Political Rants

Take over the Democratic Party right effing Now

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I’ve probably told this story before, but let me repeat it for some of the young people out there. I have never been a sustained political activist, but I’ve been activist-adjacent all of my adult life. During that time, I have attended political meetings (mostly around foreign policy issues), participated in protests, and interacted with more committed activists at various levels. I bloviate – that’s most of what I’ve done. I’ve also worked phone banks for specific candidates a handful of times from 2006 on.

Since the mid to late 1990s, I have also taken part in online organizing at a very low level. At the beginning, this involved subscribing to listservs, message boards, that sort of thing. As I mentioned above, I started working on Democratic party campaigns about sixteen years ago, but I never contributed money to a campaign until relatively recently. Nevertheless, around the time of the 2004 election, I started getting fundraising emails from the Democratic party. One of my colleagues on one of the listservs probably shared list data with the party at some point. (I suspect I know who this might have been, but it hardly matters.)

The money machine

I’m providing this background to illustrate one of the central problems with the Democratic party today. In this instance, they treated a group of activists, some very committed to social change, as a market for fundraising. The groups I was involved in fell away after that period, partly as a function of the rise of social media. So now, instead of receiving messages from activists and participating in conversations, I get an inbox full of fundraising messages every day, and I’m bombarded by similar pleas every time I go on FB or Instagram.

There are complex reasons for this, and I won’t delve into all that right now, but suffice to say that this isn’t how change happens. Yes, Democratic party candidates need money to compete. But a party cannot just be about extracting money from its base in $5 or $10 increments. ($22 seems to be the favorite this season.) A party needs to be connected to political and social movements. It needs to be present in people’s lives and making a tangible difference in their communities. Right now, the only time people hear from the Democratic party is when they need money or votes. That’s why we need to take its sorry ass over.

Where it’s working

There are some good efforts underway to accomplish this. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are a good example. Yes, they endorse candidates and support fundraising efforts, but principally they work within local communities to build change from the ground up. The New York City chapter is doing some great work, combining actual organizing and activism with an electoral strategy. It’s encouraging that they recognize the centrality of community-based efforts while putting some energy into electoral politics.

Let’s face it – you can do great things in your community, build strong, radical institutions, foster positive change from the ground up …. only to have it all taken apart by some right wing legislature, governor, Congress, president, or supreme court. The recent supreme court decisions illustrate how important it is for the left to keep its hand in elections. And since we are now working against time with respect to the climate crisis, the only way to facilitate radical change is by commandeering the ossified Democratic party, filling its ranks with activists, and replacing its leadership with people willing to do what needs doing.

No time to lose

There’s a lot going on in this country at the community level, particularly on the labor front. Policies largely associated with the left are popular, but the leadership of the Democratic party has had its head up its ass since the 1990s. The only way we can move crucial issues forward is by combining committed activism with a national electoral strategy, built on the bones of the Democratic party.

Not easy, but it’s easier than starting from scratch. And we just wasted a day.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Scratching out a whole new way of itching

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Get Music Here

Okay, that club on Route 5 … was that the Garden Cafe or Looney Tunes? It feels more like the latter than the former, frankly. Jesus, what the hell am I asking YOU for? The only thing YOU remember is random facts about some log cabin and the battle of Gettysburg. And even THAT you get backwards. (Though to you it seems forwards.)

In case you’re worried, no, we’re not writing a memoir of Big Green. Who the fuck would buy that? If nothing else, I can practically guarantee that there will never be a (1) tell-all retrospective, (2) drippy bio-pic, or (3) lost journal having to do with this, the world’s most obscure indie rock group that ever recorded more than 100 of their own songs. That said, we will milk it for a blog post or two. The first one was last week; the second, this week. The third will have to wait its turn.

Back to the Early ’90s

So anyway, in the early nineties we made the questionable decision of basing ourselves in the Utica, NY area, our home town, which at the time was not on a particular upswing culturally. We started by working with guitarist Armand Catalano, playing clubs and campuses around the region, serving up our own songs plus an assortment of covers. As I mentioned last week, the guitar seat in Big Green was governed by the rules of musical chairs, pretty much. Armand played with us, then friend of the band Steve Bennett, and later, other friend of the band Jeremy Shaw.

This was fine, except when we got confused and called guitarists by the wrong first name. There were occasional gaps as well, unsurprisingly. But the gigs we played then represented the least of what was going on in our tiny little world. None of them were in the least high-profile events. We opened for Mere Mortals at MVCC sometime in 1991 , I think. We opened once for Joe Bonamassa’s Bloodline at what is now known as SUNY Poly in Utica, probably in 1993. We played Middlebury College one New Year’s, if I recall correctly. And then there were a bunch of dead end bars.

The output was put out

The thing was, by the early nineties, Matt Perry was writing songs like a house afire. He was writing his Christmas numbers – a new album every holiday season. And he was cranking out a bunch in-between. (No, he didn’t write songs about Saint Swithin’s day – that’s just an ugly rumor about Big Green that some meteorologist started.) We were doing piles of demo recordings, and we managed to get into a studio a few times (the former AcqRok, thanks to friend of Big Green Bob Acquaviva of Mere Mortals.)

We had some live recordings as well. We’ve played a few of them on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and there are a few more we haven’t posted as of yet. Probably the best ones of these are the DAT recordings we made in Jeremy Shaw’s basement in 1993 (or ’94? I don’t freaking know.). Then there was the video demo done by some hipster dude named Angel who worked at a vegetarian restaurant and considered the VHS tape he recorded for us some kind of masterpiece (when it wasn’t).

Yesterday is not today

So, the upshot of all this is, we have a better audio record of the 1990s than we do of the 1980s, when the only technology we could afford was a bic lighter and a pack of Marlboros. Ever try to run sound through a pack of Marlboros? It ain’t pretty. Makes a kazoo sound like a brass freaking band.

Political Rants

Our remaining option: A Million Mutinies Now

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As you well know, the other shoe dropped last week regarding Roe v. Wade, which is now history. The joyless anti-abortion zealots up the street from me must be enjoying the closest thing they know to a celebration. Maybe they’ll take the baby-float mobile out for a ride. (No, seriously: they had a vehicle with a plastic baby on the roof and P.A. speakers through which they would read anti-abortion screeds, inaudible because of their cheap audio gear. We called it the “baby float”.)

I wrote a post on the impending abortion decision a couple of weeks ago entitled “The Right To Be Forced Into Childbirth“. What I didn’t get deeply into then was the degree of fraud Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court committed during their confirmation hearings. That was, of course, their way not only of protecting themselves but of offering their supporters cover by gaslighting everyone who had paid any attention to their careers up to that point.

Perjury and Prevarication

Let’s take Gorsuch, son of Anne Gorsuch Buford, Reagan’s EPA administrator who tried to dismantle the agency, partly through sheer incompetence. (Looks like her son is going to get another shot at it via their upcoming ruling.) During his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch acknowledged the power of precedence with regard to Roe, and affirmed that a “good judge” should take it as seriously as in any other case. Then came last Friday.

How about Kavanaugh, lover of beer, bro of Squee, best bud of P.J.? Kavanaugh referred to Roe as “settled law” and an “important precedent …. reaffirmed many times.” Sure, he suggested that he might be persuaded to overturn it, but who reads the fine print? He made comforting cooing sounds, and the senators nodded contentedly.

I’m not sure what Justice Barrett could possibly have said to counteract her part in publishing a full-page anti abortion ad in the New York Times. She bleated some gas about following the rules of stare decisis, and like her reactionary brethren, hid the ball in plain sight so that the politicians in the audience could pretend they did not see it.

The bastards Bush

It’s easy to blame Trump, of course, because he’s so damn blame-able. But the worst justice on the damn court is Clarence Thomas, and he was appointed by George H. W. Bush, or Bush the First as no one calls him. Bush is now roundly praised by centrists as a man of integrity, etc. Justice Thomas is convincing evidence to the contrary. No other recent Republican president has appointed a more reactionary judge to lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court.

And then there’s Sam Alito, the no- so-smart as Scalia clone of Scalia. George W. Bush appointed him, so to those of you whose hearts are warmed by the sight of W. and Michelle Obama goofing about, all I can say to you is …. Iraq. And Alito. And Afghanistan. And …. Suffice to say, if it weren’t for these two losers (W. and H.W.), Roe would still stand.

All is not lost

Fortunately, there are things we can do. One of them is what so many thousands of people did over this past weekend – make your voices heard. Another is to push our Congress members to support legislation by Elizabeth Warren and other progressives that would support the right to abortion services through the establishment of federal clinics in red states, expansion of access to medication, and so on.

The other thing is, well, a million mutinies now. Vote for the most progressive members of Congress you can find. Encourage everyone around you to do the same thing. We need a progressive tidal wave this fall, and it’s going to take everyone doing that simple thing – voting. With a strong majority in Congress, we can pass and expanded Roe in to law, build a better healthcare system, expand the Supreme Court, impeach Kavanaugh, amend the constitution. All we need is the votes.

Impossible? I think not. If people mobilize, we can take over the works within the confines of the current system. With the right numbers, nothing could stop us. We just have to commit to doing it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

The many incarnations of one Big Green

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Get Music Here

Ever watch Dr. Who? Sure you have. And no doubt you’ve seen how he regenerates himself every once in a while. It’s like restarting an old computer, except that when it’s done booting, it’s a new computer. That almost NEVER happens in real life, you know. Almost never … unless you’re Big Green. (Or, frankly, any other band I’ve ever known.)

We got to talking the other day. Our mouth parts moved and sounds emerged from our throats, then floated through the air and vibrated our ear drums. Those little thingies translated the vibrations into electrical signals that were then piped up to our brains. At that point, the impulses – call them voltsters – circulate around in the brain like ants in an ant farm, until they and their confederates make their way down to the mouth and vocal cords, making the whole process begin again. It’s amazing!

Anyway, we were talking about how many versions of Big Green there had been down through the ages. We started chalking up the white board and this is what we came away with.

1979 – 1986: The Proto Period

As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, Big Green started under other names. Matt and I started learning our various instruments in the mid-1970s, and of course it occurred to us that we should play our newfound instruments in the same room at the same time, occasionally playing the same song at a similar tempo. In 1979 we decided to do that thing with some other people with instruments, and the result was a band variously named Slapstick, Mearth, Withers Backtrack, and five other things.

Did we work? Not much! A few bar gigs here and there. We spent a year in the Albany area playing one-night stands, a few outdoor events, nothing special. It was practically all covers back then. Matt was writing stuff and I was writing some as well, but mostly not the kind of material that worked well with a rock group. We have a bunch of scratchy recordings from this period, plus some studio recordings, such as Silent as a Stone, which we featured on our February 2018 episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That incarnation trailed off into the eighties.

1986 – 1987: The Ned Year

Yes, this was the first year we called ourselves Big Green. I met Big Green co-founder Ned Danison when we were both playing in a cheesy bar band, and together with Matt we pulled this mess together. Did we practice? One hundred percent. Did we perform? Eh … not so much. I think we played in front of an audience exactly once, at a street fair in Ballston Spa, NY. (I’ve posted photos of that heinous incident in the history of rock.)

Of course, Ned and I played a bunch of other gigs that weren’t with Big Green and had nothing to do with the cheesy bar band. One was Dale Haskell’s Factory Village, videos of which I have posted on our YouTube channel. We also did a couple of songs at the wedding of our friends, Leif and Jill Zurmuhlen (Leif is the amazing photographer who took so many pictures of us before we shriveled into our current superannuated state of disrepair.) And, well, we recorded a demo. That was the year that was.

Is this part three or two?

1988 – 1994: Musical Guitar Players

Our first year we had a problem holding on to drummers. From 1988 on, after Ned went down the road, we had trouble securing a permanent guitar player. Over the next six years, we played with Tony, Steve Bennett, and Jeremy Shaw. We also disguised ourselves as a cover band under the names I-19 and The Space Hippies. (Tony and I were going to do a duo named Seven Vertical Inches of Purgatory or SVIP, but we never got round to it.)

This last period needs a little more exploration, so I’ll save it for another post. Suffice to say, we played a fair number of gigs under the various monikers and did some recording as well.

Then came the reboot. CHIME!

Political Rants

The hot air balloon we call the inflation debate

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I saw Larry Summers on television today. That says all you need to know about the corporate media’s state of discourse on the economy. The Democratic leadership in Congress is like a deer in the headlights – they are just effing doing nothing. Didn’t they have at least two shots at reconciliation? Has it occurred to any of them that they should pass something under the Byrd rule, seeing as they plan on leaving the filibuster intact?

I suspect the answer to these questions is a resounding no, and I suspect the reason for that answer may be, well, Larry Summers. The austerians appear to be winning the day in the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress. They are afraid of spending money on anything apart from the military, which is the beneficiary of lavish amounts of public funds in excess of $800 billion per annum.

The notion that social spending is responsible for recent price rises is simply laughable. There are other, more likely causes.

Pumping profits straight from the ground

Gas prices are an obvious driver of inflation. The price at the pump is somewhere around $5, the highest they’ve been perhaps ever. The thing is, crude oil prices are not at a record high, not by any means. Oil peaked in 2008 above $140 a barrel, and yet gasoline in the U.S. was selling at about $4 a gallon. Right now oil’s around $108 a barrel. So …. what gives?

One big factor is refining. During the pandemic, oil refining capacity in the United States fell about 5%, from over 19 million barrels in 2019 to less than 18 million. This was because there was less domestic travel due to COVID, which meant less demand for oil. Now that demand has shot up like a rocket again, the oil refining capacity in the United States is simply not sufficient to meet the need.

Why not reopen some of that refining capacity? Well …. that would mean more supply, lower price, less profit. Get the grift … I mean, drift?

From every misfortune a fortune is made

Why are prices rising? Over the course of 2021, corporate profits were up by more than 25%. There’s some serious profit-taking going on here, obviously. While everyone else was struggling to get through the pandemic, these fuckers have been cleaning up. Jim Hightower talks about Proctor and Gamble’s diaper business, an industry they and maybe one other mega corporation have a corner on:

Procter & Gamble Co. announced a year ago that COVID-19-driven production costs were forcing it to raise the price for its Pampers brand. At the time, it had just posted a quarterly profit of $3.8 billion, so P&G could easily have absorbed a temporary rise in its costs. But instead of holding the price to ease their customers’ economic pain, the conglomerate used a global health crisis to justify upping diaper prices. Six months later, P&G’s quarterly profit topped $5 billion. And—in that same quarter—P&G spent $3 billion to buy back shares of its own stock.

Just one of many examples. Bottom line is, as working families are stripped of the modest benefits they received from the Child Tax Credit, they must now contend with rising prices driven by the greed of monopolistic companies that contribute heavily to our leaders’ campaign coffers.

Asleep at the wheel

Why isn’t the mainstream press reporting on this? Too busy reporting on the many challenges of air travel – Turmoil at the Terminal! As I’ve mentioned previously, corporate journalists are disproportionately focused on the airline industry. That’s because they make up the seven percent of Americans who fly regularly (once a month or more). Maybe Jim Hightower should hang out in airports and talk to the correspondents as they wait impatiently for their flights.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

One Long-ass road back from the Joyous lake

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Get Music Here

Think we ought to go? Nah, maybe not. Though I don’t know. Maybe we CAN go. But we probably shouldn’t. And anyway, who the hell is going to pay? Not me, man. Unless they take bottle caps. With the bottles still attached.

Hello, blog friends. It may seem like you’ve caught us in another serious controversy, but that’s not the case. We’re just sitting here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and shooting the breeze about this thing we should have done, this thing we shouldn’t, and so on. Kind of amazing that we all get along with each other so well after spending so many years with these dumb, lousy-ass fuckers. There’s a lot of love here.

Who caught the Katy?

What are we sparring about? Well, I’m gonna tell you. I was browsing the internets, clicking through the facebooks, and I saw an ad for Taj Mahal’s upcoming tour. No, I’m not talking about the ornate monument in Agra. I’m talking about the blues singer, Taj Mahal, who I started listening to as a wee lad of twenty-one, thanks to my dear friend Ellen Everett.

In our earliest incarnations of the band that came to be called Big Green, we played a few Taj covers and I always liked the dude. (We even included one of this songs on our 1986 demo, posted here.) When I saw that he’s planning to play Woodstock (Levon Helm studios), it reminded me of the time, back in the 80s, when a group of us humped our way down to Woodstock to hear him perform at a famous now-defunct club called the Joyous Lake.

Lost weekend … or weekdays

I can’t remember what year it was – maybe 1984? My illustrious brother Matt, our guitarist then, the late Tim Walsh, Phil Ross, our drummer, and I piled into somebody’s car, drove to Woodstock, had a cheap cafe dinner, and trooped over to the Joyous Lake to buy tickets. As we were standing there, waiting for the tix, I turned around and saw the man himself, Taj Mahal, having an early dinner, gabbing with Rick Danko from The Band.

Left me a mule to ride!

I remember him putting on a really good performance that night, mostly solo, playing an electric guitar, I think a drobo, and an upright piano. He kicked the shit out of Johnny Rivers’s Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu on that piano, as I recall. As an added bonus, the horn player Howard Johnson came up and accompanied Taj on a couple of songs, playing one on a tuba and the other on a piccolo. Taj also did a nice, quiet version of his arrangement for Johnny Too Bad.

Then what? I’ll tell you …

I don’t remember what happened next. We went home, we slept, we played, we slept …. rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this week, I see the ad for Taj’s gig in Woodstock, and I think, man, I should go. Only trouble is, it’s sold out at $100 a ticket for general seating. Good going, Taj! You can still pull them in.

Guess I’ll just have to suffice with another rendition of She Caught The Katy, or Fishin’ Blues, or Corrina. Where’s my non-existent dobro?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

How the hearings stack up against hearings past.

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As someone who tends to pay attention to these things, I watched the first night of the January 6th Committee hearings with some interest. MSNBC spent a week winding up to these public meetings, and the committee did not, in my estimation, disappoint. I don’t know who in America remains persuadable on this issue, but it’s hard to watch the proceedings and not come away thinking about what an outrage January 6 was.

When I say January 6, I mean the whole enchilada. The day was just the culmination of a long process which the president at the time set in motion. As shocking as the attack was – and I, like many, watched it unfold with disbelief – Trump had long demonstrated his contempt for elections, and spent much of 2020 undermining the credibility of mail-in and absentee ballots. This was because he knew that Democrats were more likely to opt for vote by mail than to show up at the polling place. The hearings are highlighting this dynamic, and it’s all to the good.

Haldeman’s racist lawyer

Not surprisingly, many commentators have invoked the Watergate hearings back in 1973 to give context to the current proceedings. I’m old enough to remember these being broadcast on television, though I can only recall the high (or low) points, like when Haldeman’s shriveled old lawyer called Senator Dan Inouye – a wounded WWII veteran – “that little jap”. That was world-class.

The thing that’s notable about the Watergate scandal was its iceberg-like quality of revealing just the tip of what was hidden from view. Author Jefferson Morley talked about this on Majority Report this week. Several of Nixon’s “plumbers” were CIA assets or agents with a long history of involvement in the Agency’s abuses at home and overseas. More of the truth came out during the Church Committee investigation a few years later, but it was kind of a controlled burn, according to Morley. (Practically at the same time as Church, Cuban exile Agency assets blew up Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in D.C. and the Cuban Olympic Fencing team in mid-air.)

Reagan’s little game

Perhaps the second most well-known Congressional investigation was Iran Contra during the Reagan administration. This, too, represented a tiny corner of a much larger enterprise. The select Committee (led by Inouye, incidentally) looked into Reagan’s circumvention of the Congress’s law barring direct aid to the Contra terrorists operating in Nicaragua with our assistance. (We had essentially created the force out of thin air.) The crime was breaking the law passed by Congress, not the persecution of Nicaraguans.

Beyond that, though, Reagan’s team headed by Oliver North and General Secord sold TOW missiles and some spare parts to the Iranian government, which was defending itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – an invasion supported by the United States! Interestingly, very little about America’s role in the Iran-Iraq conflict came to light through these hearings. Neither did the committee touch on how the U.S. government was supporting murderous dictatorial regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere.

Old fashioned grift and graft

The January 6th Committee proceedings are looking at something kind of different. This is more garden variety corruption and authoritarian tendencies, though as always, racism is part of the story. Trump tried to lie his way into permanent status as president, and has thus far failed. He bilked his own supporters out of hundreds of millions of dollars, saying they were contributing to a legal defense fund. Guy has no shame.

I guess the thing that ties them all together is authoritarianism and a strong desire to override the will of the people, either by discounting their votes or ignoring their elected representatives. That much hasn’t changed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Planning a tour on the ground floor

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Okay, I really think you have the order of operations wrong. One thing has to come before the other thing, and you’ve got the wrong thing first. Dude, it’s not that hard – why are you blinking those lights so frantically? This isn’t differential calculus … whatever the hell THAT is.

Oh, hey, out there in normal people land. Just having a little conversation here, nothing to get excited about. Just a handful of friends getting together for a quick jawbone. That’s a big motherfucker, man. I’ve seen smaller jawbones on a donkey. Whoa, is that the time? Okay, well … gotta go, guys! Great chewing the fat with you.

Right … now that I’m out of earshot, JEEEsus, what a bunch of asshats. That’s what I get for raising the issue of touring again. Let me ‘splain.

Cart before the horse

You know the old saying: don’t put the cart before the horse. For one thing, the horse might decide to drive away in the cart. And if you’re applying a different meaning to the expression “put X before Y”, you should always prioritize animals over inanimate objects. That’s a no brainer. (Or perhaps a YES brainer. But I digress.)

I guess the point is, I seem to me among a stark minority of members of Big Green’s broader entourage who believe that we should RECORD and RELEASE an album before we go on tour promoting it, not after. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t get his little brass head around that idea. I mean, I can understand why antimatter Lincoln would be in favor of the before plan – he’s from that backwards universe where everyone eats corn on the cob vertically rather than horizontally.

I don't know, Abe. That doesn't look right to me.

What’s that you say?

Now, some of you out there may be asking, what album? And yes, I know lately we’ve been doing little more than posting old archival video of us playing random songs. But just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t snow in the living room as well. (I’ve got to stop using so many cliches, particularly the ones that don’t make any sense.) The simple fact is, we’ve got some songs … a whole lot of them.

What are we doing with said songs? We’re incubating the fuckers. We’re tossing parts back and forth, writing chord charts, barking into microphones, squinting at pages of poorly recorded verse. We’re pulling things apart and patching them back together with bailing wire and scotch tape. We’re …. killing time, frankly. It’s just fun to play new stuff, even when you’re doing it over the internets.

Why the internets? Matt is sequestered in his naturalist redoubt, watching birds, feeding beavers, and somehow writing scores of new songs. So we use sophisticated web-based technology to do our dirty work. Because that’s how we roll.

Where to begin. So many choices.

Now, if we were to go on tour … AFTER finishing the new album, we could start on that pulsar I talked about last week. Nobody’s played there yet, so we could finally be the first to market with something. (Damn, we suck at capitalism!)

Political Rants

The right to be forced into childbirth

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Let me put this right on the table. I am a cisgender white male, born into considerable privilege (though not rich) and raised in a rock-rib Republican town that is also home to Congresswoman Claudia Tenney. Unlike Claudia (who is currently warning on Twitter of yet another election-year migrant “caravan” coming north from the brown countries), I am pro-abortion rights, 100%. And if I were against abortion, no one should listen to me …. because I am a cisgender white male who will never need the procedure, and should shut the fuck up.

In light of the leaked Alito draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, I feel as though I should map out my reasons for supporting women’s bodily sovereignty. None of my thoughts on this are unique or particularly original, but this is a time when people should voice their opposition to the Taliban-like edicts of our robed overlords on the Supreme Court, in hopes of mobilizing even broader opposition. Aside from organizing, volunteering and donating, it’s all we’ve got left at this point.

Thus far and no farther

First point: I have long felt that our bodies are our own personal nation, and that we are the sovereigns of that nation. Sure, we can’t control everything that happens within our borders, so to speak, but we should have the final word on any interventions from the skin inward. That seems pretty minimal to me in the way of human rights. Men insist on this, and rightly so – no forced vasectomies, thank you very much. And I intend on keeping my gall bladder, so there!

Okay, so when a woman is pregnant – and guys, I hope you’re reading this carefully – the pregnancy happens inside of her. That small province of internal space should be totally within her control. You’ve heard the old saying about politics stopping at the waters’ edge? Well, the law should stop at the skin. If a woman wants to bring the pregnancy to term, that’s her right. If she wants to end it, prevent it, whatever, that’s her fundamental right as well. It’s a question of sovereignty, you see.

Freedom from religion

Last time I looked at the First Amendment, it appeared to say something like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

This is our guarantee not only of freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. Now, when you hear right-wingnuts and religious zealots talking about when life begins, it’s important to remember that they are expressing a religious belief. The idea that “life” begins at conception has no basis in science. If they are passing laws that force us to comply with this warped take on human biology, by any reasonable standard that amounts to compelling us to live according to the strictures of their religion.

This is indefensible on first amendment grounds. Unless, of course, our hyper partisan Supreme Court decides otherwise.

Card-carrying justices

Let us face it, the Supreme Court is an overtly political institution. Regardless of what they say at their confirmation hearings, conservative justices are only going to vote on way, regardless of the facts or the law. As Elie Mystal has pointed out many times, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were bred to overturn Roe v. Wade – no amount of argumentation will convince them otherwise.

If the Court decides to overturn Roe, people like me have to stand up. We all know multiple women who have relied on this constitutional right at one point or another. We need to ally with women, support them, and fight for justice. That’s the only way forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Hello, Captain Neutron – we are receiving you

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Get Music Here

Sure, there’s probably a reasonable explanation behind it. Why wouldn’t there be? Lord knows, everything we know is firmly rooted in reality. Except, of course, for our upstairs neighbors. And Mitch Macaphee. Yes, yes … and Anti Lincoln, too, but only when he’s drunk. Which is most of the time.

Just spending a little time as a Big Green family, sitting around the hammer mill, reading the headlines to one another. Now, as you know, we can’t afford a subscription to the real newspaper. That’s way beyond our humble means! Luckily, there are the internets. All you need to do is borrow a little wi-fi, do a search or two, and voila! Instant news. Not terrestrial news, you understand – that would cost money. No, we read news from outer space. It’s fresh, it’s interesting, and there’s always a head-scratcher or two in there.

From a land beyond time

Here’s something, Bob! (Your name is Bob, right? I always assumed that was the case.) A strange radio-emitting neutron star has been discovered in a stellar graveyard. Now, I know what you’re going to say. We shouldn’t be so morbid, reading about stellar graveyards. Why not focus more on what’s happening in stellar nurseries? Hey, you know, we find news wherever we can. If it leads us into stellar graveyards, so be it. Don’t be so judgmental, Bob!

Still, you have to admit that it’s interesting. I mean, what are the chances that another race from a land beyond time would have stumbled on the same invention that Marconi did? Even more intriguing, they appear to be trying to communicate with us, via radio. It seems to me that we should be able to decipher their language relatively easily. Why? If they’re on the surface of a neutron star, whatever they’re saying must be the deep-space equivalent of GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! We just work backwards from there.

I think it's trying to tell us something, Lincoln.

Strange magnetism

At the same time, scientists are detecting a new type of magnetic wave emitting from the earth’s chewy center. Is this a coincidence? I think not! The coincidence of these two stories on the same week is certainly no coincidence. (Wait, what?) I think it’s only right that we speculate on why this is happening at this particular juncture. To my tiny mind, there is only one possibility …. mother earth is responding to the neutron radio waves with magnetic fields. It’s like neutron man is calling collect, and she’s accepting the charges. Like any good mother would.

Skeptical? Well, there’s really only one way to test this theory. We need to break out Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. The thing’s been in mothballs since we used it to bail Anti-Lincoln out with those crypto-kidnappers last year. But dramatic rescues are only one of the device’s practical uses. It can core a apple, make mounds of julienne fries, raise pole cats, and interpret interstellar communications, particularly those emanating from invisible flying predators.

Point it to the sky, Mack!

Damn, I wish we were more resourceful. If we had half the moxie of those forties guys that used to sing backup in our Ned Trek songs, we would have solved this mystery by now. As it is, it’s taking most of the week just to drag the Orgone Generating Device up from the cellar. And then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has first dibs on it. (He’s making julienne fries.)

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