We are so numbed to death these days that sometimes it seems the only time human loss affects us if it's either someone in our immediate circle, or the mass slaughter of innocents.

Perhaps it's a function of still being emotionally raw after having spent most of the holiday season going through old photographs and throwing away hundreds of photographs of my mother's entire life over the years from 1972 to 2000, keeping only the best photographs and representative photos of her various and sundry dogs. But reading yesterday of the suicide of Aaron Swartz at the age of twenty-six just knocked me flat.

It isn't that I knew Aaron Swartz personally. In fact, I had no idea who he was until I started seeing the above photograph everywhere I looked; a photograph that at one time my mother would have showed me and said, "See? Now someone like THAT would be a nice boy for you." But part of what I've been going through while looking at the documentation of my mother's life is seeing photographs of her in her teens and early twenties, and then thinking about the wreckage she made of herself, of her second marriage and her life after her husband's passing, and wanting to take that girl from the late 1940's and knock some sense into her. And after reading who Aaron Swartz was, I want to smack him across the face too and say, "SCHMUCK!! You're a fucking genius! How DARE you take that mind away from this world!

For my fellow unitiated, here's who Aaron Swartz was, from Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing:

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

[snip]

Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.

This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.

Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.

There's more, from one of the people actually qualified to write about this young man.

But in case the utter waste of a fine mind doesn't make you angry enough, go read about how the Federal government had decided that because he broke into MIT and used his laptop to release hundreds of subscription-firewall scientific documents, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I'm no advocate for lawbreaking or piracy or anything else. I used to use BugMeNot.com to get around subscription firewalls like most people did, until I was laid off in 2008 and deluded myself for about five minutes that I should actually get paid for writing and realized the inconsistency of trying to get around revenue streams. But ten felony counts? Seriously? While Jamie Dimon, Vikram Pandit, Angelo Mozilio, and Lloyd Blankfein walk free? A kid in his early twenties is an adherent to the "Information wants to be free" movement and you want to put him in prison for fifty years while the men who architected a global near-economic-collapse are free to do the same shit again? And this wasn't under George W. Bush's Total Information Awareness Big Brotherism; this is Barack Obama's and Eric Holder's Justice Department that did this, and in the course of doing so, arguably hounded a twenty-six-year-old genius to death.

And they say they want this country to be more educated.

Labels: government conspiracy

This time of year always makes me nostalgic for those good old days when I spent half of every Saturday and often a good chunk of Sunday sitting in a darkened movie theatre with a small notepad, scribbling notes to refer to when writing a review later. I never had the sense back then that time was getting away from me, that I'd blink and the weekend was over. Of course I was younger then, and was working low-stress jobs where I either had nothing at all to do and could spend the day writing, or where I had enough to do to fill up a normal eight-hour day with only a 20-minute drive each way. Long about 2005, I decided I'd had enough and hung up my movie review had largely for good. Once a year, at Christmas time, I try to meet up with my old friend Gabriel for a "Critics over Coffee", just for old times sake and because I miss his company, for he is always modern and fabulous, just as his old blog says. But this year, despite the fact of the entire week off between Christmas and New Year's, Other Things of which you all are well aware got in the way. (I'm still waiting to hit a wall about that one, because I know that sometime, probably long about March, I'm going to find myself curled up in a fetal position in the corner as the end of fifty-seven years of Very Complex and Troubled Relationship really hits me with a two-by-four. She would want it that way.)

But tomorrow night is the first night of the Silly Season for movie fans and those for whom entertainment consists of snarking at people who have more money, often for less reason, than we or anyone we know will ever have. It's the NLCS of movie awards, or the NFC Championship series, or the Grand Prix of Figure Skating final in an Olympics year.

In the years since that group of starfuckers known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association learned their lesson from the Infamous Pia Zadora Fracas of 1981, the annual Golden Globe Awards show has become the Academy Awards' hipper younger sibling. I actually prefer watching the Globes, not only because the very name of the award -- "Golden Globes" -- evokes what pops out of the bodices of the lookalike trophy wives, girlfriends, and miscellaneous escorts of the women in attendance, but because the Globes just don't take themselves seriously as much other than an excuse for a bunch of Hollywood names to dress up, get plastered on national television, and perhaps make some connections with people more famous and popular than they are. You never know what could happen at the Globes, unlike the Oscars®, where it's inevitable that some actress who was a shoo-in from the very beginning will get on stage as if her award was a complete surprise that came out of the blue, cry uncontrollably (*cough* Halle Berry *cough*), and thank her agent before she even thanks her own spouse (*cough* Hilary Swank *cough*). You do get this at the Globes too (*cough* Kate Winslet *cough*), but at least then someone else will get up on stage and make fun of her, everyone will laugh, and no one will think that the little statue is somehow the Nobel Prize.

I also prefer the Globes because they are now way ahead of the curve in that they have always recognized television as well as movies. Given that shows like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and others have not just shown that great work can be done on the smaller screen, but have also started to attract actors who at one time would never even have considered doing television. For my money, the really good stuff is happening in my living room, not at the local Clearview Cinema.

Then there's the thankless job of hosting. Ricky Gervais, a comic whose charms have always escaped me, had an interesting run, but this year the Globes are being hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, which promises some interesting times and jokes that go over the head of most of the audience.

But the real jewel in the crown of Hollywood self-congratulation is still the Oscars, as it allows the film industry to think of itself as something other than the creators of Honest Stories of Working People As Told By Rich Hollywood Stars. The Oscar® broadcast has never seemed stodgier than last year, when a clearly "I'm So Done With This" Billy Chrystal labored through the two-hour show like an aged Borscht Belt comic with a heart condition, wondering why no one laughs at his jokes anymore. After the horrible James Franco/Anne Hathaway disaster of 2011, anything would have been an improvement. But this year the Academy did something amazing, surprising everyone with their jaw-dropping pick of Seth MacFarlane, the multi-talented creator of Family Guy and American Dad, music lyricist, Nelson Riddle-wannabe, crooner of obscure American standards and overall Rat Pack-channeler, to host the awards.

It's impossible to be on the fence about MacFarlane. Either you love him or you hate him. Either you think he's a ferociously talented, handsome if smarmy and lounge lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who also has a wicked sense of humor that he doesn't always know how to control and a glorious singing voice that could open anyone's ears to the charm of American schmaltz music, or you think he's just a smarmy, lounge-lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who has a sick sense of humor that isn't even funny and thinks he'a Frank Sinatra when at best he's Frank Sinatra, Jr. And that he's a hack to boot who doesn't write every word of his shows himself the way Trey Parker does. Here at Casa la Brilliant, we loves us some Seth MacFarlane, so if you fall into the latter category, you can stop reading now.

MacFarlane is a man both very much in his time and oddly out of it. The preposterous success of Family Guy, with its boorish alcoholic patriarch, savvy if ineffectual mother, hopelessly unpopular daughter, vaguely intellectually disabled son, at times variously homicidal and sexually confused infant, and a dog that is the only intelligent one in the family, often goes too far. It has a tendency to become not just unfunny but cruel, seeming to endorse what I think it intends to ridicule. The show relies too much on gimmicks like ending the show with a Conway Twitty clip only because the writers had no idea how to end it, and shock humor that often seems like Howard Stern circa 1987. But when the show hits its mark, it's hilarious, and there's always just enough sweetness to the hapless Griffins to redeem whatever shocking, outrageous things they do. They're the Simpsons in gargoyle form, and they get away with things that often leave me saying, "Did they just really do that?" Because MacFarlane and his writers are always pushing the Fox censors to see at what point they'll have to stop. These days there doesn't seem to be one, unlike a few years ago, when the censors prompted this number, which didn't even appear in television until recently:



It's also in numbers like this where that you see where MacFarlane's heart really lies -- in the music. The best part of Family Guy is the musical numbers, which MacFarlane writes along with composers Walter Murphy and Ron Jones. MacFarlane has a feel for the Big Showstopper Number and it is no doubt this talent, along with his now-immortal comeback from what in anyone else would be a jaw-dropping mistake at the Emmys, and what is perceived at least to be his appeal among "the kids" that made the Powers that Be tap him to host the Academy Awards. Because let's face it, after the Big Opening Number, what does the host really have to do?

On Thursday, MacFarlane, along with rapidly physically disappearing actress Emma Stone, announced the Academy Award nominees, which predictably resulted in a whole lot of pearl-clutching from those who think that an announcement that Silver Linings Playbook is nominated for Best Picture is akin to finding Shakespeare's Long Lost Plays. Yes, MacFarlane made the obligatory Controversial Hitler Joke^TM, but it sounded more like it was scripted by Bruce Vilanch (who writes most of the Academy Awards show gags) than by MacFarlane, whose outrageousness runs more towards jokes about S&M;, menstruation, public drunkenness, flatulence, and other sophomoric topics. Someone needs to tell these people that it's mostly Jews who joke about Hitler (see also: Mel Brooks) anyway.

Anyone who thinks that the Academy Awards are about the Gravitas of the Great Art of Film is delusional anyway (A Beautiful Mind? Shakespeare In Love? Really? Rocky winning instead of Taxi Driver, Network, AND All the President's Men? Forrest Gump over The Shawshank Redemption? Crash rather than Brokeback Mountain? Seriously? Seriously?). I'm sure that MacFarlane is more than game to pop those balloons when they show up on Oscar® night. I think the outrage about MacFarlane is more a function of resentment at the increasing incursion of what the stodgier folks at the pretentiously-named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think of as the inferior medium of television. Ted may have grossed a half a billion dollars worldwide, but as far as these folks are concerned, it's a gross-out movie about a talking teddybear done by a TV hack.

Consider this, though: Ordinarily Mr. Brilliant would watch Downton Abbey before he'd deign to watch the Oscars®, and he would rather have hot metal spikes shoved through his eyeballs than watch Downton Abeey. This year he can't wait for the Night of the Chick Superbowl. And THAT, my friends, may be the REAL reason why the Academy picked the voice of Peter, Brian, Stewie, and Quagmire.

And since I have no idea how to end this post, I'll just take a page from MacFarlane's book, but instead of Conway Twitty, here's Seth MacFarlane singing "Ain't That a Kick in the Head." and "Come Fly With Me".

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, music, Seth McFarlane

     Seriously, trying to explain people of color to the Republican party is like, well, you know...
     I mean, how much chutzpah does it take for a political faction that looks like 50% Off Day at a Brooks Brothers outlet to chide an African American president for not making enough racially diverse nominations for his second term Cabinet? And don't forget, this is a party that had protested Susan Rice's nomination for Secretary of State before Obama had even made the nomination.
     And, as Joan Walsh had recently pointed out on MSNBC, if the Cabinet nominations uncomfortably remind the Senate Republicans of themselves, they have only themselves to blame.

     I'm sure many if not all of you have heard of Good Samaritan laws that protect wouldbe guardian angels from being sued if they save the life of a victim of a heart attack. I've heard stories of people who'd actually sued their life-saving benefactors for cracking their ribs while doing chest compressions or crimping their ascot or some such nonsense. Good Samaritan laws were then put in place to curb the rise of frivolous and audacious tort lawsuits so that health care givers coming across victims are given immunity from lawsuits and in some cases even exonerated from not offering life-saving aid.
     We need such a law, an Act of Congress, actually, one that prohibits rapacious Wall Street behemoths from suing the federal government who'd, through us, bailed out the biggest and quite possibly most corrupt insurance giant in the country to the tune of $182,000,000,000. Yet this is what AIG's executive board will vote on tomorrow morning. They're actually thinking of suing Uncle Sam for the $25,000,000,000 they claim their shareholders lost during the bailout that saved their asses at a time when 60% of their share price tanked in one day over four years ago.
     AIG's shareholders want to launch this lawsuit for about half what Bill Gates' fortune is because they claim the bailout that obviously saved the company cost them tens of billions. Obviously, they were compensated to some degree and I seriously doubt if any of those shareholders took a big enough hit so they had to weigh the value of single vs double ply toilet paper. Just as obviously, they wouldn't have gotten dog shit if We the People hadn't involuntarily stepped in to bail out their fat, corrupt asses.
     Actually, a private lawsuit was already filed two years ago by the 87 year-old former AIG chief Maurice Greenberg, who automatically wins the Henry Potter Prize for the most rapacious and avaricious octogenerarian on earth. Greenberg's hope is that AIG's board will tomorrow join in with his lawsuit because their corrupt investors are owed fealty by the board of directors. It's hard to fathom how much of that $25,000,000,000 Greenberg thinks he'll live long enough to spend but one thing remains clear: Just when you think the federal government is filled with more grasping, self-centered, ungrateful sociopaths than any entity on earth, a Wall Street firm like AIG comes out of nowhere to claim their place on the mantle.
     This is the equivalent of throwing a life preserver to a drowning man who then sues you because the guests on his boat were detained by your act of heroism and made late for dinner at a 5 star restaurant. Obviously, this will have a chilling effect on any other Wall St. firm that needs bailing out in the future (even though Section 6 of the TARP bailout allows the incumbent Treasury Secretary to buy up another $700,000,000,000 of corporate debt without any oversight). If this sets such a precedent, the federal government will think twice before bailing out these sociopaths. Which would be a very, very bad thing for Wall Street, not so bad for the Main Street that would be forced to fund another bailout.
     So this goes out to Greenberg and the AIG board: Please, proceed, ladies and gentlemen. Try and sue the government and see what happens next time your corruption catches up to you and your precious shareholders. Then maybe Congress will get smart and allow you go the way of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns by relegating you to the shit hill of corporate history.

     Let's get one thing straight: I never liked Chuck Hagel. I was never impressed about him volunteering to fight in a clearly unjust war in Southeast Asia. He's a typical right wing homophobe and Obama nominating him to head up the Pentagon is just another wearisome sign that he will never wean himself from the right wing douchebags that have largely gotten us into the seemingly insoluble fix we're in. Tolerating Chuck Hagel when he was in the Senate was like tolerating getting Hepatitis B because it's still better than having Hepatitis C.
     But, speaking as a bisexual liberal in semi-permanent exile, the Log Cabin Republicans' sudden opposition to Hagel largely if not entirely because of an antigay remark he'd made almost 15 years ago (and for which he's subsequently apologized) reveals their loathsome double standards and conveniently-timed pro-LGBT stance. It's an inexplicable move condemned by even the moronic Chris Barron, the co-founder of GOProud, another right wing gay rights group, one that was barred from last year's CPAC. They'd gone as far as to take out obviously expensive full-page ads in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
     It ought to be mentioned, although I get the dry heaves at the thought of even typing out his name, that Mitt Romney, the virulently anti-gay former Governor of my state, enjoyed their endorsement. This is a guy who sought to block gay marriage in Massachusetts both before and after its ratification and, after avoiding them for weeks, listened to gay rights activists with sociopathic indifference to their concerns and was actually surprised to hear some gay couples had families. And yet the Log Cabin Repubs thought they'd get a better deal with a typically homophobic, Mormon psychopath than an incumbent who'd endorsed marriage equality (albeit belatedly and only after Joe Biden painted him into a corner). Really, now, guys?
     These self-loathing morons might as well have taken out their full-page ad in the Washington (Moonie) Times. When are they going to realize they will never be embraced by the conservative establishment (such as it is) EVER? I don't recall them ever bitching and moaning about homophobes being appointed to one post after another during the Bush years. But a 15 year-old remark by a former senator is now suddenly relevant? Aren't these the same right wing lunatics who keep telling us, "It's old news", "Respect our privacy" and "Let's turn the page"? I guess the rules change according to the letter after the president's name.
     Note to the Log Cabin Republicans: You will NEVER be accepted in the embrace of the homophobic GOP, even among those who have yet to come out. These are the same people who'd barred GOProud from last year's CPAC and will surely do so again next month. And you have many more allies among liberals than you EVER will in conservative circles.
     And it utterly mystifies us liberals who support the equal rights for all LGBT people, including, yes, conservatives, why you persist in hitching your wagon to a political party that would love nothing more than to sever ties with you. You are loathed by your political brethren, ignored by even outed and closeted gay Republicans and as a whole, the entire conservative movement would love nothing more than to see you consigned to the flames of Hell once promised by Jonathan Edwards.
     No one's saying you can't hang on to your core conservative beliefs. But you need to wean yourselves from a political party that's notoriously hostile to you and has, at the very least, worked tirelessly and fought tooth and nail to deny you those rights pursued in your convenient, erstwhile gay rights agenda. And anything other than completely and permanently separating yourselves from what's obviously a toxic political party does not make the slightest bit of sense and makes you just as screechingly incoherent as the GOP that loathes you as much as it does liberals and Democrats.

Faithful readers,

Thanks for sticking with B@B during my absence due to the passing of my mother from this mortal coil. I am doing OK, aside from the baffling weepies that affect me when I least expect them. I am just back from North Carolina, where I spent a week and a half bagging up hundreds of never-worn items of clothing for the thrift shop, sorting hundreds of pieces of costume jewelry, and classifying hundreds of collectible teddybears. Watch for the Ebay store coming soon. I'll be back to posting as soon as I catch up.

Labels: personal musings

If we had gone off fiscal cliff, GOP wouldn't have had to vote on tax hikes, only cuts. Obama made 'em break the pledge.
— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) January 1, 2013

      The latter-day Republican Party is more misused than an internet apostrophe. The party that a couple of generations ago had given and had helped give us a progressive tax rate of 90% on the 1%, the Eisenhower Highway System, a strong national defense and kick-ass foreign policy has degenerated into the world's premiere clown show, the worst show on earth. It's one that's reduced to heckling the President and openly doubting his nationality and religion, sabotages the nation's ability to move forward and shamelessly sucks up to corporations, lobbyists, evangelical nut jobs and mobbed-up oligarchs.
      Republican initiatives have paved the way for the crippling of unions, making pensions a fond memory, an epidemic of outsourcing, ruinous tax breaks, subsidies and deferments for the least deserving and welfare "reform" replaced by woefully insufficient minimum wage jobs. They've given rise to a for-profit prison system that, by design, has made us the most heavily incarcerated nation on earth. The Republican agenda has resulted in military adventurism that's overseen the death, detainment, displacement and detention of indigenous peoples in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. They've openly waged wars on science, on gays, on women, on minorities, on the elderly, on the young, on education, on the unemployed, in short, everyone but rich, white Republican men like them.
     Bluntly speaking, the Republican Party is killing the planet earth to the point where the human race directly afflicted by it can no longer be said to be actually evolving. If we were to drive to ground or hound these lunatics out of existence like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday did the Cowboys in the early 1880's, the human race as a whole would be allowed to progress and we could put an end to this shameful evolutionary bottleneck these selfish and bloated bipedaled vermin have visited on us.
     It would be easy to see last night's "fiscal cliff' Senate vote as a step away from the darkness, to see it as a bellwether for the end of the planet-plundering Republican Party as we now see it. Through some vicious, back room dick-twisting on the part of the President and Vice President, the Senate passed a bill that at last saw the end of the Bush tax cuts that have helped put us in the financial Dark Ages as well as averting spending cuts to the social safety net and blocked any attempt for lawmakers to vote themselves yet another pay hike.
     The bill sailed through the higher chamber 89-8, which is about as strong a bipartisan mandate as the President could hope for. It was opposed by one liberal Democrat, Tom Harkin, as well as by five of the most archly conservative Republicans, including rising GOP star and 2016 presidential wannabe Marco Rubio. Harkin saw it as a shitty compromise and while I appreciate his principled stand, Senator Harkin has to understand that this decisive victory in the Senate is just that, a victory considering the counterproductive posturing and faux outrage we've been hearing from wounded Republicans since Super Tuesday.
     While there were some giveaways to a Senate GOP that's as strong as it'll ever be for the next two years, the aversion to cuts in the safety net, the $30 billion funding of a year's worth of unemployment benefits and letting lapse the tax cuts for those making $400,000 a year or more (instead of starting with those making $250,000 or more, as the President had consistently called for) is certainly worth the 2% payroll tax cut lapsing and no spending cuts to the military that would surely merely affect the boots on the ground while not stopping the outsourcing orgy to war profiteers like Blackwater and Halliburton.
     Plus, the GOP-controlled House looms balefully in the distance and it's important to have in the tank as strong a bill in the Senate as leverage when the lower chamber tries to pass a reconciled version of the bill. In short, while the process was deeply flawed and certainly no model of governance (as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the vote), giving these stopgap measures a rushed and hasty look, the end result was an object lesson of how swiftly and effectively government can work when bipartisan bickering is squelched and both sides of the aisle reach out to each other.
     While I've been (justifiably) taking pot shots at the President practically from inauguration day, perhaps Mr. Obama is finally learning how to negotiate, which is in asking for the outrageous so that when you're finally chewed down, it won't be as bad a compromise as when he'd negotiated with Congress on the disastrous health care reform bill. I'm not as optimistic as the NY Times that a favorable House version of the bill will sail to a reconciled version and straight to the Resolute Desk. Yet the Democrats' victory in the Senate last night will surely be a psychological blow to a House Republican leadership that's finally realizing it's losing its traction in a fading world in which white, rich Republican men once held sway over everyone else. It's all but assured the House will later today pass their version of the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal with the 113th Congress looming even larger in the next 48 hours.
     All in all, it was a good way to ring in the New Year and maybe, just maybe, 2013 will be a little brighter for many of us than the previous year.

(Expand for full-size version)

     Jesus fucking tap dancing Christ in a chorus line of cancan hamsters, has it come to this? Auditions for wavers? Seriously? Those poor saps you see freezing their asses off on the street in the dead of winter as they wave like idiots to motorists in Statue of Liberty and gorilla costumes while making minimum wage? Those guys had to actually pass auditions and undergo drug screenings?!
     Do I have what it takes, folks? I mean, I may be a bit rusty. I haven't waved since Election Night when I bid a not-so-fond adieu to Mitt and Ann Romney and many 86'd Republicans. Break a leg, kids. Ziegfeld's out there.
     I mean, seriously, folks, I've gotten in cabs where the driver needed both a GPS and verbal instructions to get me a mile and a half across my small town. I've gotten countless fast food and coffee orders fucked up by people for whom English is a third language at best. I've met nurses who didn't know what a BUN is. And we elect to Congress and the presidency six figure-a-year idiots who don't know basic shit that your average 10th grade civics student would be expected to know.
     Yet, I, someone with ISO 9001 training as a quality inspector, someone with retail management experience and someone who in the military used multimillion dollar machinery and equipment, can't get a job cleaning up dog shit at a kennel, when I have experience doing just that, and people have to audition and suffer through humiliating background checks and drug screenings just to flop their wrists at random strangers for minimum wage? Seriously???
     Pull chain, repeat as necessary until western civilization finally circles the porcelain and meets the galactic sewer system.