No Constitutional Right to Smoke

This is what happens in an actual Democracy...which we are increasingly becoming...your daily activities are subject to the wants and desires of people named LaToya.

                                             LaToya Bans Smoking in New Orleans

According to this new Edict of the People, there is no Constitutional right to smoke. Far be it from me to question the Constitutional expertise of LaToya but, it's my understanding that the Constitution is not a set of permissions granted to subjects...a list of things the State will allow you to do. Instead, again with all due respect to LafuckingToya, it is a list of powers that the citizenry refuses to grant the State. It's a collection of Negative Rights...this is what the State cannot do.

This is the understanding of the Constitution that another community organizer, Barack Hussein Obama, finds so troubling. According to Barack, that's the great flaw of the Constitution...it's a collection of negative rights that says a lot about what the government can't do and nothing about what the State should do for people. In other words, the flaw of the U.S. Constitution, as Barack sees it, is its essence. This point, even as a bone of contention is, obviously and completely, lost on....dear God...LaToya.

Of course, I'm the fool...who cares about negative rights and the crucial role they play in protecting Liberty (Liberty? HA!)...who cares about the, small c, constitutional legitimacy of law. To the extent that legitimacy matters...desire is sufficient. Majority rules...authority is found in numbers.

That's how we get to the point where you do not have a right to allow smoking on your own property...but, you do have the right to seize the property of others so you can go to Junior College. The precious people, that seething mass of avarice and stupidity, want something and the vapid politicians are happy to provide it...fully justified because they are doing the bidding of that most sacred body..."the people." Amazing that we have laws at all...when the instincts of the people are so trustworthy and virtuous.

My concerns here are not only esoteric but, increasingly, nonsensical. So, let's come down out of the clouds...get down on the ground and have a closer look at the city for whose benefit this decree has been issued. New Orleans is a city...a real object. So comforting that we can measure it, touch it....smell it.

If you've never been to New Orleans and would like to experience it...you can do so in your own home. First, have a bloody piss in a carton of milk and leave it open to sour on the counter. Once the milk is ripe...two, empty your trashcan on the living room floor. Three, get blind drunk and pass out in the trash. Four, have your significant other...doesn't matter if it's a wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend or, even better, a stranger from the park...dress in an edible bikini and thigh high go-go boots. They should stand over you while barking for a strip club or hooking. Five, for a truly authentic experience, have some friends come by to vomit on you and urinate in the corner.

Whatever you do, however far you get carried away, for God's sake, do not let anybody fire up a square. We're not trying to get anybody killed here.

We've been down this road before....

No Smoking at Old Absinthe House

we've gotten so far down now that lighting up anywhere along it will get you a 100 dollar fine.
It should be fun watching the enforcement...expensive but, fun. Food and beverage people smoke...even in Quarter bars where it's already banned you can watch them early in the morning stumbling out into the daylight...cigarettes dangling from their squinting faces.

Never mind the droves of tourists who may or may not be aware of the Decree. A person standing on a sidewalk smoking is exactly the kind of mushy target that cops love. Good times...Good times...or Bon Temps I reckon.

I'll close with a question. Let's set aside the issue of legitimacy for such Decrees. What kind of people ban smoking in bars, jukes, taverns...we're talking about a bar...a BAR. What concept of a juke and the purpose it serves must those people have? I know many don't like to be around smoke...but that's hardly the issue. That market can be served without a total ban. What kind of human being would support a ban on smoking cigarettes in a juke...a honkey tonk? It's a bar...you get dunk, dance, fight and smoke cigarettes.



It's not really a place that figures into a program for adding a few years to your stank carcass.

Twinkle, Twinkle...Blah, Blah, Blah...EE. TEE. CEE.

Many of you have expressed your anxiousness to hear what else happened in Birmingham...and it makes me happy to know that y'all read. We will get to it, but first...

this.

There stands Jackson like a Stonewall

Every year around this time, for reasons known only to him, God abandons us and the atmosphere takes on a strange quality. I don't know how to describe it really...it's sharp and penetrating...kinda like when you reach for something in the ice box. The sky goes dirty grey. It goes on forever...like a month. Turrible.

This week was particularly bad. It got down to 14 degrees (-10c)...low enough to freeze water in pipes and blow the pressure valve on your hot water heater. I can't express how much I hate winter...hate the cold...hate coats, jackets, jumpers, sweat shirts...how I despise it busting in on my room in the garage.

Fortunately the previous owners left a big box of tiles under the heater...there were these fabulous high pitched accents to the crashing thud of dry wall.

So, that was fun.

Obviously it was very upsetting for The Boy and Herschel-Walker.

Speaking of upsetting...and I'm loath to even bring it up, but none of your Christmas presents to me have shown up. I know they're coming...I'm not brining this up to shame anybody. It's just I know y'all are anxious to hear what I think. Please know that I'm already appreciative but, I'm a little ashamed to say, it was with increasing anxiety that I've rushed to the mailbox every day the last few weeks...only to be disappointed. I know they're coming...I'm not complaining...my silence has not meant a lack of appreciation...they just haven't shown up yet.

While I'm complaining...that crap in France. It wasn't actually a distraction from blogging but, I'm so sick of these dickheads.

I've only gotten a glimpse of this nonsense once. It was at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. There was an American evangelist and a black fella that I think was British. As far as I can recall, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Yeah...somebody was going to hell but I don't remember it being anti-Muslim or anything. Just the usual turn-so-you-don't-burn stuff.

Whatever it was...was too much for the swarthy fella next to me. I could see him gritting his teeth and sorta swaying...like pacing from the waste up...until he couldn't take it anymore...

"What do you expect from an American and nigger!"

There was some verbal rustling at that...no intelligible boos or shut ups...but that was the audible gist. This poor American girl next to me, when he said nigger, she caught a case of the vapors. I thought she was gonna pass out.

Then he was completely incensed. He started that pacing thing again and then snapped. He lunged for the black dude...burst right through the crowd in a rage but the crowd was having non of it. He was literally thrown back on to a walkway and escorted out of the park by a few biguns.

He just couldn't tolerate hearing what he didn't want to hear. Dick.

...

 



The final distraction came this weekend when me and the Big Man got in to a discussion about the punk rock...which led to me spending two days downloading Minutemen songs instead of writing.



Throw you lighters up for D.




Alright...back to our regularly scheduled reading and writing then.

Where Were You

Watch me sweat and complain.

It's like an oven out in that damn room this time of year. It's supposed to be fall but...the late August and early September are stupid hot around here. Don't fret for me though...I love it. It feels so good under the fan right now...beer's so cold. It's the one thing, between Sunday and Friday, that isn't on my nerves right now.



Watch it or don't. Up to you...but, miss it and you'll miss one of the greatest games ever played.



Is it sick that my favorite game is a win that ruined the season of FSU and not one of the numerous SEC and National Championships they've won? :)

Next up...maybe we can get to the bottom of something that has always mystified me...how sports became separated from the higher pursuits like Art, Literature and Music, Dance.

Up Next Yoko Ono

Two Days!...after 8 dreary sepia months, we crack the screen door open on Oz...if Oz had bourbon and smoked pigs....a four month Technicolor Southern block party. Actually, considering the emotional scars, the intractable grudges, the fact that we will get drunk and yell at one another ...maybe it's more appropriate to call it a family reunion.



I love the song on this one...but, the true beauty comes at the 1:09 mark.

 

I can't wait. There's a delicious irony to this time of year. Universities all over the US are gathered into athletic conferences...the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is really the only one that's still regionally and culturally cohesive.* So, when SEC teams play outside of conference we are more Southern than ever...we are one fanbase. It drives a lot of people crazy but, SEC football is a Southern institution and we are loyal people and we are not them. It's also one of the only times a goodun can celebrate being Southern without somebody screaming racism in your face...just before they go into the RocknRoll hall of fame in Cleveland, Ohio...to eat bbq and drink Cokecola in the café while finishing off the last chapter of Absalom Absalom. Uh-Hmmm Anyway.....

On the other hand, during Conference play, we can forget about all that and get down to what we truly and dearly love...beating hell out of the only worthy foe...one another.

That's Thursday...this is still Tuesday and we need to go ahead and get some things out of the way...maybe deal with a few recurring topics before things go pear shaped.

PAVEMENT



Other than the sweet sweet degeneration**....the best thing about this about this clip is the flippant political statement. Earlier during the set he said "We're here for turrets...I mean Tibet." Ha. I know a lot of y'all are true believers in the political power of music...y'all and hippies :)...but, many of us were horrified and scared, as young'uns, watching you punk rockers become hippies with mohawks...pestering us about workers and the sandinistas or whatever. We were dismissed for being willfully uninvolved with reality...as Slackers. Yeah. I guess. 



Speaking of politics spoiling everything....this bastard.

MIRO

Today, during my trials and tribulations on the road (I left home without a wallet...and had to wait for an hour at a gas station to be rescued by Martha with credit cards), I tried to listen to a series of podcast on Miro. These were put on by the Tate...good...they turned out to be on MIro and politics...bad, very bad. The stream of profanity that I unleashed on the windshield was so intense that it blocked sunlight for a nanosecond. Look up there...look at it. Who looks at that and thinks about politics? It turns out, people whose definition of politics includes every possible human activity...that's who. Then they set about explaining his paintings through politics...even when political statements, in the paintings, were vague at best.

It's one thing to say a storefront mannequin unavoidably evokes Plato...it's quite another to say the worker who put the mannequin together had Plato in mind. I'd rather be bit on the forehead by a mosquito than listen to this nonsense.

Rude Talk

Did y'all hear Richard Dawkins the other day? He said it was "immoral" not to abort a fetus with downs syndrome. That's nasty man. Then, under the guise of an apology, he doubled down. At least he didn't actually apologize. I'm sick of people saying something...something they've obviously meant to say...something they'd given some thought to...then coming out the next day and apologizing like they'd merely burped at the table. You said it...stand by it. Shit.

What I want to know is this...what did he mean by immoral? He didn't say it was undesirable. He didn't say it shouldn't be allowed. He said it was immoral...as if he had some absolute authority in mind. I'd like to know exactly why he thinks it's immoral to have a baby with Downs. Why it's wrong...and what authority he's drawing on? I could infer...but, that would just be rude. Where does a machine go for moral authority?

Adamparsons Hates on the Fall

An oldie but a goodie (as a topic on the blogs...the song is timeless)



Me

Who am I kidding...we gon' keep talking about me....but, this gives me an excuse to point you all in the direction of Hugh Marwood's blog. He is an artist...a good one. He has been kind enough to recount some of our recent conversations on his blog. He's also put some of my really fantastic photos on there. So go look at it. He talks about Tom Wolfe too...so it's actually worth a click. :). Hugh's work is really good.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some things but, that should hold us over for now.

*If the money grubbers keep expanding the Conference we'll have Yankees in it...at that point we will seriously be looking to immigrate...it'll all be over at that point.

**If only Pavement had given this much "effort" in covering The Classical.

Vampire Slayer

South Carolina's Trey Gowdy pounds a wooden stake through this fiends heart.......y'all.

The only thing worse than politicians are the stooges they fill the bureaucracies with...incapable of actually doing anything but certain of their own superiority...they're too smug even for politics. So they dedicate themselves to tormenting citizens. When these goblins die...they go to the IRS. Tax collecting.

Once there they can target political groups and harass 67 year olds, like my father, for five years over a legitimate, but small, claim on mileage...only to explain afterwards, "Sorry about that we were mistaken...hahahahhahahha."




If only they could lose the checks we have to write them every year.

The Stupidity...It Burns!

I'm tryin to mind my business and drank a cup of coffee...but the T.V. 's on in here. The Weather Channel. People love to watch the weather on TV...anyway I've got my headphones on so I can't hear it but I can read a blurb under a woman being interviewed.

 "Female Named Storms Are Not Taken As Seriously as Male Named Storms."

 

You all that don't live in hurricane territory may not be aware of this but, years ago all storms were given female names. All of you, steeped, stewed and brewed in the insanity of identity politics as we are, will immediately see this for the vicious sexist slur that it was. Women are given to raging destructive passions...they are to be feared...just like hurricanes. Well we couldn't have that. So, in 1979 we got hurricane....Bob.

 

Now, 35 years later we have a study which shows that female named storms cause more destruction. People don't take them seriously because they've got girly names.

 

You know where this is headed.

 

"Well Suzanne...does this mean we should name all storms after men. So people will take them more seriously and be better prepared...cutting down on the damage, cost and possibly even deaths associated with these storms."

 

"No, of course not. Chuck the problem is society's attitudes toward women. We are still seen as weak and powerless...and obviously not to be taken seriously."

 

"What's the answer then...what should be done? We have the stats in front of us...if we can mitigate the damage caused by these storms...I mean, isn't that something  we should try to do?"

 

"Of course Chuck...we all want to see the damage and suffering caused by hurricanes minimized but, the damage and suffering caused by stereotypes is also real. What we are proposing is that all Hurricanes be given female names."  

 I also have never been to New Guinea or..uh built an igloo ;).*

Any of you who think I may be overestimating the potential for stupidity here need only remember Shelia Jackson Lee's call for all races to be represented in the naming of storms.

*You may not know this but if you don't own a copy of Double Wide and Live...your ears hate you and long for the silence of your demise rather than carrying on in denial. 

Slip It To The Andriod

Yet another week where I've worked more than 20 hours. Y'all I didn't make it back to the house until 9:30 on Thursday...then turned right around and worked for five hours on Friday. It's like I'm making Nike tennis shoes in China. There's nothing for a week like that but liquor, smoke and Chrome.

Our friend from Satellite of Love is back...only now, he loves her even more. So Sweet.

Beat yer head on that for a while.*


Mainly I've just been beating my head against this laptop and blogger...and idiots. Below is not a sketch as such...but, a material artifact of a conversation between me and Martha. Through a convoluted series of links I ended up on an article from, where else, Salon, that blamed all of America's wars on Southerners. Why? Because we are the dregs of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and North and West England. We like to scrap. The author had just read Albion's Seed. The last decade or so has been a real revelation for the Yankee. Through the publication of a few books and essays (see: See Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell or Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secesion, Albion's Seed, etc.) the Yankee has finally come to understand that flawed as we are...we aren't flawed versions of them. We are different from them. We are still, to a large extent, the same people that were too poor and rowdy to live in the poorest and rowdiest parts of Britain (or kidnapped from West Africa). New England, and the United States of God Almighty America and the whole of the Western Hemisphere was invented by the Puritans...the better sorts of England...the sober and industrious and, above all, the Pious. The example to all...they founded a shinning city on a hill. A beacon for the rest of us struggling in the dark. They will save the world...even if they have to burn it down to do so. From Calvinism through Transcendentalism to Statism...they haven't changed a lick. Some of these people were sent out to save the Great Lakes region (the Midwest)while others stayed back to get the minds of wave after wave after wave of immigrants right. They pulled that shit on the Italians and Poles...found ready allies in the Germans of 1848 but, we instinctively knew why they'd been kicked out of England in the first place. F***ing witch burners. We've never wanted any part of it...and that is our great and unpardonable Sin. We aren't just different than them...we don't want to be them. That's Cardinal. That is what they are finally coming to realize. One of the reasons we don't want to be them is that their Piety is literal minded and dull. They're not Righteous. They're busybodies.* Their industriousness, their solid work ethic, looks an awful lot like grasping, rapacious, greed. In short, they're the kind of people who would invade, conquer and occupy Sovereign States, slaughter indigenous peoples, go on rabbit hunts in the Philippine, send gunboats to South America, Vietnam, and on...all in the name of Abolition or Manifest Destiny or making the world safe for Democracy or etc. etc. etc. and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh. Now matter how dastardly...they can always come up with some cockeyed Moral Justification paper over their Imperial compulsions. We're the warmongers??? Pound sand dickh**ds. Anyway...the above is what you obviously see in those scribbles. We will revisit all this later. We gotta clear the air in here... Stay tuned...I didn't want to sully F-Word's efforts with all this nonsense but, next up...we will be examining a piece of his excellent work that purchased recently. *You may be asking yourself...Isn't the Bible Belt in the South...isn't the South hyper-religious. One, there's more than one religion (see the State). Two, much of what passes for religion in The South is not naturally Southern...fundamentalism, for instance, is a product of modernity and a Midwestern import. Three, we go to church because we, as individuals are Sinners, not to plot the salvation of the world. Jesus handled that...without any help from Cotton Mathers even. Again, we will be discussing all this in the future.

8 Hours!?!

Yesterday I worked for almost eight hours...EIGHT freaking hours. Can you imagine working like that five days a week?  &%$# on that!

This has been an exhausting week. Not only have I put in over 20 hours...but, I've done manual labor. Just let that sink in.

I painted my room. Well, I put colors on the wall. I spackled some of the holes and even sanded some of the spackling but mainly I just covered the walls with paint.

I spent about 8 years, off and on, as a house painter. Started right after I got out of the Army and while I was an undergraduate...between jobs after graduate school, and whenever I needed some folding money.

If my old boss was to come by and see the work...he'd probably try to retroactively fire me. We got color though and that's the main thing. Color and pictures.

Keep in mind I couldn't completely ignore my day job for this task. I spent time on the road this week...from up to French Camp and down to McComb.

This was taken just off the Natchez Trace between French Camp and Kosciusko.  The phone decided we were in McCool, Mississippi but, of course, any place I go in Mississippi is made McCool by my presence.

McComb was an especially taxing trip. I was so worn out by dinner that it took four bowls of banana pudding at The Dinner Bell just to get my energy back up for a few more hours of work.

Six or seven hours in the car isn't a lot in my line of work but, it is long enough to have your patience and sanity tested by idiot philosophers (as opposed to non-idiot philosophers who have the grace to spend most of their time driving a tractor rather than being a smart-ass). I found a series of podcast called Philosophy Bites put on by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. Each podcast features a philosopher being questioned by Edmonds or Warburton on a specific topic. 

One particularly irritating example...Ronald Dworkin on the Unity of Value. He takes two values that are commonly, and to my view rightly, believed to be contradictory...Liberty and equality. Then he shows how they are actually compatible. How? By altering the definitions until they are reasonable. How do you know they are reasonable? They no longer contradict each other. Ronald Dworkin has discovered the color green and mistaken it for the elimination of the colors Yellow and Blue.

As an aside, Spliff and I have argued about this on various occasions...all I can say about Dworkin is that he is no Spliff.

Then there are those who have interesting insights about the findings of neuroscience but don't really seem to be doing philosophy...hallucinations, personality disorders, etc. There are some delights like Emma Borg on Context Sensitivity and Language or Nick Bostrom on the insanity of Simulation Theory (you, me and Tom's house-cat are almost certainly computer generated simulations...it's not that easy to dispute). 

It was Galen Strawson on Pansychism that took the prize. Strawson is a self proclaimed Physicalist. In this view everything is physical through and through...merely physical. Everything has a material explanation. He then addresses the big screaming, purple experiencing, problem with this view...Consciousness. You can't deny the existence of experience but to accept experience as real is to accept the existence of non-physical things...nevermind that, how do you explain the emergence of Consciousness from non conscious material. Science can't do it. It can explain the complex process that seems to accompany consciousness but we don't have access to the data of consciousness...it dosen't exist in any accessible way.

My favorite exchange was when the interviewer, I can't remember which one it was says..."it could be the result of some magic interjection but that's implausible." As if there were anything plausible about consciousness in the first place. 

Sam Harris provides an answer in The Mystery of Consciousness ...it's "incomprehensible - a miracle, in other words." Something, non-physical has arisen from the purely physical, something has emerged from the absence of some thing. No problem for me the Theist...and, obviously Sam, the non-theist, has learned to live with it...not so Strawson. Strawson's answer is that because everything is physical and experience exists...everything must be experiential. Consciousness must be integral to all material...it didn't emerge it was always there. A cardboard box, a wad of gum stuck under a desk are conscious on some level...dear God, that means there must be something it's like to be a urinal at a bus station or Adamparsons' toothbrush. 

I actually enjoyed his interview...it's a clever way of trying to deal with his problem.  After all, it can't be tested. 

The biggest bore of the week came, not from Philosophy Bites, but from an interview at The Whitney with Lawrence Wiener. What a silly ass. At one point, he states "good people can make bad art and bad people make good art...that's why I don't want to know anything about the people I'm showing with."

Yeah man, he doesn't place any importance on personal morality...that's so f****ing bougie. Unless..."they're racist, or sexist...or you know fascists."

That is the kind of shit that causes me to have acute visions, hallucinations almost, of beating a blazing, 50 gallon drum with a baseball bat over and over until I collapse from exhaustion.