Saturday Music and Furniture Moving

So the Kid is moving into my closet next weekend (the closet is the size of a NYC bedroom folks, so it's not too terrible) and I am rearranging my room so I can hang closet rods on one wall (sorry lathe and plaster, but it's cheaper than buying a wardrobe). I went thrifting yesterday and found an old 1940's vanity which has replaced the card table i was using for a desk ($14.99- and I've been coveting one of these forever).

To help make the labor go faster, I've been playing Gang of Four. Best described as disco punk and an obvious influence on bands like Franz Ferdinand, I love love love the Gang of Four. They had a wee resurgence a few years ago when they played the Live 8 concert. The lyrics are political, the beats are dancey, and it hits all the happy revolutionary buttons in my brain.

I love a man in uniform


Natural's not in it

My newest obsession

Ruth and I watched Bizarre Worlds last night. And they were talking Turkey. And now I am obsessed. Not just because of the history and the archeology and the culture, but because of this. Manly men, covered in olive oil, wrestling in the grass.

So fucking hot

One of these things is not like the others

I've been thinking about parity lately. It's hard not to when bankers are crying over salary caps of $500k a year while minimum wage (even with increases) is still far behind the actual cost of living.

If you or I were to rob a bank (no guns, no violence, just a scary note and the threat of violence) we'd be facing some serious jail time. But if you are a banker and you rob the treasury department with threats of violently collapsing the entire world economy, you don't get jail time. You get TARP money. And you still get to hand out annual bonuses and bitch about salary caps.

Now if you or I had to apply for government assistance, there would be some serious investigation into our finances. If you own a car worth more than a couple thousand bucks ($5000 I think), you have to sell it and use up that money first. If you have stocks or bonds or a 401k even a prepaid funeral plan, you have to use that up first. Then maybe you can get some kind of government help. Maybe.

But if you're a banker, and you've run your company into the ground, your own assets are safe. The government will not require you to sell off your vacation house and pump the proceeds back into the bank before writing a check. They won't even require salary cuts or end bonuses (who the fuck gives out annual bonuses at failing companies anyways?)

Now the bankers are screaming that if you put restrictions on salary, you'll run off all the top brains who will take their wads of cash and go elsewhere. Good riddance I say. But isn't it both morally and fiscally responsible to subject failing businesses that receive government money to the same kinds of pressure and investigation that we subject poor people to?

But one of these things is not like the others. The mere act of having money makes you insulated from the requirements we place on every other person in the country. And that is not ok.

Dear Fauxgressive Liberal Dickwads

Do you believe in choice? I mean really truly with your whole heart believe that people have the right to control their own bodies? Or are you just saying that you believe in a woman's right to choose because 1)no intelligent woman would ever sleep with you if you said otherwise and 2) you want to have abortion as an option in case your girlfriend's birth control fails.

Maybe I'm being a bit too hard on the boys here. How about you girls? Do you really believe in choice, or do you believe in choice under certain conditions? Do you believe it's ok for a poor brown woman to have abortions, but make snide comments if she chooses to have babies instead? Have you complained about poor single moms draining the system with their multiple babies? Have you bitched about someone having multiple abortions instead of using birth control or just keeping their legs shut?

Choice is simple people. It means that people get to decide for themselves whether or not to have babies. Period. You aren't really pro-choice if you are denigrating someone's choice TO reproduce. You are actually just as bad as the forced pregnancy douchebags, but coming from the opposite direction. Just like it's not a big leap fro the forced pregnancy nuts to go from banning abortion to banning birth control, it's not a big leap from limiting the number of pregnancies a woman can have to forced sterilization.

Here's the truth peeps- there is absolutely no good reason to have babies. None. Every single reason anyone will ever give you for having babies is, at it's core, a selfish one. Same thing is true for people deciding to not have babies. AND THAT IS OK. Really, it is. It's a choice that we have to make on our own. And for some of us, the actions of say a poor single mom who seeks fertility treatments and ends up with 14 kids seems insane. But I bet the idea of choosing to never have kids at all seems just as insane to her.

And lets not forget how fucking sexist and classist all this Octomom crap is. If she were married, she'd get her own reality tv show to help pay for all the babies. She'd have giant corporations falling over themselves to donate diapers and clothing and cars. But she's single, and poor, and has a "funny" name that doesn't exactly sound waspy. And that makes people think it's okay to tear her to shreds and hope for disaster to strike her kids.

So if you really, truly, absolutely think you are pro-choice, ask yourself if you can support someone else's choice when it goes against everything you believe? If you can't, you're not really pro-choice. Instead, you're giving the forced-pregnancy blow hards fuel for the fire when they scream about forced abortions.