychologically horrendous, and it doesn't seem worth it, so fuck health insurance. I'll take my chances.

Anyway, for something to do, the news that I've got the most beef with is:


Dahlia Lithwick on Slate.com telling Joe Biden that he should handle Sarah Palin delicately. I want to see that bitch cry, and if people call him "sexist" after that, then they are the ones who are sexist idiots, because the goal, when the fate of the nation is on the line, should be to make your evangelical Christianist right-wing opponent of any sex break down weeping because of their own inadequacies. If this does not "play well" with the evangelical Christianist right-wing morons who will be voting for Ms. Palin and John McSoFuckingOldCain, I don't really care - they're racist and crazy and wouldn't have voted for Joe and Barack anyway, so.


The Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac thing.

As far as I understand it, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are "quasi-governmental" agencies that no longer have the money to back up their billions of dollars worth of bad loans, in part because of dishonest accounting, and so the government, trying to prevent the complete collapse of the real estate market, has stepped in and declared that they will back up to $100 billion worth of these loans, at the taxpayers' expense. In the Post-Gazette, George Bush is quoted as saying that this action "will strengthen our ability to weather the housing correction." "Housing Correction?" OK, look. I'm not an economist, but as far as I can tell, the housing crisis has followed the same general pattern as the credit crisis in general: people who couldn't back their expenditures received credit anyway, and eventually this bad credit, when called upon, dropped the bottom out of the economy. The short term solution, apparently, is massively restricting who can get credit of all kinds, and having the government either back, or coerce private, solvent institutions into backing, the loans of less responsible institutions to people, which will in all likelihood never get paid back.

Here's the problem as I see it. This glut of unsecured credit is the direct result of the American economy's post-WWII structure. The notion was that the American economy would grow forever on the basis of consumer spending. Every year, Americans, it was thought, would buy more and more things, thus creating more and more wealth for companies who would pay their workers more and more, thus allowing them, the year after that to buy even more things, etc. etc. This on its own creates two problems: one, eventually you will run out of things Americans need to buy, and even out of things they want to buy, and so you will have to go to work to "create want" to convince them to keep buying, because if they do not, the economy will cease to expand, begin to contract, and ultimately collapse. This, as we now see, has had dire consequences for American culture, but that is not necessarily the problem of the economy on its own, so we will set it aside. Two, if the salaries of American workers do not continue to expand with inflation, even if you manage to convince them they want what the economy has to sell, they will not be able to afford it - since consumers buying things, to repeat, is all that is holding up the American economy, this is disastrous, of course. The solution, then, beginning in the late '60s and early '70s, was to begin to broadly offer consumer credit. If you did not make enough money to keep buying and keep the economy rolling, someone would give you the money you needed to keep buying and keep the economy rolling … naturally, this had its own disastrous consequences. Eventually, of course, people could no longer float the amount of credit they were being offered, but the culture of created want - I guess it did matter! - continued to demand that they keep buying, as did, of course, the undercurrent of thought on the American economy, and so they were compelled to take more and more credit anyway. We see where this has led. The central problem, of course, is that as pointed out in the cycle before, the consumption-based economy can only continue to function without relying on bad credit if consumers have enough money every year to buy more, expand the market, increase their own salaries by way of increased profits for companies, and so on. But with globalization, this is no longer happening, nor will it ever begin to again. There will never come a day (in the current system) in America where labor is cheaper here than it is elsewhere. Highly skilled labor may be cheaper here, but that is only the purview of a small minority of Americans. Therefore, most jobs will, or already have, moved overseas, stagnating the wages of the majority of Americans. This stagnation led to the increased reliance on credit, and has now led to the point where not even credit is possible - it is no longer possible to buy the economy to better health; wages for the middle and working classes will not rise sufficiently because of globalization, and credit will no longer be widely available to replace wages. The centralized economic control and globalized marketplace that the liberal (in the classic sense of the word) economists of America extolled can now be seen to be essentially incompatible with the consumer-driven economy of a (formerly) insulated America they also extolled. To repeat: what is occurring in the American economy right now is not a temporary correction, it is the natural end result of these two things - globalization and consumption-based economic expansion - which cannot work in concert for very long. A REAL correction is needed, one that eliminates the consumption-driven American economy, the globalized economy, or both.

My own preference would be to see a return to local economies in this country. If we were reliant on locally produced goods, it would open up more work opportunities for better wages in communities who would only be tangentially interested in selling their surplus further afield; it would foster the culture-correcting community-mindedness that this country is in dire need of in the face of numerous social ills; it would be vastly better for the environment, as fewer fuels would be needed for transportation of goods, and as communities would feel an investment in keeping their local resources renewable, constantly available, and healthy. Now, obviously, not every little town is going to open its own iPod manufacturing plant; but the negative economic consequences of massively centralized and globalized markets of scale would be greatly mitigated if we came to depend to the greatest extent possible on our local economies. This would, of course, require years of adjustment during which the economy would be worse rather than better. But at least it is a real correction: we will soon be faced with years of adjustment during which the economy will get worse … and worse ... and worse ... because the economic system we have in place, which is currently showing the first signs of failure, is untenable.

So, that's my several cents on that matter.


In local news, it seems the Urban Redevelopment Authority has given out parking lot leases to bidders who were not the highest - but who did help the mayor's office put together fundraisers. The decisions were made not by the URA board, but by the executive director and the mayor's chief of staff Yarone Zober (all of this is as reported in the Post-Gazette). I don't think I even need to comment on this, right? A second contract was given out to the same bidder, who bid the highest this time, but then after the award was allowed to lower the bid. This same behavior with the URA and the mayor's office was applied to road work contracts as well, with contributors to the mayor's campaign being granted contracts that they were then permitted to lower the bids on. Nice, Boy Wonder, nice.


Also nice: Christopher "I Hate God" Hitchens defending Sarah Palin in a round about way because Barack Obama and Joe Biden are Christian, too? That's just stupid, Hitch.


Good news – I get to take my lunch hour at the end of the day. Since I've had a headache for all five hours I've been here, getting to leave an hour early helps.


Again locally, here's Bruce Kraus harassing the businesspeople of the South Side for selling food on the sidewalks - horrors! Apparently, he's been getting constituent complaints about messy drunks at 3:00 a.m. It is achingly obvious that these constituents are old. I am 100% certain that the young people who are spending $100,000 + to colonize the ugly little aluminum siding box houses around East Carson are not concerned about the 3:00 a.m. drunks - in fact, they came for that atmosphere. I have a better solution than trying to put the poor chicken-on-a-stick guy out of business: if you don't like the South Side, move. You're ugly little box house will sell for 18 times what you paid for it in nineteen ought eight, and you'll be in good shape to head out to a ranch home in Edgewood, or wherever old people like to live. Meanwhile, the city won't waste its time and energy making one of its most appealing spots less appealing to the people they're constantly claiming they want to appeal to: young people. Lord!

Dear Mayor Boy Wonder,



Forgive me if I am urgent in reaching my point, and so skimp on introductory pleasantries.  You know me anyway, right?  Oh?  Really?  Because over the last seven weeks I on several occasions called the "Mayor Luke Ravenstahl City Helpline" because of the mountain of garbage in my back alley, and so I assumed that you were familiar with my requests for help.



Missed me, eh?  Well, you see, I live four blocks outside of the City of Pittsburgh in the Borough of Wilkinsburg.  Wilkinsburg used to have its own trash collection, and the trash at our address was always picked up on schedule.  Then, the City took over our trash pick-up.  Our waste removal became ... spotty.  Until it stopped.  Seven weeks ago.  We kept putting trash into our alley, and the City kept not picking it up.  Eventually, it was blocking the alley, such that, I have to assume, the City garbage truck must have had to make a great effort to get by it so as not to pick it up.  I called the Mayor Luke Ravenstahl Helpline, and they kept taking my name and address, and assuring me that my trash would be picked up.



Nope.



Finally, desperate, I got in touch with a city councilman, who took action for me, and by the end of the day I had gotten in touch with the councilman, my trash was removed.  So someone in the City still works!



Point is, I thought maybe you'd know me from your Helpline.  I mean, your name is on it, so you must be willing to take responsibility for it, no?



Well, forgive me if I skip the pleasantries, Luke.



I hear you want to merge the City and the County.  I hear this is a little scheme you and your boyfri-- I mean, political partner, Dan "The Taxman" Onorato came to agree upon.  If I understand the reports in the Trib and the Post-Gazette correctly, the plan's outline goes something like this:



The City and the County would "merge," by which you mean, services would be combined and jobs would be lost ... I mean, money would be saved!  Right, right.  HOWEVER, the City's debt and pension obligations would NOT be merged.  Now, it occurs to me that if it were to be the case that these financial difficulties would be merged -- if the region were to assume its fair share in helping to alleviate the stresses on Pittsburgh, freeing it to grow and prosper and inevitably share that prosperity with the rest of the County, which will surely fail if Pittsburgh does not prevail -- if the County were to merge its fortunes explicitly with the fortunes of the City, then this might be a good idea.  But, as previously mentioned, no.  The new "Urban Services District" would get no help from the County's other municipalities; what it WOULD get is HIGHER TAXES -- was that part Dan's idea? -- to pay off its debts and pension obligations. 



Now, I can't imagine how this won't result in everyone moving to where I live, four blocks outside of the City of Pittsburgh, by which I mean, the "Urban Services District," so as to avoid the new taxes, thus creating a ring of dense population -- Party in Dormont! -- and an empty hole where Pittsburgh used to be.  Oh, that should be GREAT for the region.  Who will you tax then, Dan?



In summary: the City and County governments would combine services, which, as far as I can tell, will result in jobs lost during an economic downturn -- good plan, good plan -- and the kind of absolutely super municiple services that led to a seven-week-old mountain of garbage behind my house for the County's other municipalities.  For Pittsburgh, it will mean loss of representation and higher taxes.



On the plus side ...



...



...



Huh.  On the plus side you wouldn't be mayor anymore, Luke.



Look, I'm not surprised that Dan "Next Comes the Tax of Sex" Onorato doesn't give a damn about the fate of the City.  But as the mayor, that's supposed to be your first concern, Boy Wonder.  And yet, you're proponing an idea that would mean the death of the City in the long-run for the sake of, possibly, a cheaper service bill in the short-run.  And, of course, in the longer-run, it would mean the death of the County, because if you believe that Fox Chapel or Cranberry or Mt. Lebanon would exist without the City of Pittsburgh, you're a fool.  Do you know what you get if you live in a little town that's NOT within an hour drive of a fairly thriving city?  You get a Wal-Mart.  You don't get a Barnes & Nobles, a Starbucks, an Einstein Bros. Bagels -- you might hope for a T.G.I. Friday's, but you'll never get a Buffalo Wild Wings or a Bahama Breeze, or whatever the hell people in the suburbs like.  Wal-Mart and McDonald's.  That's what this County has to look forward to after the mayor manages to kill his own city.



Now, I would say, "Luckily, no one, not in the City, certainly, and not in the County's other municipalities, which would benefit not at all from this and would suffer only a little less than Pittsburgh, would vote for this horrendous idea.  So since you're putting it up for a referendum, we should be able to avoid this disaster."



I would say that, if it were not for the fact that I am a Pittsburgher, and as such, I know what happens when people vote down referendums -- politicians ignore the public will and build whatever stadiums or merge whatever governments they want.



Luke Ravenstahl, you're an asshole.  And if I had a few pennies to rub together, I'd run for mayor myself to try to get you out of office. 

So, perhaps you recall me discussing how something I don't like about my job is wearing the Uniform of the Man? I realize, objectively, that my daily wardrobe restrictions aren't so bad: no jeans, no sneakers, no shirts with writing on them, plus a general aura of neatness and cleanliness. A reasonable person might say, that's not so bad. And yet. I sit and stew, hating the man. I like blue jeans and shirts with writing on them. And the only shoes I find comfortable are sneakers. Grr.

You may also recall that my partial solution for hating the Uniform of the Man is body modification. I'm always a little out of uniform with tattoos and piercings!

To wit:

My New Tattoo Is Awesome

If you are not familiar with Belgian comic artists of fifty years ago, the dog is Snowy, from the comic Tintin by Herge, and the cat is Captain Haddock's; I have not found mention of the cat's name anywhere, but she lives at Marlinspike, and I think may be modeled after the real Siamese cat Herge had at the time. To be precise, the two of them laughing together is taken from a panel on page six of "The Castafiore Emerald." Dorky? Yes. Awesome? Indeed. Super cute? Hells yeah. Cute is the new hardcore. Pass it around.

Ted also got a tattoo, which coordinates with mine: it is Snowy with a dinosaur bone, on his ankle, and it is also super cute -- super cute boys with super cute tattoos equals cute to the nth power!

Nerding out with tattoos -- woot.

Anyway, the next step in my plan is to go get pierced with Sarah sometime, and Ted and I are on the waiting list for more tattoos with an artist at Z Spot in Dormont. If you are curious about where I got Snowy and his laughing friend, it was Jester's Court, 1410 East Carson Street in the South Side, and the artist was Shannon Daley, who is very nice and wee and took us on short notice and stayed late to fit us in.

Yay!