Pussy Riot in Church!!!!!

All the Tsar’s children scandalized.

The band is facing backlash from journalists, parishioners and others who have called the band “demoniac” and an “abomination.”
Boris Yakemenko, leader of the youth movement “Orthodox Body,” told Izvestiya that the group just pulled the stunt for publicity.

“Any filth is always more visible against a clean background,” Yakemenko told Izvestiya. “If they had done this in a brothel, nobody would have noticed. It is for people like this that churches are needed.”

“They’ve stunk up the Church and it now must be censered”, no one said.

Mr Isquith has surveyed the post-Citizens United world, and found it wanting:

Americans were already deeply cynical about their politics, before Citizens United. But while there was once a means, however faint, to argue that the system is not a dull gloss over what is in essence an elaborate sporting event with dueling oligarchs jockeying over what amounts to most of us as minutiae, the Super PAC order of today renders that optimism not naïve but simply delusional. In the same way people know professional wrestling is fake — even if the role of “winner” is traded back-and-forth between dueling sides — voters will soon believe, if they don’t already, that American democracy is a sham.

It may continue to provide good copy for Wilkinson, Weigel, and me, but the Citizens United decision nevertheless remains, on the whole, a disaster.

Is the CU decision the disaster, or is the disaster what, post-CU, we are seeing ever more clearly?  Put differently, is it in the final analysis possible to agree with Mr. Isquith without disagreeing with him?

Now, to suggest that citizens may have very good reasons to be united in their belief that American democracy is a sham is not to say that they do not or should not have other good reasons to believe other things about American democracy as well.  It could be, for instance, that the mass electoral arm of the American system has never functioned ideally, was never designed to function ideally, and cannot be made to function ideally or very much more nearly ideally without requiring the sacrifice of other ideals or values – in short that our approach to election campaigns is necessarily informed by the same Madisonian borderline attraction-repulsion complex that attaches to every other aspect of applied American political science, from the management and tabulation of actual voting, to the obligations and privileges of citizenship, to the relations between and true powers of the various branches and sub-branches, to the functioning of the judicial system from top to bottom.

Yet whatever the deeper truth about the American system such as it is, the post-CU world is a world in which the 0.0001% are financing a remarkably effective satire undermining themselves and their chosen spokespeople:  Diminishing returns as morality play.  Don’t we mostly believe that the main “beneficiaries” of SuperPAC spending have mostly suffered in public esteem over the course of an extremely disproportionately negative campaign?  Does anyone believe that the candidates, their party, or the interests that the candidates and party seek to represent are “doing better” right now than they were before the Republican campaign really got going?  Has any Occupy protest or even any interview with Donald Trump done more to expose the irrationality of an economic system that to some impressively large extent reserves its greatest rewards for people who do not deserve them?

Who needs Karl Marx when we have Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess and the shrinking men they pay for on vividly multimediatized display?

It could be that by November the SuperPACS will have discovered something to say and a way to say it that somehow reverses the increasingly indelible impression that they’re making fools of themselves, but speech is not merely a commodity sold by the ton.  It has to have something to convey.  The main message of the SuperPAC-oids, repeated and received and repeated and received again, has so far been that people like them, all of the people that people like them like, and all of the other people like them at all, to whatever extent they like them or are like them, are dangerous and ridiculous.  On present evidence that will continue to be their only real message until and unless they themselves, embarrassed to be the last ones to get their own joke, finally discover less self-destructive ways to waste their money.

One jarring revelation in which the movie reaches beyond the book comes when Schmidt makes a query to assess nominee Palin’s awareness of foreign affairs, asking McCain’s VP pick how she would respond in the White House to news of waning British support for the war in Iraq.

The Palin character, sitting opposite Schmidt in a campaign bus, says McCain would “continue to have an open dialogue” with the queen of England on the subject. Flabbergasted, the Schmidt character informs her the queen is not the head of government. Palin asks who is. He informs her that the country has a prime minister.

Strong said he uncovered that additional episode during the 25 interviews he conducted with principals from Team McCain. Schmidt confirmed the account.

The Tsar of Capsaicin

far better than most anyone could write it,  (and Scott, you idle-worshipper, don’t say it!!!) it sort of reads like all it needs is a closing line like “God bless us every one”

except it don’t close like that at all.

he can ask Lin if he has a younger sister.”

Useful article, but mainly reverses and thus replicates the error that it seeks to correct.

It goes without saying that every individual subjectivity is endless from the point of view of analysis. Wherever the analysis, the reification in words, stops, there precisely would be where the authentic self begins – another way of saying that the authentic self is a question for mystics or philosophers. We can however differentiate between different forms of presentation of the self that correspond systematically to different conceptions of the self politically and socially, that in turn are crucial to and distinguish competitive political ideologies.

This observation is potentially the basis for a complex discussion, or for a number of them, but an offhand statement in the main post frames the issue. The blogger says about Romney that “there are reasons why he performs on the stages he does—he’ll never be any kind of liberal—but he doesn’t just play the same character every time.” Keeping in mind that human beings are complicated entities and that no one or thing is ever all only one thing or another, Romney in fact represents a very particular kind of liberal. He speaks or performs as the economic liberal or classical liberal, the liberal properly so-called prior to the emergence of social liberalism. He knows the principle of money and the free market, but the principle of money annihilates the public self. Its interest in the human character is mainly utilitarian – in no way “sympathetic” – and from every other point of view at least somewhat destructive.

Social liberalism (Democratic Party ideology broadly speaking) and social conservatism (paleo-conservative, evangelical – Palin, Santorum) emphasize very different presentations of self. To state the obvious, they are “social.” Romneyism is in this sense as nearly perfectly as possible anti-social within the bounds of “mainstream” politics: It displaces its irreducible social remainder onto other generally accepted sacred objects, typically the blessed nation of hyperpatriotism, and the family. The analysis of “Mormon economics,” but also Frank Rich’s insight into Romney’s overdetermined concealment of his Mormon identity, help explain how the “Romneybot” ends up with a transparently false salesman’s persona: It’s the reduced self adapted to free market capitalist purism, the stunted religion of “private equity” above all, which, like money itself, is generally transparent to the contents it proceeds to price.

In other words, the economic liberal whose personality is another “private equity” is the human exponent of the universal equivalent, money, and approximates its mode of operation in his chameleonlike adaptability. Yesterday he was a social liberal, today he’s a social conservative. He doesn’t “really” care. He isn’t “really” anyone, at least as far as we’re concerned. And that’s who he is for political purposes – same as what he comes across as – no one in particular.

from a seated position, they flex the elbow slowly and regularly raising a small weighted object to slightly above shoulder height then return their forearm to rest position atop the bar and signal for the attendant to add more weight.

The Fiddler

The Fiddler saws the strings,
His light brown hair he tosses and flings.
He carries a sabre at his side,
He wears a pleated habit wide.

“Fiddler, why that frantic sound?
Why do you gaze so wildly round?
Why leaps your blood, like the surging sea?
What drives your bow so desperately?”

“Why do I fiddle? Or the wild waves roar?
That they might pound the rocky shore,
That eye be blinded, that bosom swell,
That Soul’s cry carry down to Hell.”

“Fiddler, with scorn you rend your heart.
A radiant God lent you your art,
To dazzle with waves of melody,
To soar to the star-dance in the sky.”

“How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black sabre into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wists,
It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists.

“Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.

“I must play dark, I must play light,
Till bowstrings break my heart outright.”
The Fiddler saws the strings,
His light brown hair he tosses and flings.

He carries a sabre at his side,
He wears a pleated habit wide.

and not at all least

Or was I just not watching very closely?

This seems like the kind of movie whose best and most appropriate venue may be streaming video – which is not quite an expression of high “want-to-see” on my part.  Maybe WTS with an asterisk or sub-categorical additional letter:  WTS-c, “Want to See – the clips anyway.”

(photo found at this isn’t happiness)