|
5/8/08, 11:16 p.m. (Link here)
Good grief: In the California appellate case of People v. Semien, a Christian pastor who works with the homeless is found to be correctly excluded from a jury because "The pastor is in the business of forgiveness, and the prosecutor was not required to accept the pastor's assurance that he could find someone guilty."
5/5/08, 9:10 p.m. (Link here)
R.I.P. Mildred Loving, as in Loving v. Virginia, the perfectly named U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the right to marry beyond racial classifications. There's a lovely phrase that I'm only seeing in the FindLaw version of the AP story: In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history - she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy."It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."
4/17/08, 12:57 p.m. (Link here)
Is sludge good for poor black children? HUD decided to find out. Now some members of Congress want to know why. Honestly, you almost couldn't make this up.
4/15/08, 9:08 p.m. (Link here)
Here we go: a Craigslist ad proposing shared space as a way to keep a home. This kind of thing is going to show up more often.
4/9/08, 4:40 p.m. (Link here)
San Francisco demonstrators can claim success in today's Olympic torch absurdity: the public acted straightforwardly, rationally, solemnly, seriously, responsibly... and it was the authorities who resorted to flash mob tactics. So far, that is. I can hear a siren now...
4/9/08, 12:14 p.m. (Link here)
TOO MUCH: This ad for a "bank-owned" (foreclosed) house in the San Francisco Bay Area includes a photo of an empty bedroom with fairytale castle pictures on the wall -- pictures that clearly used to frame a little girl's bed.
4/6/08, 12:17 a.m. (Link here)
So, OK, someone tell me if I'm wrong and if so why: Couldn't home mortgage borrowers who are threatened with foreclosure be helped by turning their extra space into shared quarters under Tenancy in Common contracts? I realize single-family zoning is a mainstay of suburban exclusivity, but shouldn't the zoning boards of hard-hit towns prefer TICs to foreclosure wastelands? With so many households homeless, and so many other households rattling around in McMansions, and so many rich people squeezing out the poor from older city centers, it has been obvious for a while that the McMansions are going to be subdivided into cheaper, more reasonably sized living spaces. Why not just let it happen in an orderly fashion?
4/5/08, 11:23 p.m. (Link here)
San Francisco real estate finally goes off the deep end... or anyway the shallow end: "Once in a lifetime opportunity to own a piece of the very desirable San Francisco Bay! *PLEASE BE ADVISED: this is an UNDERWATER LOT (Tidal Land), meaning it DOES NOT TOUCH THE SHORE. As a result, there is no sign on the property." Hey, buddy, I got a bridge I wanna sell ya...
3/19/08, 12:06 a.m. (Link here)
Jesus, five years of this war. Make it stop.
3/17/08, 10:56 p.m. (Link here)
Sue Halpern in The New York Review of Books on the science of happiness: "...what the happiness researchers now know -- that the people who say they are happy are those who are part of a community, have purpose-driven lives, and don't sweat the small stuff. (The researchers also know from their surveys that the happiest of happy Americans are Republicans, social butterflies, and bigots.)" Sez Strange de Joel: "Some people even hit the trifecta!"
2/20/08, 8:25 p.m. (Link here)
Mouse eye view: 
2/07/08, 12:25 a.m. (Link here)
At last, someone with an audience recalls Hillary Clinton's betrayal of everything her ex-friends at the Children's Defense Fund stood for. Laura Flanders tells it right in The Nation.
1/17/08, 9:29 p.m. (Link here)
Strange de Joel: "Instead of 18-1/2 minutes of silence, now we have 473 days."
1/10/08, 10:22 p.m. (Link here)
"Those who go around publicizing the names of CIA people abroad are despicable." That would be Bush Sr. speaking, in 1989, not Bush Jr. any time recently. The current Google version of the AP story leaves out that bit.
1/04/08, 8:36 p.m. (Link here)
San Francisco had a heavy rainstorm today with high winds. Our doorbell shorted into blatting noise first thing in the morning -- a lovely wakeup. Later we lost power for a little over four hours. The eucalyptus tree that keeps threatening to come down didn't. I picked up a task I'd been avoiding, a dull hand tabulation of records, and lost no time from the outage. The power came back on while everything in the freezer was still frozen. Very small deprivations, these, but they made me think of the Iraqi blogger Riverbend with her perpetual frets about power cuts and generator fuel and chances to get online. Hope she's all right, wherever she is.
1/02/08, 12:02 p.m. (Link here)
We rented The Birth of a Nation (yuk). Midway through, our cat had the good taste to walk out of the room. I'm sorry we stayed. Strange to realize how much of the white supremacist crap in that film depends on male supremacist crap: Southern White Woman has to be helpless and in need of rescue to give white men a chivalrous-looking excuse for attacking black men. Men deny other men the right to vote, to serve on juries, etc., but women exist outside citizenship. One has fantasies of creating an escape route for the women in the film -- but where to? Ohio? Canada? C'mon, it's 1866, or at best 1915. Nowhere is safe yet... [Morning thought: Griffith's propaganda has layers within layers. He might even have wished the viewer to reflect that women of all ancestries are oppressed in his world, to distract from the film's more basic falsehood -- the pretense that postwar events in the South were some kind of fair fight. The real story being brief hope and ensuing re-enslavement.] [So, OK, someone has pointed out accurately that the claim isn't "fair fight," the claim is oppression of the poor beleaguered ex-slaveowners by their dreadful arrogant ex-slaves. Which may be the essence of fascism, come to think of it: stealing the moral authority of underdog status from the actual underdogs and using it to license unrestrained abuse by an already powerful majority. But this is probably obvious.]
12/12/07, 12:33 p.m. (Link here)
Been rereading Ulysses this week. Shocked to learn I'm older than Mr. Bloom.
12/03/07, 8:52 p.m. (Link here)
Um, there's this article of mine posted over at Shelterforce about what's wrong with supportive housing that doesn't care for people with real problems. It's the product of a difficult eight-month editorial negotiation and shows it, but maybe some of the sentiments got through. English takes repetitive scrunching-up and flattening about as well as pie crust, don't you find?
11/11/07, 10:04 p.m. (Link here)
R.I.P. Norman Mailer. He was brilliant so long as he wrote what he knew: about American men in ethnic categories he thought similar to his own. So long as his characters were enough like himself for him to consider them human, he could see right through skulls. Motives, evasions, shamefaced virtues, endless subtle variations on brother and father dynamics, the reminder in The Naked and The Dead that everyone feels a bit different from the others and expects to do big things.
With women and other members of categories he found foreign, he was a deaf, dumb clod. But all writers have limits.
10/27/07, 10:04 p.m. (Link here)
So the SF Chron mgmt. now admit they are considering selling the paper's Fifth and Mission headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Makes sense: they obviously don't like downtown poor people nor want them as readers. Their news sections now deplore the kinds of urban knockabout variety that writers like Herb Caen once celebrated. Their advertisers clearly prefer home improvement "news" appealing to upper-class suburban trophy wives. Their paper doesn't belong South of the Slot any more. Sad to say, they can just go ahead and move to Fairfield or Burlingame and their readers won't know the difference. Far as I'm concerned they can take the glossy overpaid Giants and the bumbling '49ers with them. Harrumph.
10/20/07, 6:08 p.m. (Link here)
Good, good: The San Francisco Coalition on Homeless has started posting letters to the editor debunking the Chronicle's anti-homeless hate campaign. See especially Jason Albertson's well-informed demolition of the official lie that homeless people refuse available housing.
10/20/07, 12:15 a.m. (Link here)
Amazing: even the usually conservative SF Weekly is expressing concern about the San Francisco Chronicle's ethics, at least about a rather sinister request the Chron posted for (presumably non-homeless) readers to photograph "homeless" people and send in the pictures. As the Weekly says, the request smacks of vigilantism and sketchy ethics. Doesn't anyone in authority at the Chron know better?
10/18/07, 4:47 p.m. (Link here)
This published exchange is the best critique I've seen yet of the San Francisco Chronicle's hateful scapegoating campaign against homeless people. Here, San Francisco Bay Guardian city editor Stephen T. Jones engages the point man on the Chronicle's campaign in an actual conversation about the professional and moral defects of his anti-homeless columns. I've also been saying what I can wherever I can about the Chronicle scapegoating problem, including guest posts c/o friends on LeftInSF and Harry's Place, but there are not enough of us who believe in homeless people's human rights, have computers, and have the time to use them in protest. Mr. Jones finally has said what needs saying, hitting the necessary buttons hard, in a publication that gets a lot of local attention. Many thanks to him.
10/6/07, 3:13 p.m. (Link here)
There's stuff now about Mitt Romney "looking presidential".
Romney looks like a smiling sociopath. He looks like the bank manager in the Bukowski poem with "a face nothing had ever happened to." Abraham Lincoln wouldn't look presidential to this crew. He'd look like a yokel earnest enough to cheat but not rich enough to yield much of a take. Come to think of it, that's how he looked to a lot of people in his own day too.
9/30/07, 10:46 p.m. (Link here)
Reader John Burke came up with some suitable art for that "Family Day" phrase.
9/29/07, 1:55 p.m. (Link here)
From the recent White House proclamation of September 24 as "Family Day," we learn that "Strong, loving families help young Americans grow into successful adults and build a Nation shining with optimism." If you don't find that phrasing creepy, try picturing art to go with it. And tomorrow is Gold Star Mother's Day -- a strange idea, though an old one, as it implies the mothers of the dead offered them up voluntarily, like Abraham with Isaac.
9/25/07, 11:38 p.m. (Link here)
Not so bad, this new TV comedy called "Reaper". A fresh premise: a nowhere kid in a nowhere job, whose parents obviously did better than he has, discovers they long ago sold his soul to the Devil -- and the deal kicks in on his 21st birthday. Forgive me for being dreary, but it's a timely metaphor for debt peonage in a generation that arrived too late for the good tuition rates, mortgages, and pensions.
9/22/07, 3:00 p.m. (Link here)
"Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed."
9/22/07, 10:28 a.m. (Link here)
Ran across a sad phrase today. It's in the SF Chron coverage of the Internet organizing group Color of Change and its recent work on the Jena Six case. It's this: As part of a loose coalition of bloggers, black radio hosts and activists that helped rally 20,000 people to demonstrate in Jena this week, Color of Change is bridging the gap between civil rights activists and the predominantly white liberal blogosphere and mainstream media. The sad part is, I was raised to think civil rights activists and liberals were more or less the same thing. But maybe it was never true.
9/18/07, 11:18 p.m. (Link here)
Yep, it's all the fault of the bicycle riders...(c/o Cursor.org)
9/10/07, 9:09 p.m. (Link here)
So I'm reading Joan Didion's Political Fictions, and there's a bit on the Clinton scandals where Didion compares the obsessive Kenneth Starr to Captain Ahab. Says Strange de Joel, "Thar she blowwwws!"
9/2/07, 2:52 p.m. (Link here)
Offbeat thought about the Republican and Democratic Parties: one is the party of private landlords, and the other is the party of nonprofit and government landlords. What we need is a party for tenants.
7/28/07, 9:22 p.m. (Link here)
J. found this a few days ago. Looks like Google News was getting a little ahead of the game. 
7/13/07, 1:17 p.m. (Link here) Im in ur cheez, dreamin ur dreamz
6/29/07, 7:15 p.m. (Link here)
Strange de Joel strikes again: A suggestion being made that the Devil has reserved a special place for Dick Cheney, Mr. J. says, "Don't worry, Cheney's not gonna go to Hell. He has other priorities."
6/1/07, 7:02 p.m. (Link here)
R.I.P. Lloyd Alexander, author of the Chronicles of Prydain and other lovely adventure stories. He died May 17. I only just heard. "I used the imaginary kingdom not as a sentimentalized fairyland, but as an opening wedge to express what I hoped would be some very hard truths," he once told an interviewer. "I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out. . . . On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality."
To
see earlier
entries, please refer to the archive directory.
|
