Gloom, Despair, And Agony On
The protesting planet
Links are at the end.
Family matters, jet lag, fatigue, and the rolling around of an unpleasant anniversary mostly account for the radio silence in these precincts. More travel and more family matters loom, later this month, but yr. editor expects to write through them.
Adams “referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents and slaves serving their masters”
That’s Texas Tech basketball coach Mark Adams, now suspended for, presumably, trying to clarify the relationship twixt his players and himself.1 Back a few years the team was coached by Bobby Knight, after he got fired from Indiana for being an abusive asshole.
Not a racist bone in his body, he says; “I’m just fucking stupid.” (The quote is a paraphrase.)
“The show’s power rests in its uncanny ability to reveal art-historical truths, even if its host doesn’t (or does she?) know it.”
Artnet News reveals the fundamental truths revealed by Philomena Cunk in her not entirely serious documentary, Cunk on Earth.2 Yr. editor recommends it (streaming on Netflix), and is at present watching Cunk on Shakespeare on YouTube. Cunk. Cunk.
“This shared musical interest was the spark for the Blues Brothers”
Leonard Pierce at Jacobin reviews The Blues Brothers, the new hit movie about Chicago; the musical interest in the pull quote being shared by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd.3
[T]he people I trusted most — my friends who had moved to Arizona from elsewhere, my acquaintances who had traveled more widely than I had, my teammates from high school baseball — all told me that Chicago was the place to be. Many of them were from the South Side, and all of them had stories about what an amazing place it was to live, to work, to enjoy life. One ex-bandmate, who grew up in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, put it in a language that he correctly guessed I would understand: “Chicago is like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off if you’re rich,” he said, “and it’s like The Blues Brothers if you’re poor.”
Pierce says the simile isn’t as appropriate as it was when he moved to the town, but says The Blues Brothers is still historically relevant. Perhaps one of our Chicagoan readers could comment.
“[A]fter more than a year of fighting intense and often illegal union busting by Starbucks, the clouds definitively broke for unionizing baristas.”
Also from Jacobin, a large bit of good news for unionists at Starbucks.4
First, dozens of the company’s own white-collar workers went into open revolt, releasing a letter to the public making clear their support for the baristas and opposing new back-to-office rules.
Then, Bernie Sanders’s office announced that the committee he chairs in the US Senate will seek a subpoena to force Howard Schultz, the outgoing CEO of Starbucks, to testify under oath about the company’s labor practices.
Finally, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative judge issued a ruling against the company stating, in a two-hundred-plus page document, that Starbucks had engaged in “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights” in Buffalo, New York.
Schulz, the company’s cofounder and off-and-on CEO, has taken union organizing attempts in the company’s shops as a deeply personal insult, and the NLRB ruling targets him by name, requiring him to personally read the enumerated company wrongs and worker rights to Buffalo store employees, either in person or on video.
All three events took place last Wednesday.
“the study is the first step in an effort to understand … what it takes to survive an environmental catastrophe”
The study at issue is one examining the genome of dogs living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, exposed to unpleasantly high radiation levels.5
Today, hundreds of free-ranging dogs live in the area around the site of the disaster, known as the exclusion zone. They roam through the abandoned city of Pripyat and bed down in the highly contaminated Semikhody train station.
Now, scientists have conducted the first deep dive into the animals’ DNA. The dogs of Chernobyl are genetically distinct, different from purebred canines as well as other groups of free-breeding dogs, scientists reported Friday in Science Advances.
It remains too soon to say whether, or how, the radioactive environment has contributed to the unique genetic profiles of the dogs of Chernobyl, scientists said. But the study is the first step in an effort to understand not only how long-term radiation exposure has affected the dogs but also what it takes to survive an environmental catastrophe.
This was all prefigured in Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog.6
“The groups in the letter claim that overturning the constitutional right to abortion contravenes the US’s international obligations as a UN member organization.”
Hundreds of human rights activists and organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, sent an open letter requesting a U.N. intervention to counter the assault on abortion rights across the U.S.
The letter sent on Thursday was addressed to a number of UN agencies and officials, including the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls; the Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy. In the letter, the signatories ask recipients to communicate with the US about these violations, to request an official visit to the US, and to ask the country to comply with its obligations under international law as a UN member state.
Anybody who pays attention to the U.S. attitude toward international law knows that it’s a matter of a must for thee but not for me. Some months ago yr. editor wrote about a 2017 U.S. visit by the U.N. special rapporteur on poverty, who was startled to find scenes of the most dire poverty.7
The visit attracted a lot of press attention at the time, but little has changed going on six years later. Certainly the state and local governments most prominently mentioned in the report were only briefly embarrassed by it, and not enough so to do anything. One has to think that local conditions around abortion similarly won’t change even if the U.N. does send investigators, although perhaps some political advantage could be had from it.
Abortion rights obviously excluded, assaults on women’s rights are among the things the U.S. selectively pretends to care about when they happen in other countries, and sometimes uses to rationalize violent interventions abroad.
Ah well.
Cops Are Terrorists
Atlanta is filing domestic terrorism charges against protestors at the site of a planned urban warfare training center in one of the country’s largest urban forests.8 Among the people charged were several who attacked construction equipment at the site.
Turnabout is fair play, one would think: if protestors can be charged with domestic terrorism for using violence in an attempt to influence government policy, then surely cops can be similarly charged for using violence to intimidate local populations, and indeed, for training to do so, and perhaps for propagandizing on behalf of such efforts.
A good example of cops ripe for charging under the same statutes as the Atlanta protesters would be the deputy gangs infesting the LA County Sheriffs.9
“They create rituals that valorize violence, such as recording all deputy-involved shootings in an official book, celebrating with ‘shooting parties,’ and authorizing deputies who have shot a community member to add embellishments to their common gang tattoos,” the special counsel team wrote this week.
. . .
The report found that at least half a dozen “gangs” or “cliques” are still active, including the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys and the Reapers — and new groups may be forming as some members retire. And, the report noted, “there is some evidence indicating that deputy cliques are re-emerging in the Los Angeles County jails as the 4000 Boys.”
Deputy gangs have been an issue in LA County for decades, and one would be foolish to think similar gangs with similar attitudes toward local populations, and in particular toward non-right wing protestors, don’t exist in other police forces.
“Deputy-involved shootings” is a propaganda term, and reporters who voluntarily pepper reports on police violence with it should be chastised.
Good for the gander. Lock’em up.
“Tokyo-based executives will face off at Roppongi’s Grand Hyatt Tokyo in front of hundreds of cheering fans”
Yr. editor can’t help but think this kind of thing would go over really, really well here in the U.S. And why limit it to an annual do? With the number of worthwhile charities in the U.S. (most reflecting government policy or the lack of it), a weekly show would be easy enough to justify.10
Even though the cause is serious, the event promises to be hugely enjoyable — necessarily so, to represent the positivity of SOK’s joyful mission. May’s championship will be the 11th Executive Fight Night and the event is famed for its luxurious food, wine and spectacular Vegas-style boxing — a rarity in Tokyo. Finally, for the many people who work under these executives, Executive Fight Night offers the fulfilment of a fantasy that is hard to find elsewhere: seeing your boss get punched in the face. And as it’s for a good cause, you don’t even need to feel bad about it.
The obvious drawback: a winner might be declared.
& The Music
These are all new to the newsletter, and all pretty good, the first one and the last two being, in yr. editor’s opinion, the best of them.
Rosie & the Riveters, “Ms. Behave;”11 Davina & The Vagabonds, “Sugar Drops;”12 Hannah Gill & The Hours, “The Water;”13 April Smith & The Great Picture Show, "Songs For A Sinking Ship;"14 Carsie Blanton, "Lovin' Is Easy."
That, Comrades, is all there is
Take care, be well, share the newsletter around if you like it, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already—it’s free unless you wish to pay.
The difficulty with social programming is that there are potent, immediate disincentives for doing it locally. Utah still gets people sent down here from Wyoming and Idaho because, as ephemeral as our social safety net is (particularly for the seriously and persistently mentally ill), it's better then theirs. We could fix all of this, but it has to be on the national level. "State's rights" is just another way of saying, "I don't care about those people."
Welcome back, Weldon. It's warms my heart to know that you dare to subject yourself to the bad news and the bigger picture, and it helps free me up to subject myself to other things.
I've heard the Rosie and the Riveters and like it. I'll check the others out. One of these days I'm going to go through and make a Spotify playlist of all your suggestions in the order you made them.
The Blues Brothers is an entertaining fairytale of life in the struggling parts of the city. That's not to say there's no joy and no music there; only to say it certainly doesn't dominate. Hard times are hard times even if some good musicians arise from them.
As to the international law claims about abortion, there's no court with jurisdiction and, therefore, the points are interesting but unenforceable.