I was pleased this afternoon to see that the questions I posted here last night about where Rikers Island fit into New York City’s evacuation scheme for Hurricane Irene were being asked all over Twitter and the blogosphere. I knew something was up when I saw the metrics on that post take an immediate spike, in both visits and referrals from Google. Clearly a lot of people were not writing off the Rikers residents even if the mayor and the city’s disaster planners were not going out of their way to include them in the discussion. Continue reading
Music for #Irene: Roky Erickson: The Wind and More
Roky Erickson and the Explosives, with special guest Billy Gibbons, perform a classic from Roky’s Bleib Alien/Evil One days
#Irene: 12,000 on Rikers Island Don’t Count On NYC’s Evacuation Map
Residents of this island are not included in New York City's evacuation plan.
If you look at the map of evacuation zones New York City is sharing with New Yorkers to let them know which of the city’s coastal areas are most at risk should Hurricane Irene live up to the hype and deliver a disaster on Saturday and Sunday, you might not notice right away that only one of the large islands in the city’s waterways is uncoded: A rather substantial white form, like a little Greenland, sitting in the place where the East River and Long Island Sound blend, just northwest of LaGuardia Airport in the bay between the Bronx and Queens.
West of that large shape are a couple of tiny ones, also uncoded. Those are uninhabited. The large white shape, however, is home to about 12,000 people, though that number fluctuates. That shape is Rikers Island, site of five of the city’s prisons. (To find it more easily on the Times map linked to above, enter “Rikers Island, Bronx, NY 10474” in the “Go to Your Address” form in the legend.) Continue reading
Fox News is Afraid of Ron Paul
As much as I criticize Dr. Libertarian from Texas, I do find Fox’s GOP-sanctioned fear of him, as pointed out by Cenk Uygur of the The Young Turks in the video below, to be utterly pathetic.
As davejoe75 says in the comments to the YouTube video: “Cenk nailed it with that last comment…O’Reilly wants the Ron Paul bump!”
NY Attorney General’s Dismissal Has “Big Banks’ Dirty Fingerprints All Over It”
Here’s a bit of outrageous news that you might not have heard today, courtesy of the Institute for Public Accuracy: Continue reading
I’ve Been Vacating
Exhausted from blogging
I just want to say thanks to people who actually stopped by my blog for the last couple of weeks while I was on vacation in Maine. I know it’s a strange concept: why would a person who has no “official” job need a vacation? Well, it was scheduled before I knew I wouldn’t be having a job.
In any case, I will be back up and running any day now…
Letting Go of God
It's Jesus!
If you know her only as “It’s Pat” from Saturday Night Live, then you probably won’t know that Julia Sweeney is also a talented writer and performer of monologues à la Spaulding Gray. Unlike Gray, Sweeney moves around on the stage a lot, but like Gray, her subject is her journey into self-knowledge. Her first show, God Said, Ha! (1998), concerned disease, death and survival: the story centered on her brother Michael’s lymphoma and how it brought her closer to her parents–literally closer; they moved in with her to help her care for her brother. It’s a surprisingly unsentimental, unselfpitying show, very funny throughout, and, therefore, a much richer experience than the usual hystrionic tales of family dysfunction and disease.
I picked up the Quentin Tarantino-produced film of Sweeney’s show from the library a few weeks ago thinking it would be about Sweeney’s loss of faith. I’m at the age when titles of movies and plays don’t stick in the head the way they used to and I was thinking of her next piece, with the similarly divine title Letting Go of God (2006). But I’m glad I saw her earlier piece first, not only because it was fascinating and beautifully performed, but also because it drops a few clues about how someone with Sweeney’s deeply Catholic background could take the radical spiritual turn she takes in the second monologue, which I finally got to see last night. Continue reading
Anarchism, Capitalism and Human Rights: A Discussion
There’s a lively little discussion going on in the comments for this post. Here’s a little sample: Continue reading
What Is Ron Paul’s Notion of Justice?
To understand Paul’s third principle for a free society (“Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments”), it would be helpful to understand his theory of justice.
One thing seems absolutely certain: it isn’t the same as John Rawls’ theory. In fact, without being explicit about its debt, Paul’s theory, based on what I sussed out of it in the previous two posts, bears a lot of resemblance to Robert Nozick’s anti-Rawlsian theory of justice formulated in Anarchy, State and Utopia.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read Rawls or Nozick. Does this disqualify me from commenting on the ideas I’ve read about from them? I leave that up to my readers. I’m going to plow ahead because I think it’s necessary to discuss Nozick’s idea of “distributive justice” (i.e., how “justly” resources are distributed among individuals) to understand Paul’s. Continue reading
Is Government Property Always Unjust?
I want to spend a little more time on the notion in Paul’s third principle that “justly acquired property” is “privately owned,” which implies that government (or public) property can only be unjustly acquired. I suspect the primary libertarian principle at work here is “taxation is theft,” a right-wing perversion (or theft, if you will) of Proudhon’s original libertarian socialist principle that “property is theft.”
It seems to me a bit sneaky of Paul not to put his cards flat on the table and admit that that is precisely his meaning here, if that is his meaning. Of course it would open him wide up to the charge of supreme hypocrisy for having accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years of “unjustly acquired” income as a representative to the Congress from his district in Texas. Continue reading
Tragic Farce 