• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Jose Sarria: The Activist in Drag who Changed American Politics Forever
WHEN WAITERS AT THE BLACK Cat Café in San Francisco began pushing dining tables together at the front of the room, a murmur would ripple through the crowd. A performance was coming.
The crowd would fall silent as a man stepped onto the makeshift stage. Less than five feet tall, he was dressed in red pumps, a tiara, tight black pants and a shawl. He wore cherry-red lipstick. In his hand: a single orchid.
“They were trying to make gay people second-rate citizens,” he said. “I’ve never been a second-rate citizen… As little as I may be, I’m part of the history.”
But before Sarria went down in history, he sang arias to packed crowds at the spot that Allen Ginsberg called “the greatest gay bar in America.” Sarria knew more than 45 operas, and his most famous performance was a rendition of the French opera Carmen. Sarria’s version of the titular character lived in modern-day San Francisco. This Carmen visited a popular cruising spot and hid in the bushes to evade police capture.
The Black Cat crowd ate it up, perhaps in part because the plot was all too familiar. The San Francisco of the ’50s and ’60s was a hostile place for the queer community. An early 1950s editorial in the San Francisco Examiner called for a force to “drive [gay and trans people] out of the city,” and police regularly arrested gay and trans people on bogus charges at well-known gay hangouts—including Sarria’s beloved Black Cat. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: He had a right to run for office and didn’t have to hide.
IN SOLIDARITY
Ed. Many thanks to NISSAN for sponsoring this content.
Biden’s victory is only the prelude. What happens now is up to us
We all have a role to play in persuading this administration to have more courage, go further and live up to its promises.
‘How do we remain awake, engaged, committed not just to prevent the worst but pursue the best?’
Yes, this election victory may be time to pause and sigh with relief, but it’s no finish line. It’s only the starting line for the next round of work. If people who worked so hard to win, go home, and go to sleep, the Biden administration will accomplish little, and the right will have its usual opportunity to get back what it lost. We can’t allow that.
The clear and pressing danger is a repeat of the last few election cycles in which, when Democrats won, too many people who’d been the backbone of the resistance relaxed and assumed the government would do the right thing. They didn’t bother to participate much because they thought power rests in elected officials rather than the electorate. The fierce effort to push Donald Trump out of power, the unprecedented scale of this summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and the many forms of resistance that took place when Trump won should remind us that it is not so.
In 1992, when the Democrats took back the White House, a lot of liberal and progressive people dozed through the next two elections and the political opportunities and dangers in-between. George Bush became president in a corrupted election handed to him by the US supreme court, the sleepers awakened, anti-war protest resulted in the world’s biggest demonstration in February of 2003, and a number of new organizations and coalitions did great work, but when Barack Obama became president, the whole cycle repeated again. Those who stayed engaged won serious victories around climate, immigration and other key issues, including marriage equality – but it could have been so much better.
Obama knew this and early on admonished those who voted for him to have his back when he was on the right track and push him to get what they wanted. I would argue not enough did, not hard enough, and those eight years were paved with lost opportunities. More engagement in 2016 could have prevented the obscene catastrophe of the past four years. More involvement in protecting voting rights overall in the past decade or two could have meant entirely different races and candidates overall, because one thing that is clear from the Republican frenzy to suppress votes is that this country’s election results are far more conservative than its people, by design. Both Bush and Trump posed immense threats to human rights and the climate, which is not to say that the last two Democratic administrations were ideal; they were better and they offered chances to move forward rather than hunker down in wholly defensive action. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “Four years of Trump has been like being locked in a room with an unhinged assassin.’
From the editor of Guardian US: a fresh start for America
The American people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. But now the real work begins.
‘Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is quite another.’
Joe Biden is the next president of the United States – and Kamala Harris has made history, becoming the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be elected vice-president. The pair shattered previous records, winning more votes in the presidential race than any candidates in American history.
The American people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. They have chosen decency over dysfunction, fact over fiction, truth over lies and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of ugliness, divisiveness, racism and sustained assaults on constitutional democracy. And even as Trump makes baseless and dangerous claims of fraud and plots legal challenges, it is clear that 75 million Americans are moving on.
But now, the real work begins.
Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is quite another. There is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to address the deep-rooted problems that will remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the celebrations – spontaneous, glorious and moving – die down, there will need to be a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump, and his departure is no guarantee that the country will mend. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
Two eight-year Democratic presidencies over the last 30 years have not significantly tackled these problems: a stark racial wealth gap, worsening school segregation, corrosive inequality, a climate crisis and a democratic deficit at the heart of America’s electoral college are but some of the systemic issues that confront the new president. …
Let’s Read ‘The Young Comrade,’ The Crazy ’20s Magazine For Baby Communists
As we’ve noted previously, after World War I, capitalist countries were so concerned that covert communists would corrupt their children that national security services had special surveillance on the Boy Scouts. But they shouldn’t have bothered. Instead of turning these state-sponsored youth indoctrination camps Red from the inside, America’s young socialists simply made their own youth groups.
Of these, the raddest had to be the Young Workers League of America, thanks to its kids’ magazine The Young Comrade, the Tiger Beat of Trotskyism — complete with cute pictures of socialist heartthrobs like Friedrich Engels and Karl “Marxy” Marx.
While the Young Workers League of America was open to all “children of the proletariat” aged 14 to 30, its youth publication was aimed at even younger Reds (or “Pioneers”), typically aged 9 to 13. And in the spirit of socialist equality, it was these eleven-year-old Leninists who were responsible for the content of The Young Comrade, providing articles, poems, and cartoons. Like the adventures of Johnny Red, who promoted the magazine’s sale of socialist songbooks.
But precisely what kind of bourgeois establishment did these tiny commies fight against? Rich kids, corrupt priests, but most of all, the purveyors of capitalist propaganda (and maths): teachers. …
RELATED: 5 ‘Good’ Ideas That Are Secretly Propaganda
You know how political ads are supposed to end by saying who paid for them? Some would say there’s no need for that. A message is a message, and if it convinces you, it isn’t any less true just because it’s endorsed by Tramp Stamps For Refugees. But sometimes, finding out exactly who’s been pushing messages in your face tells you everything you need to know …
5. Plastic Recycling Is A Big Fraud Designed To Sell More Plastic
When you drop plastic in a dedicated recycling bin, it’s probably never going to be recycled. The recycling center that receives all that plastic is probably instead going to pile it on a ship and try selling to some foreign country, where poor scavengers will loot what they can from it, while the rest of it will be burned, buried, or dumped in the sea. If no other country will take it (China has stopped accepting plastic), it will be burned, buried, or dumped domestically. And the industries that have been urging you to recycle your plastics always knew this.
The problem: plastic is very different from, say, aluminum. With metals, you can melt them down into atom soup then mold that pure stuff back into anything you like. But plastic has long chains of complex manmade molecules, and when you try melting it, you’re probably going to degrade it. And if you haven’t totally sorted plastics before melting, you’re going to mix the wrong kind of molecule chains and make a horrible Frankenstein brew no one wants.
The other issue: It’s really cheap to make plastic from oil, and we have just so much oil. We have so much oil that we can burn billions of gallons every day, and we’re only stopping that when it turns out we can get energy other ways even cheaper — rather than when, as apocalyptic stories used to predict, we run out of oil and have to switch to a slaver-raider economy. Expecting a factory to turn a truckload of household plastic into usable stuff is like expecting your waiter to wash dishes by distilling water from your leftover gravy when he can just turn on the tap.
So where’d this idea come from, that we all recycle plastic? The plastics industry. They realized decades ago that people were rising up against the sight of litter, and legislation might soon make single-use plastics history. So they looked into whether large-scale recycling would work as a solution, and … discovered it would not. But they pushed the idea anyway, so we’d all go on buying plastic, now falsely believing the stuff is getting recycled so no longer hurts the environment. Recycling did actually work for one item — plastic soda bottles — but even that soon failed, because of this:
…
South Korean ‘sparrows’ try to cap surge of throwaway plastic
Lee Yong-gi, owner of a recycling facility, collects sacks of recycling garbage in a residential area of Seoul last month.
At a workshop in Seoul, two environmental activists melt down old plastic bottle caps that thousands of volunteers known as “sparrows” have collected in a bid to fight a tide of plastic the novel coronavirus has helped unleash.
Green activists Kim Yona and Lee Dong-I use the bottle caps to make a tube-squeezing device — something they hope consumers will find useful and be able to keep, rather than toss out after just one use.
“Plastic is a recyclable resource,” said Kim, 26. “But it’s way too cheap, easy to make and easily thrown away, which makes people think it’s disposable.”
The environmentalists opened their “Plastic Mill” in downtown Seoul in July, attracting 2,000 volunteer “sparrows” — the name comes from a Korean expression about the bird that can’t resist stopping at a mill to peck — who gathered an estimated 85,330 bottle caps in a collection drive.
Unlike bottles, the caps are usually discarded at recycling facilities as they need extra work to sort, the activists said.
The “sparrows” get one upcycled tube-squeezer as a reward, no matter how many caps they bring in.
“We can’t reward them for sending lots of plastic, our goal is to reduce it,” said Lee. …
Daikon radish found growing in concrete in heart of Osaka
Photo taken Nov. 6, 2020 shows daikon radish growing by the foot of a busy pedestrian overpass in Osaka. Embiggenable.
A lone daikon radish has been attracting attention from locals after it was recently discovered growing by the foot of a busy pedestrian overpass in the heart of the metropolis of Osaka in western Japan.
The root vegetable, commonly used in a range of Japanese dishes, was found protruding a few centimeters out of the asphalt with a full stalk of green leaves near the busy JR Osaka Station, close to the Hanshin department store in the central Umeda district.
Many pedestrians are stopping to snap photographs of the plant, with some crouching down to touch and examine the ground it is growing from.
“It makes me feel good to see the radish thrive in a place like this,” said local resident Koji Shima, 68, who came to take photos of the vegetable. “I hope nobody pulls it out or does anything to it.” …
Ed. I’m about 32 minutes into Google’s suggestion and am having a really trippy time cobbling up these errant ramblings barely uninteresting at all things.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
John Oliver discusses the long week of US presidential election results, including Donald Trump’s various attempts to make the election appear illegitimate, and a historic win for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on a diverse range military fails. Be safe out there army people, be safe and use ya smarts I reckon.
まるお気に入りの穴の開いた箱にはなが入ったら…？ When Hana gets into Maru’s favorite box.
FINALLY . . .
‘It’s the screams of the damned!’ The eerie AI world of deepfake music
Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks – but they could change pop for ever.
A ghost in the machine? … Frank Sinatra.
“IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as “all legato and regrets” – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool.
The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by “research and deployment company” OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end.
“As a piece of engineering, it’s really impressive,” says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. (OpenAI declined to be interviewed.) “They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music – a dictionary if you like – at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in. The algorithm can then rearrange these fragments, based on the stimulus you input. So, give it some Ella Fitzgerald for example, and it will find and piece together the relevant bits of the ‘dictionary’ to create something in her musical space.”
Admirable as the technical achievement is, there’s something horrifying about some of the samples, particularly those of artists who have long since died – sad ghosts lost in the machine, mumbling banal cliches. “The screams of the damned” reads one comment below that Sinatra sample; “SOUNDS FUCKING DEMONIC” reads another. We’re down in the Uncanny Valley. …
Ed. You’re welcome. I didn’t get what was meant by Uncanny Valley either.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Sorry, I have something more barely uninteresting at all to do tomorrow.
ONE MORE THING: Steve Bell’s If … Donald Trump wants Rudy Giuliani to sue the American people
FROM THE COMMENTS:
Giuliani hasn’t been himself since the Borat incident. The Four Seasons muddle showed sometimes that truth can be stranger than fiction.
Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to comment. The editors have closed the discussion.
TODAY I FOUND OUT that Steve Bell’s If has been a thing since November 1981.
I have a lot of catching up to do.
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
