We're Probably Lucky It's Not Unbearably Hot

L.A.Times live blogging it an hr. ago.

Police in riot gear were confronting protesters Tuesday night on 6th Street near Union Avenue and fired non-lethal projectiles toward the crowd that had gathered to protest the shooting death of man who officers said was wielding a switchblade Sunday.

The confrontation was sparked after people tore down a police sign and threw objects at windows of the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart station at 6th and Valencia streets. The crowd was pushed west on 6th toward Union Avenue by the officers in riot gear.

Earlier, about 300 people were blocking the intersection of Union and 6th. They were standing outside the Restaurant Atilan Express, a Guatemalan eatery, and were illuminated by the spotlight of police helicopters circling overhead.

The shooting of Manuel Jamines, who the LAPD says threatened officers and passersby with a knife, has heightened tensions in the heavily immigrant community.

11:15 p.m. update: At least 15 people were arrested tonight, and police were attacked from above by objects thrown from rooftops, the L.A. Times reports. It's 22 arrests, says KFI News.

Top Several Twangy Telebision Themes

Order is for others.

Your Bosses Will Work You 'Til You're In Your Graves, Part ...

We stoleran/linked an item on SoCal car washes last month. The NYT caught up yesterday. (OK, we've been napping & they caught us.)

In some ways, union leaders say, this campaign parallels previous ones in which unions organized thousands of immigrant janitors in Houston and Los Angeles and substantially lifted their wages.

In addition to adding members, the carwash campaign hopes to send a strong message to employers to stop taking advantage of workers in an industry where it is common practice.

California officials have estimated that two-thirds of the 500 carwashes in Los Angeles violate workplace laws. Many workers say they are paid just $35 for a 10-hour workday — less than half the minimum wage — and some say they are not paid for time during which no cars go through the wash. Others complain that they are not given gloves or goggles even though they often use stinging acids to clean tire rims.

Alternately: Why Illegal Immigration Will Never Be Stopped

Small Universe

This is stupidly amusing. Extra amusing to us is that we saw an ossifer speaking to the maintenance-uniformed hurler seen in the video around 1325 last Friday, as we were leaving the Museum Square edifice. Missed it by that much. The other ossifer (they travel in pairs, you know) was inside bee-essing w/ the Museum Square security guards, whose main function is sitting behind a desk & monitoring the keys to what we Yanks like to euphemise as the rest rooms.

Matt Geller of the SCMFVA said office workers are not happy with their ad hoc food choices disappearing. "People feel their rights are being infringed upon," he noted, adding that he has a meeting set up with Councilmember Tom LaBonge, who wants to regulate food trucks. "I hope we can alleviate all of this in the next few weeks with the agreement we're putting together."

Yeah, we hope you get your fucking pony, & world peace too, sonny.

Hey, Look Over There! No, There! Shiny!

From the morning email load that we don't get to until half the working stiffs in North America are already heading home:

We were quite curious about Muslim inbreeding. And became curiouser when a click made around 1435 PDT led us not to an article about this latest horror of the Musselmen, but to the slightly different horror of the PAJAMASMEDIA® homepage. Cursory searching of the site revealed the most recent item containing inbreeding is dated 2 August 2010. And all these link to the PJM homepage.

Apparent typist Jamie Glazov appears on the Google, but not w/ credit for anything recent to do w/ inbreeding. Yet. Ah. He does enjoy the theme.

A story disappeared by a website which regularly features Victor David Hanson & Michael Ledeen must have been a masterpiece, especially given Jamie's record.

UPDATE (1852 PDT, 7 September 2010): Unlike Jonah Goldberg, we needn't be obvious when we're on deadline or sacktime. Internet Scotsman Substance McGravitas points us to Pp. 1 & 2 of whatever it is. (Crud, now less sleepytime.)

Catholic Junior Anti-Sex League

Delaware Republican Senate primary candidate Christine O'Donnell:

When a married person uses pornography, or is unfaithful, it compromises not just his (or her) purity, but also compromises the spouse's purity. As a church, we need to teach a higher standard than abstinence. We need to preach a righteous lifestyle.

On an MTV show about abstinence (as summarized by Huffington Post), O'Donnell explained:

The reason that you don't tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue. ... You're just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.

In the 90s era discussion on MTV, O'Donnell said, "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."

Yet one can certainly lust w/o pounding/rubbing one's pud. Does candidate O'Donnell therefore want everyone's hands cut off to improve their chances of living a righteous life? It would be irresponsible not to ask.

The Roman Catholic Church: Causing human misery w/ its anti-life, anti-sex, anti-human policies for well over a thousand yrs. Including the misery that Sister O'Donnell's espousal of Catholic claptrap will cause her to suffer as she sails to defeat.

Audio, Video, And Typing

Haley Barbour’s Ridiculous Story

Posted on Sep 6, 2010

By Eugene Robinson

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I’ve ever heard. Ever.

He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can’t decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.

In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and website, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was “my generation” that led the switch: “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college—never thought twice about it.”

The “old Democrats” fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but “by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”

Not a word of this is true.

Shorter to read the remainder than to see/listen. We hope.

Sudden Realization We Felt We Should Share

Having spent the last two days in a telebision-less Third World zone, we did not see one damn minute of the Larry Jewish MDA Labor Day Telethon. Nor did we donate to the MDA when asked at the supermarket check-out.

Please find it in your hearts to pick up the slack for us, & tell the next begging moocher to fuck off.

Police Terror, Part Infinite

We wondered why there were choppers orbiting downtown as we were wending our way back to the Just Another Blog™ bunker mere moments ago.

After a day of protest marches, vigils and confrontations with police, the LAPD declared an illegal assembly about 10 p.m. and officers in riot gear began clearing the streets around 6th Street and Union Avenue. That's where an LAPD bicycle officer on Sunday shot and killed a man identiified by friends as Manuel Jamines. The department says he was threatening a pregnant woman with a wife [sic] and came at officers. People in the community say he was a gentle soul, an immigrant from Guatemala who did not understand English or Spanish very well. A march that began at the intersection moved to the Rampart police station, then back to the 6th and Union area where rocks and eggs were thrown at police. It looks on media reports as if activists from the Revolutionary Communist Party have been in the crowd urging on the protests.

OUTSIDE AGITATORS!!!

Mocking Hockney

So, what happens w/ the over-50 set at pool parties is: Everyone grabs one of the above "noodles," & floats. No splashing, no one thrown in the pool. Nothing.

In Living Color

For the impatient, Count Basie & Orchestra wail around (7:35). By way of. And some more Miltie.

Prisoners Of Art

Alternate title: At The New Death Panel Bldg.

Rest Of The Light Standard Pix

This one just because we're being faithful to the title.

Maybe We Can't Shoot Your Precious Art ...

... inside, but here's a shot of J. Koons' damn train anyway:

Nyah!

Better train set.

Variety Sign Building: Night & Day

Alternate (less nature) take:

Quitting Time

17:28 PDT

18:20 PDT

Decline & Collapse

Giant Head Awaiting Installation At New LACMA Building

Can We Just Clear Out This Rat's Nest Once & For All, Damnit?

30 False Fronts Won Contracts for Blackwater

WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

Why Andrew Breitbart Is A Conservative

This is probably more EVIDENCE of you-know-what media bias, but ...

Breitbart, who has emerged as a star of the "tea party" movement, loves telling his apostate's tale in the italicized, frequently profane manner that is his trademark. Three epiphanies stand out:

1. The Black Dorm Moment. In 1986, Breitbart was a freshman at Tulane University when his friend Larry Solov, a sophomore at Stanford, happened to mention his school's African-American-themed residence hall.

"He just matter-of-factly said there was a black dorm and I was like, 'What the friggin' hell? Are you kidding me?'" said Breitbart, who is now business partners with Solov, a former corporate litigator. "And then, when I found out that it was not segregation in the sense of white people doing it, I was like, 'What are you talking about? Why aren't we working toward the colorblind ideal?'"

2. The Clarence Thomas Moment. In 1991, he was riveted by Supreme Court hearings in which the future associate justice was grilled by hostile Democrats .

"I remember the mainstream media telling me, 'Bad man! Really bad man! Sexual harassment bad man! Worst-bad-man-in-the-history-of-the-world bad man!" he told a Philadelphia tea party rally in July. "By the end of the week, I said, 'What did this man do? This man is an American hero!' … It was a cavalcade of Caucasians asking this man about his very private video rentals!"

3. The Kurt Cobain Moment, around 1994. "In essence, the media was saying, 'Hey, see that guy, that's your generation's spokesman,'" said Breitbart, not a fan of . "I was like, 'This guy seems like a world class [screw-up].' And I just started to have the awkwardly pedestrian revelation that my parents were right."

***

We're no fans of "grunge music" ourself ("Grudge nusic" is more our style.) but we've no idea why anyone should give the proverbial crap about media presentation of any pop music thing, idol ("Grunge music's suicidal prince." Sheesh!) telebision programming or much else cultural. Certainly not enough of a crap to conclude that the problem w/ media is that it's somehow too leftist.

And that's it for us. No desire to read the no doubt even-handed (Cough. Hack. Expectorate.) item. But: Reaction! (We'd like to think running coverage of a comment thread is objectively worse than noting that this item appears in almost identical form elsewhere.)

Nothing

We got plenty of it.

Ditko The Libertarian

"The Lighthouse From Nowhere," from Strange Tales #87, August 1961, in which a Scottish Howard Roarkobjectivist übermensch saves humankind from scaly green monsters from outer space.

Lashing Back

Will Bunch pimps his new book at PuffHo. Anecdotes of fear & reaction among the single-information-source voter. Most chilling:

... somehow Obama was factually not an American, to match their gut reaction to the new president. They feel the same way about Obama voters. In one moment I will never forget, I sat in a Dover diner as the leaders of the Delaware 9-12 Patriots tried to convince me that Obama's victory in their state wasn't legit because his majority came from "the handout people" in urban Wilmington.

Then:

In the long run, the evidence remains strong that the coalition that elected the president in 2008 -- more multicultural, more likely to be college educated and somewhat less likely to be religious -- is still ascendant.

Optimist. None of those people will qualify to vote under the Real American Guaranteed Elections Act, which will suspend the 14th & 17th Amendments (minimum) & allow only Christian property owners & their wives (maybe) to vote. It'll be the first bill Pres. Palin signs.

Warning To Female Republicans

The every-so-often dumping of hydrogen peroxide on your hair & head, & the anesthesia required when your your eye sockets are tucked-&-rolled may be causing brain damage beyond the original damage that led you to Republicanism.

Case in point:Also: No Botox®, Wrinkle-Woman?

More Drivel We Won't Be Reading

EVALUATIONS

Iraq in the Long Run

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Barack Obama still believes the Iraq War was a mistake. Should we?

Yes, Douthat, we realize that you don't work from a reality-based perspective, but really, it's not a question of what we should believe. Didn't the fucking Pope at the time say it was not a good thing? Aren't His Holiness's beliefs what what you should be basing your beliefs on? And if it was such a good thing, why wasn't your ass in the U.S. Army helping?

Trotsky Thursday: Permanent Revolution, Baby!

Public meetings in Sri Lanka

Seventy years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky: The return of history and the strategy of the world revolution

By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 
1 September 2010

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) will hold a series of public meetings in Sri Lanka on the historic legacy of Leon Trotsky and its relevance to today’s fight for world socialist revolution.

Trotsky was the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and led the Red Army that defended the first workers’ state. After Lenin’s death, he politically and theoretically led the struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet state. After Stalin’s betrayals allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933, Trotsky concluded that the Third International was dead and called for the building of the Fourth International, which he founded in 1938.

Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico on August 21, 1940 by a Stalinist agent. His murder was the culmination of Stalin’s purges that physically eliminated the finest representatives of the entire generation that had carried out the October Revolution.

Trotsky’s life and work has a profound contemporary significance. The global profit system is, once again, mired in a fundamental economic and political crisis. The lessons of Trotsky’s struggles provide the essential political weapons for uniting the working class to abolish capitalism and establish a world planned socialist economy.

In countries of a belated capitalist development, Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution has been repeatedly confirmed by the inability of the bourgeoisie to meet the aspirations of working people for democratic rights and a decent living standard. The quarter century of civil war in Sri Lanka is one tragic example.

We warmly invite workers, housewives, youth and intellectuals looking for a way to oppose war, oppression and poverty to attend our public meetings.

Colombo
Venue: New Town Hall
Date and Time: September 12, 3.00 p.m.

Kandy
Venue: Janamadura Hall
Date and Time: September 23, 3.00 p.m.

Jaffna
Venue: Co-operative Hall
Date and Time: September 26, 2.00 p.m.

Main speaker: SEP General Secretary Wije Dias

WSWS.

Murder In Berkeley

Early this morning, Berkeley police shot and killed a mountain lion on Shattuck Avenue, "not far from popular restaurants and shops in the north side of the city, reports KTVU. The early morning murder happened "just around the corner from Chez Panisse, Peet’s Coffee and other popular businesses on Shattuck Avenue." (Berkeley Daily Planet's Daniel Turman jests, "he or she was apparently drawn to the area by the promise of an exalted hunt: tender, young returning students and slow-moving, California Cuisine-fed, neo-hippies.") RIP, big fella.

SFist.

Now We Know What She's Been Trying To Do All These Yrs.: Stop Sympathetic Suicide Stories

La Althouse (Don't! All necessary info.):

4. The man's Facebook page shows that he regarded his interests as "being mean" and "making fun of people." Does that make you less likely to scold me for being mean and making fun of him? I am making fun of him, but I deny that I'm being mean. This post is part of my ongoing effort to deter people from committing suicide. I believe stories about suicide are full of the kind of sympathy that creates a romantic aura around suicide. I want to give suicide the kind of awful image that will make [it] less easy to embrace than facing up to your problems in the material world.

Stop creating those auras, lamestream media. Face up to your problems, people, & your problems are solved!

2. A construction worker who witnessed the fall has opined that the man survived not because he landed on a red 2008 Dodge Charger, but because the car contained a set of rosary beads.

3. He landed feet first, "twisted like a pretzel," in the backseat of the car. The car seat! That, not God, accounts for the soft landing ...

One must admire someone who can deny God's rosary but has such faith in tough love & facing up to one's problems (Is this different than "facing down to" one's problems, whatever the hell that might be?) as immediate cure-alls. Is Dr. Laura's syndicator in the market for a replacement scold?

Also.

They Hate Us For Our Guns

We're inured to this sort of thing;

Don't make fun of ...

it's inane, & always good for a laugh & the feeling of moral, intellectual & hair-do superiority w/o which we couldn't stumble through our existence. But imagine how cretins like Gun Owner Mike above appear to (may the sweet baby Jeebus have mercy on their heathen souls) Un-Americans.

Most of the weapons I saw in cold-war conflict zones originated in the US, China, or Russia – so I decided to go back to the source. When I looked into the statistics in the US, it was astonishing: about 30,000 people are killed each year by guns. It's like a civil war. My idea was to look behind the groups that are normally portrayed as the problem: gang members and criminals.

Instead, I wanted to photograph the largely white, middle-class Americans who buy and sell weapons in vast quantities. First I went to a three-day National Rifle Association event in Texas. It was astonishing: a convention centre filled with families, salesmen and thousands of weapons. I started taking pictures, discreetly, but people were suspicious and hostile. So the following day I set up a portrait booth, with a large backdrop and studio lights, and people started queuing up to be photographed.

Then the sheep went for it. Like children, but w/ real guns.

He Listed 39 People He Hated And The Reasons Why

We've always despised jerks who have goals & set about to achieve them, no matter how noble their goals may be.

During a search of Hansen's room, investigators found a list Hansen wrote of things he wanted to do, including blow up Sisseton High School – where he was set to begin his senior year the day after his arrest – torture and rape women and "become the world's most infamous sociopath," according to an affidavit filed Monday.

He listed 39 people he hated and the reasons why, and he researched the 1999 Columbine school massacre in Littleton, Colo., in which two student gunmen killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others before committing suicide, investigators said.

Detectives also found drawings of swastikas, documents outlining two attempts to make napalm, instructional materials on how to make bombs, four guns and a video showing two explosive devices detonating, according to the affidavit.

Gawd damn show-off.

Actual Vomit

Mostly to force the accidentally published animation below from visibility (Seizures? No thanks!) one example of the many things we wish we'd never seen:

EVALUATIONS

The Riddle of Moral Authority

By ROSS DOUTHAT

How Obama lost it, and how Glenn Beck seemed to grasp it.

Of course we deny morality, & any claim that Beck's pseudo-paranoid entertainment & attempts at rabble-rousing hold any "moral authority" only confirms the bankruptcy of any ideas of morality or authority.

(Douthat: Harvard alumni. Really?)

MORAL AUTHORITY UPDATE: Lies, lies, lies. Where's that authority? Or is lying no longer immoral?

Cat Vom

There is not a bandwagon upon which we will not climb (nor one from which we will not jump like that).