INTP Thug Life / Daegu Friday Night

(stay home, wonder why my friends don't call, think how going out usually sucks, think about contingency of all human social interaction)

— Not My Presi-James (@wetcasements) March 10, 2017

Beyond Insane

In West Virginia, people are overdosing faster than they can be buried:

"Deaths in West Virginia have overwhelmed a state program providing burial assistance for needy families for at least the fifth year in a row, causing the program to be nearly out of money four months before the end of the fiscal year, according to the state's Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR). Funeral directors in West Virginia say the state's drug overdose epidemic, the worst in the nation, is partly to blame."

West Virginia is overwhelmingly Trump territory.  If they genuinely thought he or Paul Ryan and the Republican Party gave two shits about their plight I don't know what to say.

It's Done

South Korean president Park Geun-hye has been impeached.

This is huge, to say the least, but the consensus was that with an approval rating of five percent (!) it had to happen.

Next?

National elections will be held within 60 days, and the liberal parties (there are two major ones here) have a lot of momentum on their side.  (Park was the leader of the country's conservative party which is in a lot of obvious turmoil now.)

And the big one: Park is now subject to criminal prosecution.  She could very likely wind up in jail.

Happy International Women's Day!

My two cents: a permanent 1% lifetime tax on all men everywhere that pays for the health care, contraception, pre- and -post natal, and abortion needs of all women everywhere.

Done and done.

"Hootenanny In E"

The Replacements, "Buck Hill"

Things I've learned about The Replacements from the first half of Trouble Boys, an excellent and authoritative work on the band:

1)  Buck Hill is not, in fact, a person, but a ski slope in Minnesota.  I find that strangely disappointing.

2)  The band's relationship to Bob Mould and Husker Du was complicated, but not hostile.  As The Replacements started to take off, Husker Du had to start their own record label and pretty much invent the concept of D.I.Y.  Also, in early 80's Minneapolis you were either a Mats fan or a Husker fan, but never both.

3)  Paul started recording solo stuff very early on but literally had to hide it from his band mates.  Bob in particular would be quick to point out if one of Paul's songs wasn't punk or fast enough.

4)  R.E.M.'s relationship with the band was a lot more than just Peter Buck playing guitar on "I Will Dare."

5)  Bob and Tommy were half-brothers, and didn't actually have a relationship until Tommy was in middle school.  Bob forced Tommy to learn bass guitar, Tommy didn't want to learn it, but Bob forced him and physically pushed the thing on him when he didn't want to practice.  Fortunately, of all the members of the band, Tommy was probably the most naturally gifted when it came to music.

This is the second-most Replacements thing ever.

6)  While early tune "Shutup" was specifically written to piss off any audience at a moment's notice, they actually had an entire set of country covers (Glen Campbell especially) to break out if they felt an audience deserved to be fucked with.

This is the most Replacements thing ever.

Seriously, if you have any interest in American rock music check this book out.  After you thank me, get Bob Mould's biography which is also excellent.

In With The Ink

In a country where traditionally a tattoo means "I am literally a gangster, not just pretending to be tough" younger Koreans are turning to body art with more innocent intentions:

"At a time where even the most ordinary people are starting to get tattoos, it remains a question to many whether tattoos should continue to be perceived as unethical and unhealthy. To find out, the JoongAng Ilbo, an affiliate of the Korea JoongAng Daily, met with a number of people with tattoos. 

A 27-year-old university student surnamed Yun got a tattoo of a unicorn on her wrist last month. When she visited a tattoo shop, she initially did not intend to get one, but was just tagging along with a friend getting a tattoo. But she was mesmerized by the design and ended up handing over her wrist to the tattoo artist. '[Since getting the tattoo], I always wear long-sleeved shirts at home in case my parents find out and scold me,' she said and continued, 'But permanently being able to have a design that I adore on my body strangely makes me excited.'”

My perspective from teaching at a college in the very conservative city of Daegu is that, yes, over the past few years I've definitely noticed a rise in the number of visible tattoos among my students.  (A lot of cursive-script incongruous English self-help sayings on male forearms, for what it's worth.)  I'm sure female students are more reticent to get openly visible ones, so I imagine a lot of lower-back and ankle work is going around.

But what do I know?  I made it through the 90's without a single tattoo or piercing.  I probably deserve some kind of a medal for that.

Note: Advanced Conversation posts contain material that I've used with my adult conversation students.

Dear Obama: Please Engage "No More Fucks To Give" Mode

Obama's greatest flaw as a president was having too much faith in the small-d democratic institutions and commonsense understandings of how Washington works.  It took him far too long to wake up for the fact that Republicans were never going to meet him with good faith on any issue, even if it was good for Americans.

So I can only hope in the bottom of my wretched little heart that Barry will now feel no compulsion not to go after Trump.

I have no doubt Obama takes the role of ex-president as seriously as anyone else possibly could.

But really, you're not going to fall for these chicken-shit Republican games again, are you?  You've done more than your fair share of bringing dignity and class to the office.  It's no longer on you to always take the high road, especially after you threw the guy a fucking life raft when you didn't have to.

"misrule and disaster"

I probably don't link to enough pieces by Charles Pierce because they're all worth reading.   But this one on why regretful Trump supporters deserve less than zero sympathy from adults who knew putting a pussy-grabbing fascist in charge would cause some problems is better than usual:

"Holy mother of god, I'm tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will 'shake things up' on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.

In Kansas, you could have declined to re-elect Sam Brownback, who'd already turned your state into a dismal Randian basket case. In Wisconsin, you had three chances to turn out Scott Walker, and several chances to get the state legislature out of his clammy hands. And, now that the teeth of this new administration are becoming plain to see, it's a good time to remind all of you that you didn't have to hand the entire federal government over to Republican vandalism, and the presidency over to an abject loon on whom Russia may well hold the paper.

You all had the same choices we all had. You saddled the rest of us with misrule and disaster. Own it. I empathize, but I will not sympathize."

These voters -- the so-called white "working class" (working class always and only means white people in American political parlance) -- are lost.  The way forward for Democrats is to energize its own bases, not pander to people who thought blowing up the universe would be good for a few LOLs.

"I had to move fast /To get my baby back from the trouble boys"

Dave Edmunds, "Trouble Boys"

I'm about 100 pages in to Trouble Boys, a biography of The Replacements.  It's dense, to say the least, but very well written so far.

It's no secret that founding guitarist Bob Stinson, who would die of heart failure at 35, dealt with an ungodly amount of childhood trauma.  But it's tough to go through it all, page-by-page.

The book actually begins at Bob's funeral in a poignant bit of framing.

And the title comes from this song by Dave Edmunds.  Apparently, as Paul and Bob and Tommy (11 years old!) and Chris started jamming on covers as Dogbreath, this was the first tune where they all felt they'd clicked as a unit.  I'm pretty obsessive in my Replacements worship and even I didn't know that.

Dumbing Down

Ed from Gin and Tacos on the plight of K-12 education in America:

"The most basic problem with the educational system (K-12 only; colleges have a different set of issues) is that it is increasingly expected to show improvement in a society in which so many of the measurable things affecting educational outcomes are getting worse. When you have students who are basically on their own before the age of ten, or move eight times in three years, or live in violent and impoverished homes, or go days at a time without seeing their substance-abusing parent, or spend evenings trying to decide whether to call the cops because that man is beating up Mom again but you don't want to be taken away into a foster home so what should you do, or have reached adolescence without once seeing an adult set an alarm clock to wake up and go to work, very little in terms of policy is going to matter. Give 'em vouchers, send them to charter schools, public schools, Catholic schools, whatever you want; those kids are not going to succeed. Teachers are expected to extract good test scores from students who are absent 50% of the time or don't have an adult to reliably feed and shelter them.

Teachers are equipped, at their best and in the best environments, to be teachers. They are not prepared to be psychologists, social workers, parents, guardians, and miracle workers. Certainly not every public school draws from a population of students as poor and disadvantaged as what I described here. But it's hardly rare. Increasingly – and vouchers will serve only to worsen this problem – public school systems are a grease trap for the students no other school would take. The kid didn't do well enough on tests for a charter or magnet school, and whatever adult supervisor is responsible for him or her can't shell out for private school. Public schools, in essence, are expected to show constant and near-miraculous improvement with a student population from which the best and most well-supported students have already been plucked out."

I taught at an American private high school for a mere two years.  The second paragraph here makes me shudder remembering a time when, on a daily basis, I was expected to wear four or five hats (parent, guidance counselor, role model, psychiatrist, cop) before getting to finally be a teacher.  (Did I mention this was an expensive private school which ostensibly should have had better resources than a public school?)

It's almost as if America as a country has given up on the Jeffersonian ideal of education as both an equalizer and a means to self- and national-improvement.

Somehow I doubt China is skimping on educational spending these days.

When, Not If

America's readiness for a major terror attack has never been lower:

"'In terms of a major terrorist attack in the United States or on U.S. facilities, I think we’re significantly less ready than we were on January 19,' said Richard Clarke, who served on the National Security Council in the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. 'I think our readiness is extremely low and dangerously low. Certainly [government] agencies at a professional level will respond [to an attack], but having a coordinated interagency response is unlikely given the current cast of characters [in the administration] and their experience.'”

But hey, Hillary's e-mails something something.