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Tea Party darling Ted Cruz is a ‘creepy,’ elitist ‘asshole’ hated by those who know him best
09.23.2013
05:26 pm
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Texas Senator Ted Cruz
 
Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) is sort of the new Michele Bachmann, the new take-no-prisoners hero of the grassroots right wing of our country, who from every rooftop has bellowed his determination to stop the wheels of government turning if he can’t get the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as “Obamacare”) repealed. He’s tarred any Republican who can count votes and see legislative reality a “surrender caucus.” He’s a demagogue, pure and simple. To some, the Brylcreem-wearing Senator from Texas is even worse than a slightly more masculine Michele Bachman, he’s a Joseph McCarthy redux.

It’s been a fascinating week for Cruz, as his efforts to filibuster a budget bill lacking language that would defund Obamacare were finally revealed to be a pipe dream. That hasn’t prevented Cruz from alienating almost all of his Republican colleagues in Congress, among whom, according to the National Review, Cruz is currently so unpopular that “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.” Wow.

But we keep learning more. Cruz went to Princeton for his A.B. in public policy (he graduated summe cum laude) before moving on to Harvard Law School, where “during the first week, he announced that he was creating a study group and only people with high GPAs from the Big Three Ivies could apply for admission. In short, Ted managed to come off as a pompous asshole at Harvard Law.” Cruz is posing as a man of the people, but there are few people more nakedly elitist than he is. But then again, IOKIYAR (It’s OK if you’re a Republican), I guess. Jason Zengerle at GQ has reported much the same thing about the Ivy League elitism.

But it gets better once you delve into the details of his undergrad days, remembered by those who knew him firsthand, including his “creepy” habit of wandering over the women’s side of the dormitory wearing little more than a paisley bathrobe, as The Daily Beast reported:

[S]everal fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.

Virtually everyone described Cruz as very smart and as a flaming asshole—read the above links for more of that. The overall portrait emerges of a man who made up his mind—about everything—when he was still in high school. Cruz is a bit like a grown-up, oilier version of Andrew Breitbart’s boy wonder, Ben Shapiro.

The hard right is hoping for another Democratic debacle à la 2010, but I’m not seeing it. Obamacare is not legislation currently under consider consideration—it’s been passed, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has okayed almost all of it. The economy is doing much better than it was doing in 2010, and we haven’t been signing a lot of trillion-dollar bailouts into law lately. Off years are always tough on the White House incumbent party, but Republicans relying on that pattern may be disappointed next year. Right now it looks a lot more like that “Republican Civil War” we keep hearing about.

On top of everything else, shutting down the government in the name of stopping Obamacare from going into effect is massively unpopular:

Opposition to defunding increases sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent, with 18 percent of respondents unsure.

So yeah, keeping pushing that message, Senator Cruz.

It’s gotten so bad for Cruz lately that Republicans are feeding FOX News the kind of opposition research usually reserved for the vilest of pinko Democrats (see video below). Whatever happens, Cruz is a wildly entertaining figure and I hope he remains the greasy public face of the Republican Party for a while to come.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Republican Healthcare
Vile Republican policies set the stage for socialist revolution in America

Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.23.2013
05:26 pm
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Copyright trolls are indoctrinating your children!
09.23.2013
05:01 pm
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propaganda
A shot from another video in which a girl’s drawings are undercut by the distribution of cell phone pictures.
 
In their never-ending quest to close Pandora’s box and stop illegal file-sharing, the geniuses at the Center For Copyright Infringement (who boast the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Comcast, and Verizon on their board) have produced an educational campaign designed to coax elementary schoolers into paying paying for media. There are plans to institute the program in California classrooms later this year, with different materials for each grade level.

Now, I am from the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) generation, and we were taught about the evils of drugs from day one. I also went to one of those oh-so-progressive schools that taught abstinence-only sex education. Without incriminating myself too much, I’m going to go ahead and say campaigns like this just don’t work, and the fact that this one is obviously corporate propaganda makes it even more laughable.

I’m a proponent of free information, and while I recognize that creators must be compensated for their work (and that other people have much better insight into how to do that than I do), it’s not as if this thing was put together by a bunch of concerned artists who felt downloading was hurting their bottom line. This is from the RIAA and the MPAA, the original backbone of SOPA, and the people that are making all the money off of underpaid artists now. I guess since legislation didn’t work, they’re going to try and conscript the youth?

It’s actually kind of enjoyable, watching them gasp for air with terrible educational materials. Hell, the kids they’re making this for could probably make a better video. In fact, I’ll bet they could pirate the editing software, first.
 

 
Via Wired

Posted by Amber Frost
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09.23.2013
05:01 pm
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Vet’s angry open letter to Republicans: ‘I am on food stamps because I enjoy not starving’


 
This “open letter” to “caring conservatives” is a must-read for all Americans, but especially for the Fox News-watching ignoramuses who seem to believe, in the words of Paul Krugman, that “freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.”

If a large percentage of the population constantly experiencing food insecurity is the new normal in America, ask yourself how much longer this can possibly continue?!?! It’s a simple fact that hungry people are not going to just roll over and die the way the Republican Party seems to hope they will. What a surprise it will be to them when hungry mobs show up at their houses looking for something to eat!

My name is Jason.  I turned 35 less than a week ago.  My first job was maintenance work at a public pool when I was 17.  I worked 40-hours a week while I was in college.  I’ve never gone longer than six months without employment in my life and I just spent the last three years in the military, one of which consisted of a combat tour of Afghanistan.

Oh, and I’m now on food stamps.  Since June, as a matter of fact.

Why am I on food stamps?

The same reason everyone on food stamps is on food stamps: because I would very much enjoy not starving.

I mean, if that’s okay with you:

…Mr. or Mrs. Republican congressman.

…Mr. or Mrs. Conservative commentator.

…Mr. or Mrs. “welfare queen” letter-to-the-editor author.

…Mr. or Mrs. “fiscal conservative, reason-based” libertarian.
 

Saving $40 billion dollars by starving 3.8 million Americans will cut a whopping .25% from the deficit!

I do apologize for burdening you on the checkout line with real-life images of American-style poverty.  I know you probably believe the only true starving people in the world have flies buzzing around their eyes while they wallow away, near-lifeless in gutters.

Hate to burst the bubble, but those people don’t live in this country.

I do.  And millions like me.  Millions of people in poverty who fall into three categories.

Let’s call them the “lucky” category, since conservatives seem to think people on welfare have hit some sort of jackpot:

Those living paycheck to paycheck?  They’re a little lucky.

Those living unemployment check to unemployment check?  They’re a little luckier.

Those living 2nd of the month to 2nd of the month?  *ding* We’ve hit the jackpot!

The 2nd of the month being the time when funds gets electronically deposited onto the EBT card, [at least in NY] for those who’ve never been fortunate enough to hit that $175/month Powerball.

I fall into the latter two categories.  But I’ve known people recently - soldiers in the Army – who were in the first and third.  They were off fighting in Afghanistan while their wives were at home, buying food at the on-post commissary with food stamps.

And nobody bats an eye there, because it’s not uncommon in the military.

It’s not uncommon – nor is it shameful.  It might be shameful how little service-members are paid, but that’s a separate issue.

The fact remains anyone at a certain income level can find it difficult from time to time to pay for everything.  And when you’re poor you learn to make sacrifices.  Food shouldn’t be one of them.

The whole concept is un-American.  People living here, in the greatest country on Earth, with the most abundant resources,  should be forced to go hungry because of the intellectual notion of fiscal conservatism and the ideological notion of self-reliance.
 

 
Are you fucking kidding me?

I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America.  I certainly didn’t risk it so *I* could come back and go hungry.

Anyone who genuinely supports cutting food stamps is not an intellectual or an ideologue – they’re a bully.

And nobody likes a bully.  Except other bullies.

It’s time for regular Americans to stand up to these bullies.  Not cower in the corner, ashamed of needing help.  Because if there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that you never know when you’ll be the one in need.
 

 
Via Class Warfare Exists

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.23.2013
02:50 pm
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Does ‘Dancing Outlaw’ Jesco White have a cameo in the new Grand Theft Auto?!?
09.23.2013
02:27 pm
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Talk about your “dog whistle”! Is this hillbilly clog dancer Jesco White dancing up a storm in the new Grand Theft Auto game? Ha! Sure looks like it to me!

I wonder if that’s Mamie White and the rest of the hellraising White clan in the background?

One piece of advice to GTA players, Jesco will cut you if you try to serve him slimy, sloppy eggs!

 
With thanks to Julien Nitzberg, director of the must-see documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (on Netflix)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.23.2013
02:27 pm
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Trans teen homecoming queen is being mercilessly bullied on YouTube
09.23.2013
01:32 pm
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Over the weekend, the sweet story of Cassidy Lynn Campbell, a trans teenager from Huntington Beach, CA, who was elected homecoming queen during a high school football game made the news. A feel good video from a local news channel shot at the game showed Cassidy crying tears of joy as her friends rushed down from the bleachers to surround her with a group hug.

It was a very moving sight and one that warmed the hearts of many—but not all—of those who watched the clip on YouTube.

And now, predictably, the trolls have moved in, leaving hateful, shitty transphobic comments picking on Cassidy and really cruelly bullying and mocking her. At a time that should be the happiest time in her life, these assholes have nearly caused this kid to have a breakdown. Doing what many teens would do in this situation, Cassidy took to YouTube and recorded a tearful rebuttal to the haters.

It’s sad to watch. Her pain is visceral. Her anguish is obviously very, very real.

The comments, well, they’re horrifying. How could anyone be proud of themselves for causing a kid this kind of pain?

Perhaps you’d like to take a minute from your day and leave Cassidy a message of support?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.23.2013
01:32 pm
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Plastic People of the Universe: Making rock ‘n’ roll in a police state
09.23.2013
01:03 pm
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The Prague Spring in 1968, the very short era of political and cultural liberalization in Czechoslovakia, lasted only seven months, but the young people who had been given a taste of freedom were not about to quietly acquiesce to the repression and restrictiveness that came with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact invasion in August.

During this new crackdown on free media, speech, and travel, bass player and songwriter Milan “Mejla” Hlavsa decided it was a great time to start a band.

He started The Plastic People of the Universe, taking the name from the Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention song “Plastic People.” He recruited Michal Jernek (saxophone, clarinet, vocals), Josef Janíček (guitar, claviphone, vibraphone, vocals), Jiří Števich (guitar, vocals), Josef Brabec (drums), and Jiří Kabeš (viola, violin, vocals). Canadian vocalist Paul Wilson joined in 1970 to translate their lyrics into English and help them learn the lyrics to the Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention, and Fugs songs they were covering. It was illegal to even own these records at the time, and music-obsessed rock fans like Hlavsa obtained records by mail from friends and relatives abroad. The band’s original lyrics were provided by banned Czech poets Jiří Kolar and Egon Bondy. The lyrics to an early song, “Já a Mike,” are credited to Kurt Vonnegut.

The government terminated the band members’ professional licenses to perform publicly in 1970 and confiscated their equipment. They found employment as forest workers and continued to play illegally out in the country, unpaid, at secret gigs and semi-private parties that masqueraded as wedding celebrations with equipment they scrounged or Janíček (a mechanic) built out of spare parts. An entire underground community sprang up around the band and their clandestine appearances. They were caught playing in downtown Prague in 1972 and were banned from performing in the city.

Paul Wilson later said of this time:

What’s it like making rock ‘n’ roll in a police state? The same as anywhere else. Only harder. Much harder.

They recorded their first studio album, Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, in 1974. Two years later all of the band members except Hlavsa were arrested for performing at a music festival, charged with creating an “organized disturbance of the peace.”  Wilson was deported back to Canada (and later became a translator of Václav Havel’s work into English).

The arrest and trial of the members of PPU motivated and radicalized young intellectuals like playwright Václav Havel. Havel and his friends began a political dissent group, Charter 77, in late 1976 and published their charter in 1977. The purpose of the document was to persuade Czechoslovakia’s government to follow the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords that it had signed. Havel was an outspoken supporter of all artists, particularly PPU, even allowing them to record their next two albums – Pašijové hry velikonoční and Jak bude po smrti – at his farm.

Havel told The Guardian:

Everyone understands that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on the most elementary and important thing, something that bound everyone together… The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom and thus as essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection, the freedom to write, to express and defend the social and political interests of society.

After the members of PPU were released from prison, they were lauded by their fans and political supporters as heroes. They continued to play underground gigs until 1988, when they were finally allowed to perform legally in public. It was also then, on the cusp of the Velvet Revolution, that they broke up. Havel, the first post-Revolution President of Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), persuaded them to reunite in 1997 as part of the celebrations of Charter 77’s twentieth anniversary. PPU stayed together and continue to perform. In 1999 Havel brought PPU to the White House, where they performed with another of his heroes, Lou Reed. 

Fans gathering for a clandestine Plastic People of the Universe show, a.k.a. Hannibal’s Wedding Party, below:


Footage of The Plastic People of the Universe from December 1969 at the restaurant U Kubra, Horoměřice, Czechoslovakia

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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09.23.2013
01:03 pm
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Dueling Sweets: Not so foxy, can hardly run anymore
09.23.2013
12:09 pm
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originalsweet
The original Sweet

The Sweet are one of the great ‘70s British glam rock bands that, strangely, have not had a single movie or tell-all biography created in their honor. Just one documentary, Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz, from 1990. With their makeup, outrageous stage clothes, and terribly catchy songs, they influenced later bands like Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Poison, Mötley Crüe, and their own contemporaries like KISS.
 

 
Sweet (they dropped the “The” in late 1973) recorded a slew of hits written by the team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman: “Funny Funny,” “Little Willy,” “Hell Raiser,” “Block Buster!”, and “The Ballroom Blitz,” as well as their own compositions like “Sweet F.A.” and “Fox On the Run.”
 

 
During the recording of their album Sweet Fanny Adams in 1974, hard-partying vocalist Brian Connolly’s throat was injured in a street fight outside a pub in Surrey. The assault affected his voice for the rest of his life. In the short-term it affected the band’s career prospects, forcing them to turn down a tour opening for The Who. Connolly left the band in 1979 and the others continued briefly as a trio, still calling themselves Sweet.
 

 
Here is where the Sweet legacy gets confusing.

Connolly formed another band in 1984 and called it The New Sweet, later renaming it Brian Connolly’s Sweet. He occasionally played in exotic locations like Bahrain and Dubai, but his version of Sweet mainly eked out a living appearing at festivals, resorts (embarrassingly, Butlins holiday camps), and small clubs. His health problems prevented at least one proper Sweet reunion, planned by Mike Chapman in 1988. Connolly died in 1997 from liver failure and multiple heart attacks.

Andy Scott started Andy Scott’s Sweet in 1985 with original drummer Mick Tucker (who died in 2002) and a different line-up in 1991.

andyscottssweet
Andy Scott’s Sweet

Steve Priest, who had immigrated to the U.S. In 1979, started Steve Priest’s Sweet in 2008.

stevepriestsweet
Steve Priest’s Sweet

Naturally this led to legal wrangling over the rights to the band’s name.

Following Connolly’s death the two surviving members of Sweet split up the world into territories. David Cavanagh of The Guardian wrote:

The two Sweets stay out of each other’s territories. Livelihoods are at stake, and if a promoter is uncertain which lineup of a band to book, he ends up booking neither. Scott has faced a challenge from rival Sweets before – Connolly fronted a few in the 80s and 90s – and is confident Priest will not encroach on his trademark in Britain or mainland Europe.

Scott, who appears to be the fitter and healthier of the two, tours Europe and Australia. Steve Priest’s Sweet tours North and South America. There is no shortage of festivals, small clubs, casinos, hotels, and benefit concerts all over the world that want some version of the band. But depending on where you happen to be, the Sweet you see performing may be comprised of an entirely different lineup than if you went 2000 miles in another direction.

The original Sweet on Top of the Pops, 1975:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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09.23.2013
12:09 pm
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Another awesome mixtape from 70s-era Sexploitation films
09.23.2013
11:34 am
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For whatever reason French music producer Drixxxe’s 70s Sexploitation mixtape (I blogged about it last week) was removed from SoundCloud!? Here’s a new one, with even more amazing soundtrack songs from erotic flicks such as Comme un pot de fraises, Tongue, L’Initiation, The Devil in Miss Jones, Comme un pot de fraises, Teenage Twins and many more.

I suggest if you’re digging the tunes, to download it ASAP. As this one might get removed too!

 
Via Nerdcore

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.23.2013
11:34 am
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‘The Ultimate Revolution’: Aldous Huxley lectures at Berkeley, 1962
09.23.2013
11:18 am
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Image via OzHouse

Novelist, essayist, spiritual seeker, intellectual, humanist, and advocate for careful experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

Aldous Huxley loved California.

He enjoyed the open-mindedness, interest in Eastern religions, and cultural curiosity he encountered in America, along with the companionship of colleagues like Alan Watts, Christopher Wood, and Esalen founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Alan Watts and Felix Greene called Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood – all passionately interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda – “the British mystical expatriates of southern California.”

On March 20, 1962 Huxley gave a lecture, “The Ultimate Revolution,” at the University of California at Berkeley. He warned his listeners about totalitarianism and how future oligarchs will ensure that people enjoy their servitude. Maybe we should add “prophet” to his list of accomplishments.

Huxley, “The Ultimate Revolution,” full lecture:

 

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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09.23.2013
11:18 am
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So wait, we almost dropped a nuclear bomb on North Carolina in 1961??
09.23.2013
11:12 am
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Dr. Strangelove
 
You might be fan of Eric Schlosser from his stellar reporting in Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness. If you are, you have another reason to be proud of him—in his new book Command and Control, Schlosser has uncovered a remarkable story about a nuclear annihilation the United States almost inflicted on itself.

That’s right: on January 23, 1961, two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina. The bombs were released after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the nuclear weapons did exactly what it was supposed to do in a wartime situation: its parachute opened and its trigger mechanisms engaged. In a newly declassified report, a senior engineer familiar with the details of the case stated that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.”
 
Eric Schlosser, Command and Control
 
Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Each bomb was 260 times as powerful as the bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945. Had the device been triggered, the lethal fallout might well have spread over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, even New York City – it’s difficult to calculate the number of people that might have been killed, but it could well have numbered into the millions.

Writing eight years after the events, engineer Parker F. Jones named his secret report “Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb,” a cute reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy about an accidental nuclear holocaust, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

According to The Guardian (UK), which was the first to report the story on Saturday,

The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy’s Road.

Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. “The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52,” Jones concludes.

-snip-

Using freedom of information, he discovered that at least 700 “significant” accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between 1950 and 1968 alone.

Well, that’s sobering news. As a little reminder of what almost happened in Goldsboro, North Carolina, here’s the last couple of minutes of Dr. Strangelove:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Nuclear Explosions Since 1945
Nuclear Bomb slow-motion simulation

Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.23.2013
11:12 am
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