CorpseBoy

My first CD is out....Grain of the Voice

2010-01-04T13:49:00.000-08:00

I like it. Working with Justin Cassidy here in Oxnard was awesome, what a great guy, very talented. Thanks to Jeff Kaiser for all the technical work...here is the press release:

Grain of the Voice

Corpseboy: voice and laptop
Justin Cassidy: electronics

A labyrinthine exploration of voice, electronics and more electronics.

From bone-crunching agressive noise
to soft and bubbly vocal caressing.
A lovely first album by Corpseboy with
experienced noisester Justin Cassidy.

A co-release of Angry Vegan Records and
Paper Cuts Records.

Click here to look, listen and buy....
http://angryvegan.com/
http://www.papercutsrecords.com/

See. Told you so.

2009-07-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

Obama Administration Approves First Roadless Logging Contract In Alaska's Tongass National Forest

Obama Administration Approves First Roadless Logging Contract In Alaska's Tongass National Forest

Posted using ShareThis

What do I mean by hegemonic forces?

2009-06-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

That Obama has received the largest amount of donations from Pharmaceutical companies during the election cycle:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/select.php?ind=H04

According to the above link accessed today, Obama received a whopping 47 percent of total monies given to Democrats and Republicans by the Pharmaceuticals/Health Products. We would trust this guy to rebuild health care?

Presidential Candidates: Selected Industry Totals, 2008 Cycle

Total to these candidates: $4,256,686 (Dems 66.7% and Repubs 33.0%)
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products
Barack Obama (D) $1,995,384
Hillary Clinton (D) $629,195
John McCain (R) $628,562
Mitt Romney (R) $374,161
Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) $188,280
Christopher J. Dodd (D) $95,000
Ron Paul (R) $86,658
Fred Thompson (R) $55,650
Bill Richardson (D) $48,400
John Edwards (D) $32,920
Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D) $26,075
Mike Huckabee (R) $23,486
Tommy Thompson (R) $22,150
Sam Brownback (R) $13,500
Ralph Nader (I) $6,700
Jim Gilmore (R) $6,200
Thomas J. Vilsack (D) $5,550
Dennis J. Kucinich (D) $4,707
Duncan Hunter (R) $4,300
Bob Barr (L) $3,800
Tom Tancredo (R) $2,850
Mike Gravel (D) $2,458
Alan Keyes (R) $500
Cynthia McKinney (3) $200

Krugman gets it right, of course

2009-06-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Democrats won't get it right...they've tried before, and failed miserably and memorably. We need a true revolution, not one backed by the same hegemonic forces they are supposedly trying to overthrow.

**************************
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care Showdown

By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: June 22, 2009

America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.

Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.

Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.

I’m not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.

Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?

Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.

And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”

Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.

But this fantasy can’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.

Mmm....Alicia Silverstone!

2009-05-02T12:24:00.001-07:00

Awesome vegan celeb interviewed about being a vegan.

Be sure to read the comments. Amazing how blind people are. The ideology of meat has blinded them...

More on pig killers

2009-04-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

The following is written under the headline: 'Swine' flu a headache for pork producers.
Ah, poor pig killers! I bet it is not as much a "headache" for them as it is/was for the slaughtered animals in the photographs.

*******************************************

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- The disease that most people in the United States and worldwide have come to know as "swine flu" has caused a less-publicized rumbling among the nation's hog farmers and producers.

China and Russia have banned imports from some U.S. states and Mexico, and stock prices for the nation's leading pork companies, Smithfield Foods Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc., took a hit. In addition, hog futures took a rare dive after initial news of the outbreak broke.

The negative news, seen in a market that had already been suffering, is something the industry says could have been prevented had a more accurate name been chosen for the human disease.

"This flu is being called something that it isn't, and it's hurting our entire industry," said Dave Warner, communications director for the National Pork Producers Council. "It is not a 'swine' flu, and people need to stop calling it that ... they're ruining people's lives."

Warner said exact dollar figures on the pork industry's losses nationwide are not yet available. But he pointed out that the industry was already suffering before the flu outbreak.

"The real issue is that anything is bad now because producers for the past 19 months have already lost money," Warner said. "On average they've lost about 20 dollars a pig. So even if they lose two dollars more, it's hard on them.

"I've had producers say, 'Look, we're dying out here, already we're hurting and now this on top of it.' " Video Watch a pig farmer talk of hard times »

Brian Buhr is a professor at the University of Minnesota whose emphasis is in livestock markets. He says that pork is a $1.8 billion industry annually in Minnesota.

On Tuesday of this week, Buhr said, the state's pork industry took an $18 million hit.

Minnesota is the nation's third-largest pig farming state, and its health experts said Wednesday they would be calling the illness "H1N1 novel flu" from here on out.

" 'Swine flu' gives a connotation that really it shouldn't have, and makes people wonder about eating pork," said Minnesota Health Commissioner Dr. Sanne Magnan.

The European Union has followed suit.

"In order not to have a negative effect on our industry -- especially under this crisis situation -- we decided to call it 'novel flu' from now on," said Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for health.

The World Health Organization announced Thursday it would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. WHO will instead refer to the illness as "H1N1 influenza A." Map: Where the flu is today »

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to CNN that it would begin officially calling this particular influenza strain "H1N1." However, the CDC's Web site is still largely "swine"-centered, and the media continue to discuss "swine flu" -- much to the dismay of the hog industry.

Minnesota's hog farmers and veterinary scientists say the term "swine flu" gives the impression that hogs, and thus pork products, aren't safe.

"There's a large concern over the name [from the hog farmers' perspective], said David Preisler, executive director of the Minnesota Pork Producers' Association. "They just wanted it to be accurate."

Professor Marie Gramer's primary focus is swine disease at the University of Minnesota, and she says "H1N1" is a more appropriate label for this flu, because it's important to remember that a direct link from a pig to a human has not been established.

"Swine flu" was "an unfortunate name for everybody involved in swine production, implying that the pigs were the source of this current outbreak," Gramer said.

Peter Davies, professor of epidemiology and swine medicine at the University of Minnesota, said the name "swine flu" had the potential to be misleading -- and that we've already seen the negative effects.

"We've seen a huge drop in the price of pork," Davies said. "We've seen a lot of interruptions to commerce."
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He added that even though the name has changed from officially being called "swine flu," it may be too little, too late for the industry.

"I think it'll take quite a while, if at all, before it trickles into the media or in the general public's conversation."

Thank you for eating bacon...

2009-04-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

Examining the way the world's population massively imprisons, tortures, and kills animals in inhumane and unnatural conditions, can we say that this actually surprises us? Factory farms breed viruses and bacteria. And with the way they feed the animals antibiotics et al it is NOT surprising that we get killer drug-resistant illnesses from them.

Hey! You want to save the world? Be a true political radical? Be green? Do what's best for yourself and everybody else on the planet? Go vegan, the only true "Green" lifestyle. Don't give me excuses and platitudes, "I only eat free-range, organic blah blah..." You are still killing, imprisoning, torturing. See what happens.

Also:
http://www.peta.org/feat-climate-change.asp

From the AP:

WHO Chief: Swine Flu Has "Pandemic Potential"

MARK STEVENSON | April 25, 2009 10:58 PM EST | AP

MEXICO CITY — Mexico's president assumed new powers Saturday to isolate people infected with a deadly swine flu strain as authorities struggled to contain an outbreak that world health officials warned could become a global epidemic.

New cases of swine flu were confirmed in Kansas and California and suspected in New York City. But officials said they didn't know whether the New York cases were the strain that now has killed up to 81 people in Mexico and likely sickened 1,324 since April 13, according to figures updated late Saturday by Mexico's health secretary.

Tests have confirmed swine flu as the cause of death in 20 of the cases.

Mexican soldiers and health workers patrolled airports and bus stations as they tried to corral people who may be infected with the swine flu, as it became clearer that the government may have been slow to respond to the outbreak in March and early April.

Now, even detaining the ill may not keep the strain _ a combination of swine, bird and human influenza that people may have no natural immunity to _ from spreading, epidemiologists say.

The World Health Organization on Saturday asked countries around the world to step up reporting and surveillance of the disease and implement a coordinated response to contain it.

Two dozen new suspected cases were reported in Mexico City alone, where authorities suspended schools and all public events until further notice. More than 500 events, including concerts and sports games, were canceled in the metropolis of 20 million.

Mexican authorities ordered schools closed in the capital and the states of Mexico and San Luis Potosi until May 6, and the Roman Catholic Church announced the cancellation of Sunday masses in the capital.
Story continues below

The Mexican government issued a decree authorizing President Felipe Calderon to invoke special powers letting the Health Department isolate patients and inspect homes, incoming travelers and baggage. But officials said it was designed to free health workers from possible legal reprisals and to speed disease control efforts.

A team from the Centers for Disease Control had arrived in Mexico to help set up detection testing for the swine flu strain, something Mexico previously lacked.

The U.S. Embassy said the U.S. has not imposed travel constraints to and from Mexico but is suspending the processing of visas and other services through Wednesday to avoid creating crowds.

It issued an earlier message advising U.S. citizens to avoid large crowds, shaking hands, greeting people with a kiss or using the subway.

While suspected swine flu cases have been reported in about 16 Mexican states, Health Secretary Jose Cordova said "it has not spread to the entire country."

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak of the never-before-seen virus has "pandemic potential." But she said it is still too early to tell if it would become a pandemic.

WHO lays out three criteria necessary for a global epidemic: The virus is able to infect people, can readily spread person-to-person and the global population has no immunity to it.

Early detection and treatment are key to stopping any outbreak. WHO guidance calls for isolating the sick and blanketing everyone around them with anti-viral drugs such as Tamiflu.

Now, with patients showing up all across Mexico and its teeming capital, simple math suggests that kind of response is impossible.

Mexico appears to have lost valuable days or weeks in detecting the new virus.

Health authorities started noticing a threefold spike in flu cases in late March and early April, but they thought it was a late rebound in the December-February flu season.

Testing at domestic labs did not alert doctors to the new strain, and Cordova acknowledged Mexican labs lacked the necessary profiling data to detect the previously unknown strain.

The first death occurred in southern Oaxaca state on April 13, but Mexico didn't send the first of 14 mucous samples to the CDC until April 18, around the same time it dispatched health teams to hospitals looking for patients with severe flu or pnuemonia-like symptoms.

Those teams noticed something strange: The flu was killing people aged 20 to 40. Flu victims are usually either infants or the elderly. The Spanish flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people worldwide in 1918-19, also first struck otherwise healthy young adults.

Even though U.S. labs detected the swine flu in California and Texas before last weekend, Mexican authorities as recently as Wednesday were referring to it as a late-season flu.

But mid-afternoon Thursday, Mexico City Health Secretary Dr. Armando Ahued said, officials got a call "from the United States and Canada, the most important laboratories in the field, telling us this was a new virus."

"That was what led us to realize it wasn't a seasonal virus ... and take more serious preventative measures," Cordova said.

Asked why there were so many deaths in Mexico, and none so far among the 11 cases in the United States, Cordova noted that the U.S. cases involved children _ who haven't been among the fatal cases in Mexico, either.

"There are immune factors that are giving children some sort of defense, that is the only explanation we have," he said.

Another factor may be that some Mexican patients may have delayed seeking medical help too long, Cordova said.

Some Mexicans suspected the government had been less than forthcoming. "They always make a big deal about good things that happen, but they really try to hide anything bad," Mexico City paralegal Gilberto Martinez said.

Airports around the world were screening travelers from Mexico for flu symptoms. But containing the disease may not be an option.

"Anything that would be about containing it right now would purely be a political move," said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota pandemic expert.

Scientists have warned for years about the potential for a pandemic from viruses that mix genetic material from humans and animals.

This swine flu and regular flu can have similar symptoms _ mostly fever, cough and sore throat, though some of the U.S. victims who recovered also experienced vomiting and diarrhea. But unlike with regular flu, humans don't have natural immunity to a virus that includes animal genes _ and new vaccines can take months to bring into use.

A "seed stock" genetically matched to the new swine flu virus has been created by the CDC, said Dr. Richard Besser, the agency's acting director. If the government decides vaccine production is necessary, manufacturers would need that stock to get started.

Mexican authorities did lay to rest one persistent doubt, after Mexican museum director Felipe Solis died this week, just days after accompanying U.S. President Barack Obama on a tour of National Anthropology Museum on April 16. Cordova said Solis had a pre-existing illness and died of pneumonia unrelated to influenza.

___

Associated Press Writers David Koop in Mexico City; Frank Jordans in Geneva; Mike Stobbe in Atlanta; Malcolm Ritter in New York; and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

Of course Obama won't

2009-01-31T10:11:00.000-08:00

Obama and his team brightened my day when they decried Wall Street bonuses. But then I realized, they were just empty episodes of name calling. Will they follow up with action? Probably not.

_________________
From Reuters:
Obama unlikely to toughen Wall St. pay rules

Sat Jan 31, 3:37 am ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration is not likely to impose tougher restrictions on executive pay on most firms receiving aid under the government's $700 billion financial rescue program, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Citing a source familiar with the administration's deliberations, the Post said officials are concerned that harsh limits could discourage some firms from asking for aid.

President Barack Obama and some members of Congress have strongly criticized recent bonuses given out to executives at Wall Street companies that received government assistance.

The issue of executive compensation is part of Obama's plan to rescue financial markets. While some details need to be hammered out, the strategy is likely to be laid out publicly in about a week, the paper said.

While relatively healthy firms are unlikely to face stiff restrictions on executive compensation, companies that need more dramatic government assistance would face more punitive terms under the plan, it said.

Under the original rescue program approved by Congress in October, executives at financial firms faced federal limits on their multimillion-dollar pay packages. But those restrictions are unlikely to significantly reduce executive pay, analysts say.

(Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Dominic Evans)

More OpenSecrets.org

2008-11-12T21:13:00.000-08:00

Hey Obama, you're number one!
(Data taken from OpenSecrets.org at 9:15pm, Nov 12, 2008)

Finance/Insurance/Real Estate: Top Recipients
Top 20 Recipients
Rank Candidate Office Amount
1 Obama, Barack (D) Senate $27,866,622
2 McCain, John (R) Senate $25,177,854
3 Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) Senate $18,888,564
4 Romney, Mitt (R) $13,656,977
5 Giuliani, Rudolph W (R) $13,522,309
6 Dodd, Christopher J (D-CT) Senate $5,786,368
7 Richardson, Bill (D) $3,472,962
8 Coleman, Norm (R-MN) Senate $2,186,923
9 Edwards, John (D) $2,144,162
10 Thompson, Fred (R) $1,941,899
11 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) Senate $1,863,004
12 Warner, Mark (D-VA) $1,729,151
13 Cornyn, John (R-TX) Senate $1,722,942
14 Biden, Joseph R Jr (D-DE) Senate $1,634,298
15 Baucus, Max (D-MT) Senate $1,496,165
16 Sununu, John E (R-NH) Senate $1,439,060
17 Paul, Ron (R-TX) House $1,341,072
18 Huckabee, Mike (R) $1,325,031
19 Rangel, Charles B (D-NY) House $1,291,044
20 Durbin, Dick (D-IL) Senate $1,255,620

For Auto manufacturing? Only number 4?
Maybe a bailout would get you to number one?

Automotive: Top Recipients
Top 20 Recipients
Rank Candidate Office Amount
1 McCain, John (R) Senate $1,011,998
2 Romney, Mitt (R) $469,930
3 Giuliani, Rudolph W (R) $369,666
4 Obama, Barack (D) Senate $349,550
5 Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) Senate $294,916
6 Knollenberg, Joe (R-MI) House $180,700
7 Levin, Carl (D-MI) Senate $162,849
8 Buchanan, Vernon (R-FL) House $156,920
9 Cornyn, John (R-TX) Senate $148,141
10 Graves, Sam (R-MO) House $134,900
11 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) Senate $113,600
12 Thompson, Fred (R) $106,150
13 Coleman, Norm (R-MN) Senate $92,958
14 Bee, Timothy (R-AZ) $92,500
15 Huckabee, Mike (R) $88,900
16 Richardson, Bill (D) $87,300
17 Pryor, Mark (D-AR) Senate $74,200
18 Paul, Ron (R-TX) House $70,488
19 Dole, Elizabeth (R-NC) Senate $66,431
20 Baucus, Max (D-MT) Senate $64,850

Palin says she might run for high office again

2008-11-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

Quotes From the AP, my comments in italics:

WASILLA, Alaska (AP) — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she wouldn't hesitate to run for the presidency in four years if it's God's will, even though she never thought Campaign 2008 would be "as brutal a ride as it turned out to be."

The US version of the Taliban: Christian fundamentalism. People who validate their behavior outside of themselves and their society via the idea of God. There is NO accountability for actions validated this way. "God told me to" (and its variant, "God's will") remains a terrifying sentence.

"I think the economic collapse had a heckuva lot more to do with the campaign's collapse than me personally," the governor said in an interview broadcast Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show.

She may be ambitious, but she is uneducated. "heckuva?" I'll bet she winked when she said it.

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door," Palin said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. "And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

Why not, "like," just walk through the door? Maybe God will be ok with NOT "plowing" through it. The thought of someone like this even running, with a chance, is terrifying.

Rewards for corporate irresponsibility

2008-11-08T23:58:00.000-08:00

Decades of economic (and environmental) irresponsibility and failure to look to a future where gasoline might not be affordable have helped along the collapse of the auto industry in the US, GM in particular. While making offensive and grossly decadent vehicles for the consumption of the American market (morbidly obese vehicles such as Hummers), they were not ready for a market that would turn on them. And now they want the government to pay for their irresponsibility. They (the auto corporations) don't want to be regulated by the government, but they want to be paid by them. This is all so incredibly abhorrent and absurd. Where would the money really go? They say it is about the workers, but it seems more about the bottomline for the bigs on top.

In 1979 when the government loaned money to Chrysler, it brought about the creation of SUVs and mini-vans. Let's hope this time would not be about dressing up old styles with 30 mpg, re-tooling to make "efficient" SUVs and vans, but about creating a new generation of vehicles that will truly have a low-impact on the environment.

You can read about it the proposed auto bailout in the Washington Post.

Obama's Acceptance Speech

2008-11-04T21:09:00.000-08:00

It was very powerful.

If only I could believe.

Hopefully he will show me. However:

He stated about his campaign: "It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause."

I think it was a few more dollars than that.

Nice to see all the universities on the list.

But meet your corporate keepers as well:

From OpenSecrets.org
as of tonight:

University of California $909,283
Goldman Sachs $874,207
Harvard University $717,230
Microsoft Corp $714,108
Google Inc $701,099
JPMorgan Chase & Co $581,460
Citigroup Inc $581,216
National Amusements Inc $543,859
Time Warner $508,148
Sidley Austin LLP $492,445
Stanford University $481,199
Skadden, Arps et al $473,424
Wilmerhale Llp $466,679
UBS AG $454,795
Latham & Watkins $426,924
Columbia University $426,516
Morgan Stanley $425,102
IBM Corp $415,196
University of Chicago $414,555
US Government $400,819

Orientalism and Ideology in the Chess World

2008-11-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

“…Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’…” –Edward Said, Orientalism, p12.

Orientalism, and its inherent colonialist and racist views, continue to be distributed throughout texts and activities (or perhaps we should say ideas, objects, texts, and “lived relations”) in both conscious and unconscious ways. One arena that has caught my attention recently has been in the chess world.

Jan Gustafsson in New In Chess magazine (2008/5, p16), gave an apparent quote, about the relationship between chess grandmaster Arkady Naiditsch and his second, where Naiditsch supposedly said, “Negro, you work for me. I call you whenever I want and you show up immediately!” Gustafsson, a talented grandmaster himself, wrote a letter apologizing two issues later, “…I quoted Arkady Naiditsch using the word ‘negro’ talking to his second. It has been brought to my attention that this word is used as a racial slur. I want to apologize to the readers of New In Chess who may have taken offence and especially to Arkady, who never said this in the context I implied.”

In this apology, we are given no real understanding about the original use of the word “negro” in the article, just that the “context” was not what was “implied.” The question then remains: In what context was it actually said? It doesn’t matter: It should not have been said. Such power structures as stated are abhorrent to begin with; to use any ethnically specific designation in such a way to show a particularly oppressive power structure relationship is just a furthering of the distribution, and the continuation of colonialist ways. Gustafsson’s “apology” is only pointed to those “who may have taken offence” when it should just be a flat out apology to all.

In the same issue that Gustafsson apologizes in, we see another example: Viktor Kortchnoi’s analyses of his drawn game against Wang Yue. Korchnoi was part of a losing team against Yue’s winning team. In fact, Yue scored a remarkable 8.5/10 at the tournament, and former world champ candidate Kortchnoi scored 2.5/10. One-half point of that 2.5 that Kortchnoi scored was the draw against Yue. During the analysis of the game New In Chess (2008/7, p82) after Yue’s 36th move, Kortchnoi writes, “A literate European player would never produce such an ugly move!!” (yes, two exclamation marks) and gave Yue’s move a question mark. It may very well have not been a good move, but in Kortchnoi’s framing of the statement we see the world clearly divided into two realms: “literate European player[s]” and Others. Somehow Kortchnoi’s half-point is better than Yue’s half-point? We see how such an Orientalist view by someone as Kortchnoi works to minimize the successes of such an incredibly talented player as Yue through the analyses and designation as not-European. And at the same time, such language attempts to minimize Kortchnoi’s failures.

It is time for the chess world to look at itself more closely and examine the ideologies it is suppporting and distributing.

Ideology as "lived relations"

2008-11-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

From Terry Eagleton's Ideology:

"No radical who takes a cool look at the tenacity and pervasiveness of dominant ideologies could possibly feel sanguine about what would be necessary to loosen their lethal grip. But there is one place above all where such forms of consciousness may be transformed almost literally overnight, and that is in active political struggle. This is not a Left piety but an empirical fact. When men and women, engaged in quite modest, local forms of political resistance, find themselves brought by the inner momentum of such conflicts into direct confrontation with the power of the state, it is possible that their political consciousness may be definitively, irreversibly altered."

Fear, people, fear!

2008-11-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Fear.

The best control of the masses.

Even better than television.

Journalist Car Bernstein keeps it going. After such great journalism with Bob Woodward, he goes into fear brokering. Instead of looking at the failings of the system, instead of looking at the election loser Al Gore, he attacks freedom of choice.

Friends, history has spoken: Al Gore lost.

If he had chosen to re-enfranchise progressives, he would've won.

But he didn't.

So Al Gore lost.

Yes, there were other factors (voter fraud), but don't blame freedom.

Blame Gore's campaign.

An intelligent and insightful man, Gore would've been a great President.

But he ran a flaccid campaign of centrist values.

So he lost the progressive vote.

Read Bernstein's fear mongering and decide yourself if you should move right to the center.

Moving center:

1) Supports the corporate oppressors and destroyers of people, and the environment.

2) It leads to oppression.

3) It keeps you oppressed.

Fight oppression. Don't buy the framing of the one party that poses as two.

**********************

Voter Beware: Of Ralph Nader
Car Bernstein
November 1, 2008

The game of "What If?" history is almost always a useless, speculative exercise - and always definitive on the question of Ralph Nader in the presidential election of 2000, and the history of the world thereafter.

What if Nader hadn't gotten a passel of votes in Florida? Al Gore would have been elected President - there would have been no need for a Florida recount, among other things; and the world would have been a very different place than it is today.

(Continued on link above.)

Election thoughts...Bailout Truth...more...

2008-11-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

Found this at:
TruthDig.com

“This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. “It is a direct attack on the American people’s ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged.”

“We buried the New Deal,” he said of the vote. “Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy’s Black Friday.”

The author, Chris Hedges, continues in his own words:
"Obama’s voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of corporations and especially the credit card industry."

***************

People are buying the line that the Democrats are offering hope. Here's what I think leading up to the election:

If Sarah Palin being selected by McCain tells you how he works: What does the selection of Biden tell you about how Obama works?

What segment of our society has been mostly affected by Biden's War on Drugs? (Wars are really on people, right?)

What other war has Biden supported?

What corporations are behind Biden?

The oppressed once again end up supporting their corporate oppressors and think it is going to be different this time. They buy the false promises presented in ideological posturing.

(Bill Clinton brags about making more millionaires than Bush. I heard him say it at the Obama rally in Florida. This is how we should be judged?)

They've promised health care reform before. And gave up on it.

Instead of progressives being re-enfranchised, they've been convinced to compromise and move right towards the center. (I.e. give up on true health care reform.)

Political radicalism is dead in the youth.

The parties have beaten them down.

The centrists have won.

The youth now say: Better to have voted centrist and won, than to have voted for ideals and have lost. Reinforcing the binary myth of this country. Reinforcing the binary into the future, ignoring the false consciousness behind it, and the consequences into the future. Reinforcing the myth that a complex society can be represented by two options. Buying it, and allowing it to continue.

What happened to fighting with radicalism?

The radical vote has been bought by the false promises of corporate run politics in which the binary poles are each funded by the same money sources.

And *Yes*, Obama is way better than McCain, and certainly better than what we have. Yet they both cater to fear, teach you to fear the other.

Ideology, as Terry Eagleton says, is still at work in today's world. Yet we don't really address it, question it, fight its oversimplifying doctrines. We just replace it with other oversimplifying doctrines. And we've only got two to choose from.

But truly, I believe our form of (fake) capitalistic ideology (really more of a corporatocracy...I thought I made it up, but then I googled it...) has run its course. So, hey, I'll be a radical, or whatever. Expressive, and hopefully somewhat aware of my ideology, and I will keep pointing out, as I see it, the failings of the ideology of our political system, not just the ideology of each of the two parties. But the failure and inability of a corporate controlled two party system to represent a complex society.

In this small town, I'm considered an outsider for my politics.

The few almost progressive Democrats want to frame my non-Obama (non-McCain) vote as a vote for McCain.

But to frame a non-Obama vote simply as being a vote for McCain is demeaningly reductionistic...My vote is much more than that. And maybe even somewhat well researched, thought-out, and incorporates my lived-experience.

Welcome?

2008-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

This is the blog home of CorpseBoy.

Posts to come sometime soon.

Certainly before the year 2012.

All the best,
CB