Met the challenge in South of Market district

When I was first looking into things to do around San Francisco online I found all sorts of references to this gay sex shop on Folsom street in the South of Market district that said that it was THE worst, sleaziest, cringe inducing one in all of San Francisco. Of course, this intrigued me immensely and I made it a point to go there. Hit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art first and then headed down to Folsom street, where I was half expecting crack deals to be going on on all the street corners and hookers walking up and down the sidewalks, based on what people online had written about the area. But although I'm sure that there are really bad parts and that as night falls the scene changes immensely, I found that in the light of day Folsom street isn't too bad.

The store itself, which shall remain nameless, was pretty much just your average sex store, catering to a mostly gay clientele. Besides carrying tubs of lube designed specifically for making fisting safe and easy that only thing out of the ordinary was a back room that was darkened where I think that people could, if they wanted to, meet each other and fuck. I'm sure the management doesn't condone that, but they're busy manning the front desk, so what can they do if people decide to fuck in the back without their permission? I didn't go back there and so didn't actually see any fucking, so I could be totally wrong about what goes on back there. Maybe they have a knitting club.

It was great to walk down Folsom and go into the stores that make and sell the kind of leather harnesses and gear that are featured in the Folsom Street Fair. This is the event that the conservatives on Fox love to repeat footage of. My impression, based on info gathered online as well as general experience, is that the Folsom Street Fair is intended to break the assimilationist mold of gay pride, the one that wants to portray gay folks as just like everyone else that are in relationships while denying the gay culture that's grown up for decades. Either take the whole package or don't take any of it. I like that attitude.

As can be expected they also had a wonderful BDSM supply store there, with all the crops, floggers, neurological tools for sensation play, restraints, whips, blindfolds that you could want, at good prices too! I can name the store this time, it's Leather Etc..., and you can order from them online. If you don't know much about BDSM and what's possible with it there would be worse sites to look at to get a feel for it.

The biggest misconception is that since there are stuff like restraints and blindfolds that the whole thing has to do with inflicting pain on someone against their will. That's not what this is about. Believe it or not it can be sexy to have your wrists cuffed to something, a blindfold put on you, and your back beaten with a flogger or a cane. But that's getting into a whole 'nother post, one that introduces the novel concept to people that just because you think that something might look like a bad and exploitive act doesn't mean that that's what's actually going on.

Anyways, check out Folsom street and don't be paranoid if you're walking down that part of South of Market in broad daylight. But of course be aware just like you would in any situation that's somewhat (or a lot) sketchy.

How microeconomic theory fails: an example from Berkeley

In the Bay Area for a couple days. I found out that it's graduation this weekend in Berkeley and that because of it room rates have gone way up. Now, why have the rates gone up? It's because there's a huge demand and not that much supply, and when that happens the people who control the supply can charge more. Whether they choose to do so is another matter. This is what the basic facts are; microeconomic theory is just an attempt to account for those facts, not, as some people claim, a science like physics. That was actually said to me by an economics teacher. So how do microeconomic theorists rationalize price gauging by hotel operators during things like a college's graduation? According to them price is a form of rationing. There are only so many goods to go around, even if there's a really high demand and people are making plans to put more of what it is into circulation later. Somehow, those goods have to get allocated. If you really want something you're willing to pay more for it than someone who just sort of wants it. So by continually raising prices on people when there's only so much of something to go around, so the microeconomists say, you ensure that the stuff goes to the people who really want it, who are willing to pay a lot of money for it.

In the case of the UC Berkeley graduation, even though there's probably a tilt towards rich families among the people coming into town it's safe to say that a cross section of society's economic backgrounds are going to be represented. They all want to see their kids graduate. Now, with raising the prices because of the high demand and the fixed supply the hotel owners assure that the rich people who can afford to pay a lot have no trouble getting rooms while the poor people who may have just been able to afford rooms at the regular rate can no longer get them in any location close to downtown Berkeley, where the University is. Both the rich people and the poorer people want to see their kids graduate, it's very important for both of them, but because of the class system the price increase shuts one group out without requiring the other group to really be impacted in order to get a room. For one group it's just beyond their capability to pay while for the other the increase is about as distressing as giving a bigger tip at a restaurant.

Under these conditions the theory that prices in a free market serve as good devices to ration products completely breaks down, undermined by class.

Why not stagger the Presidential election over a couple of days?

So that States would be able to vote one after the other. It would add drama to the Presidential election. Of course most people think that having different states vote on different days would make the process unfair, with states voting later having less of an influence over the contest than states that vote early, but that's part of the fun.

I mean, you know, that's what they say about the Primaries, that it gives drama to the process, that it means a fight that you can see. Who cares about Democracy when you have a good Spectacle that people can follow vicariously.

And now for something completely different: the sources of inspiration for Wiccan ritual in Golden Dawn and Thelema ritual

A lot of similar things have been written about this. The following is just my interpretation of how basic ritual structure in Wicca derives from the Pentagram rituals of the Golden Dawn and Crowley.

The first thing to be observed is that the casting of the circle and the calling of the quarters derives very heavily from the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The idea that it's just a banishing rite is mistaken since the elements are invoked after they've been banished in order to restore balance to the area. Because of this it's the basic rite that ceremonial magicians do before a working, it essentially casts as circle, or can. But the presence of the Goddess and God, who are usually invoked in Wiccan ritual in order to be present can be derived from the LBRP as well.

The last part of the LBRP involves the visualization of a "Descending tongue of grace" and an "Ascending tongue of prayer", downward and upward pointing triangles, within the body of the person doing the rite, meeting in the middle. The descending flame is masculine while the ascending flame is feminine. Their union takes place in the area associated with the Sun on the Tree of Life diagram of the Kabbalah. It sort of crowns the work with the elements. The masculine flame going downward has its base on the two lower supernal sephiroth and ends on the sephiroth just above Malkuth, associated with the moon and the feminine. The ascending tongue of prayer has its base on the two sephiroth directly above Yesod, the sephiroth that the descending flame ends at, and has its top on the first sephiroth of Kether, the symbol of masculine creation. In Crowley's modification of the Kabbalistic cross the first gesture, at the head, is identified with Hadit, the point of conscious creative light infinitely small and contracted, while the second gesture, which touches the genitals, is identified with Nuit, the goddess of infinite space. The two forces meet at the sphere of Tiphareth, representing the crown and conquering child as well as the sun, with 'child' being something identified as a hermaphrodite or at least as either sex.

In the enacting of the ritual the power of the sun, of the new produced crowned and conquering child, unites the magician to the rest of the universe outside of the microcosm, which is where the energies of the elements as opposed to the planetary energies reside. The male and female basic powers could easily be called 'God' and 'Goddess', only in this scenario the God is the god of the sky and the Goddess is the Goddess of the earth, bringing forth the illuminating sun through their union.

So in the ritual of the Pentagram we have the four elements called and then the masculine or god force and the female or goddess force invoked. The only problem is that there's no equivalent of a sun god or crowned child connecting stars and earth in Wicca. Instead, throughout the wheel of the year the masculine and feminine forces interact, impregnating the Goddess, but the being the the Goddess gives birth to is a new version of the God who impregnated her and who has since died and gone to the underworld.

Crowley resolved this conflict by making an entire self sufficient cycle of positive and negative, of ascent from the underworld, height at noon, descent at sundown, and lowest point at the middle of the night, for Horus, the crowned and conquering child, that although interacting with Hadit and Nuit doesn't subsume them.

In the Great Rite of Wicca at Beltaine the impregnation of the Goddess by the God is done to create new life on the earth that will manifest through the harvest several months later that will in turn sustain the community. So in a way you could possibly say that the idea of a middle term and a concrete product from the creation of the middle term could be the life given to the earth generated from the interaction of the two deities, and that in less Wheel of the Year linked rituals the product of the symbolic Great Rite is the power of the humans that work with it and their goals and desires.

Sunset towns by James Loewen examines racism against blacks in the North and how it works

Sundown Towns deals with towns that had policies forbidding blacks from staying there after sundown as well as limiting how many blacks could have homes in the town, often forcibly expelling the black population and leaving a token family. This gets to what might be the big difference between northern and southern racism in the United States: in the North racism is more about exclusion than outward hostility, although of course that's present as well, while in the South racism is more up front and in your face.

I can imagine some of the experiences that blacks have in the north, like extra questions and suspicions while making a major purchase, like that of a car, or having an interview to get a bank loan for a house. Or even shopping for nice clothes. Moving into an area no doubt has great suspicion attached to it. Job applications and interviews are no doubt full of apprehension and doubt on the half of the interviewer, who holds the guy being interviewed to a different standard than white applicants.

Exclusion is the key that I see among all of these sorts of experiences, the fear of black people participating in communities, and a general closing of ranks against the black people who want to become part of them. Walls of silence, more hassles than others in everyday life, suspicion. I've noticed that in many situations in restaurants and elsewhere that as soon as a black person walks in many of the conversations stop and don't start again until he or she leaves. The same can be said of normal, everyday occurrences like standing at bus stops and waiting for a the light to change at a cross walk. It's the creation and reinforcement of a 'whites only' space, a kind of unique white experience consisting of regular life and interaction that blacks are denied participation in.

The laws restricting blacks in the north were never as codified and obvious as those in the south, where separate but equal was rigorously enforced and vigilante violence seems to have been a significant factor. In the north, in white society, people who start ranting and raving about blacks, especially if they use the 'N Word', aren't very popular. Unless the community you live in is deeply, overtly, racist, people like that are likely to be labeled nuts and extremists, although some lesser complaints against blacks may be sort of accepted as kind of reasonable. Yet the same people who consider these folks to be beyond the pale unconsciously do their best to marginalize blacks when they actually have a physical encounter with a black person.

I think that this attitude by whites has contributed to the ghettoization of blacks in inner cities, with economics and the economic place of blacks in society probably being the dominant factor. It's okay if blacks live someplace in the area as long as they don't go into white areas too much, or go into shopping districts that lots of white people shop at, or think of buying homes in a very white area. It's also okay if they do work that lets them be invisible to the majority of white people. Of course these are extremely low paying jobs with very low status attached to them. It's a fortress attitude.

Although unspoken, the idea seems to be that whites in the north see blacks as an invading force and do their best to make life unpleasant for them when they try to participate as full citizens in life there as opposed to citizens that lead a marginal life. Northern cities benefited from the exodus of southern blacks to their industrial sectors, but didn't want them to seriously challenge the status quo.

While whites often complain about blacks as if people who dress like 'gangsters' are the whole black population, it takes two to tango. The barriers to entry into society, white and otherwise that are put up to black people in the north are unreal. I say 'and otherwise' because whites in the north don't see their society as being 'white society' per se but as being 'normal society' in general. Blacks are considered to be outside of 'normal society' for whatever reason, usually a rationalization based on a few people in the black community who are really visible.

A sociological/political solution to racism, as opposed to the kind of economic change that would also need to happen, would have to involve whites letting their guards down, letting their apprehensions mellow, and affirming that there's a common humanity shared between blacks and whites with certain universal rights that go with it. These rights include the right to meainginful participation in public life.

Perestroika necessitated by the way that Stalin fucked up the Soviet Economy?

Perestroika refers to the economic restructuring that took place in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. One of the causes of the fall of the USSR is thought to be severe economic problems. Stalin, in his five year plans, created industries out of nothing in a very brutal way, one that took no notice of how much time or resources exactly these things that were being built would need to be fully functional at a decent level. For example, I recently saw a book of photographs detailing how the biggest car factory in the world was being built in the Soviet Union under Stalin in just 18 months.
The errors at the start of industry may have carried over and plagued the rest of Soviet economic development, ultimately leading to the crisis that Perestroika was set to correct and that opened the way for the destruction---not the reformation---of Russia as it had been for decades.

I wonder if the war on terror isn't linked to the Cold War

In terms of domestic consumption. The major idea of the War on Terror that's repeated over and over again is that they hate our freedoms and that they, the Muslim and Asian countries we don't like, are stopping at nothing to get weapons of mass destruction that they will craftily use to dominate other countries and take their freedoms away. Why exactly they don't like freedom is not specified. Maybe the leaders had bad encounters with freedom lovers as children that have left them scarred for life. In any case they just hate the idea of freedom and to even try to understand why they do is to be on their side, because their thought processes are so far out in the stratosphere beyond normalcy that they don't make any sense, and you're better off not looking at them because they might influence you too. Even though they're completely irrational. The doctrine has the appeal of not requiring any sort of an explanation of why the people and states we're targeting, if they really are working against the U.S., are doing so, leaving us with a series of options that resembles a neo-Nazi poster that surfaced in the '80s that had a gun and a swastika with the words "Violence: it's the only thing they understand". The Cold War was packaged the same way.

Yes, the Soviet Union did have huge censorship powers, it forbade opposition parties and free elections, it severely restricted artistic freedom, and didn't tolerate people who they thought were acting against the interests of the State, but the people who were enforcing all of this didn't do it for no reason, or just because they hated the free press. Their reasons for all of this weren't very good, and I think, although I can't confirm it yet, that they were holdovers from what Stalin had done to the USSR, but there were reasons. If the media in the U.S. had tried to understand the motivation for all of this on the part of the Soviets and reported on it in a critical yet informed way it could have had the effect of pushing the U.S. government into a closer engagement with them. It could have defused part of the Cold War, although not all of it.
I'm not saying that "If the government had.." because writing this it appears certain that the U.S. government wouldn't have, and that restrictions on art, democracy, and press freedom weren't what bothered them since they supported ultra-right dictatorships in South America that were as bad as the Soviets on that score. Instead, the U.S. seems to have been afraid of the redistribution of goods and of power. Anyways.

Just as Communism was unintelligible but very dangerous, threatening to put the entire world under a dictatorship so is radical Islam, plus assorted other official enemies, unintelligible but threatening to put the entire world under a dictatorship. Same shit, different name, only in this case there's even less justification because radical Islam doesn't control huge countries having over a billion citizens. Maybe the problem started with Gulf War I, where the media shifted from Cold War to Saddam War without bothering to let people know that, hey!, a lot of what we told you about the Soviets was bullshit in the way it was presented.

Now the GWOT has taken its place. Maybe we should have an amnesty for truth instead of bumbling towards more and more idiotic but deadly wars with no official reason that's in any way believable , for goals that really reflect those of big industrial capitalists.

Prize for most redundant, obvious, title of an article: Hillary is White by Zillah Eisenstein

Which also includes the gem "And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white."

More gems: "She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness."

"As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black)."

"She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right.
More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. "

If she wasn't so rambling and hysterical (oh! I used the word, so I must be sexist!), sounding like a crazed and not too intelligent radical theorist who's also an acid casualty, she might have some interesting points. That is if she bothered to flesh them out.

Hillary runs as an unspoken white woman. She lives in a misogynist society so she can't be benefiting from being a woman, yet as a woman she's reigniting a feminist tradition that our misogynist society once had.

Which one is it? And why am I bothering to write this? There are no clear answers in sight for these questions.

Things that piss me off: people who condemn intellectuals while doing nothing themselves

It seems to me that a lot of the objection to intellectuals on the Left comes from people whose only contribution to social change is getting tattoos on their forearms and going to punk rock shows.

I would agree about intellectualism having dangers on its own without incorporation into practice if the people making the criticism were actually out there advancing social change in some way, but when it comes from people whose activity is nil it's pretty meaningless. We're about on the same level, I figure.

The difference is that intellectuals are actually trying to understand the world and are trying to break the U.S. culture of hostility towards greater awareness about the past, the present, and other countries, while the people with a lot of tattoos assume that they already get it because....they have tattoos and listen to punk rock.

Hypocrisy of Mao

As manifested through the document "On New Democracy", which the title link leads to. Most of the document is fairly interesting, giving a persuasive outline of how revolution in China weakens world capitalism, but when it comes to the thing that Mao is most known for, Cultural Revolution, it falls into hemming and hawing. The document was written in 1940 while China was engaged in a war against Japanese occupation, before the Chinese Communist Party had taken over the entire country.

Mao devotes several substantive sections to culture, of which three quotations are notable:

"To advocate "wholesale westernization" [22] is wrong. China has suffered a great deal from the mechanical absorption of foreign material. Similarly, in applying Marxism to China, Chinese communists must fully and properly integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, or in other words, the universal truth of Marxism must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula. Marxists who make a fetish of formulas are simply playing the fool with Marxism and the Chinese revolution, and there is no room for them in the ranks of the Chinese revolution. Chinese culture should have its own form, its own national form. National in form and new-democratic in content--such is our new culture today. "

"New-democratic culture is scientific. Opposed as it is to all feudal and superstitious ideas, it stands for seeking truth from facts, for objective truth and for the unity of theory and practice. On this point, the possibility exists of a united front against imperialism, feudalism and superstition between the scientific thought of the Chinese proletariat and those Chinese bourgeois materialists and natural scientists who are progressive, but in no case is there a possibility of a united front with any reactionary idealism. In the field of political action Communists may form an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal united front with some idealists and even religious people, but we can never approve of their idealism or religious doctrines."


"However, respect for history means giving it its proper place as a science, respecting its dialectical development, and not eulogizing the past at the expense of the present or praising every drop of feudal poison. As far as the masses and the young students are concerned, the essential thing is to guide them to look forward and not backward."

In a sense something like this was inevitable since Mao was allied with Stalin, called Stalin his boss, but the sad thing is that it continued after Stalin's death, when countries no longer were required to parrot this sort of stuff so uncritically, although they were highly, highly, encouraged to do so. China labeled Khruschev and the reforms that he instituted revisionist, and they may indeed have been so, but at that point China could have struck out on its own, creating a new sort of mix of ideas that were less uncritical of so-called 'scientific' doctrines that were really Western cultural values in a new disguise.

Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood, celebrates Norway's independence....from Denmark

Well I guess you have to have something to celebrate. Ballard is home to a large Norwegian population. The idea of Norwegian independence and celebrating it sounds a lot more dramatic when you don't know that the Danes, the evil, evil, Danes, were the group of people who Norway was subject to. I mean, it doesn't hold a candle to Finland being incorporated into the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917.

"On the Silver Globe", film by Andrzej Zulawski

Based on something called "The Lunar Trilogy" by Zulawski's great uncle Jerzej Zulawski, it's truly a hidden gem. It's a science fiction story, and one of the highest quality sci-fi films I've ever seen. The story goes like this: four astronauts on a mission to a habitable planet picked for possible colonization crash land, killing one and leaving three others, two men and one woman. They adapt to their new situation by learning to hunt fish, construct clothes out of native materials, along with shelter. From the beginning the planet's environment is so utterly different that it changes their whole view of life and of the world. The female astronaut came pregnant with the baby of the deceased astronaut and she gives birth to the child, who grows up in this different world, in the circumstances that the survivors have carved out for themselves, with earth being known to him from stories. Over time the settlement becomes more and more tribalistic, more like cultures that are found in the south pacific and elsewhere, and the female astronaut continues to conceive and to give birth in order to keep the human race going.

Eventually she enters the mythology of the group, that has now been totally immersed in the new culture for nearly a generation, as the great mother, the creator of the earth, the ancestor of all of humanity. The male astronaut who has fathered most of the children is, in a much lesser sense, is eventually also deified. Hunting, gathering, life, death, all becomes part of the new religion. The last astronaut is sort of ostracized from the community, lead by the first child, until an incident involving the leader prompts him to order him killed. After that he assumes the role of both religious leader and the general elder of the community, although other people serve as the actual day to day leaders.

This suits him very well because he was the philosopher of the group, now in a situation where his philosophy and thoughts on life can be worked with and provide food for thought for the people. The philosophy is adapted to the situation, with the people not treated as stupid but as sincere questioners who just want to understand the life that they're living. It turns out that he has fathered some of the last children with the great mother, and like Moses the line of these children becomes the priestly one, with the immediate daughter taking over and becoming a law giver.

I haven't even scratched the surface of all the stuff that happens. They find that there's a race of beings that also inhabit the planet known as Shernes, and engage in war with them, at one point being enslaved by them. Then there's another war lead by an new astronaut that's crash landed generations and generations after the start of the community. You see how the community has developed and permutated in the intervening years.

It goes on and on, beautifully produced, made, and thought out. But not quite. There was a change in the cultural department of Communist Poland during the filming and the film was ordered stopped. The footage was condemned to be destroyed but was saved by the studio. There are large gaps in the film that Zulawski at the beginning explains and that he tries to compensate for by giving a voice over explanation of what happens during these scenes.

I really, really, wish that "The Lunar Trilogy" by Jerzej Zulawski will eventually come out in an English edition, because this is really good stuff. According to Wiki it's been translated into virtually every other European language and is a big success there.

Fortunately, "On the Silver Globe" is available in U.S. DVD format all over the place, like Here.

Jack Kevorkian is a hero in Oakland County MIchigan

Where I lived during the last part of the drama. Seeing "Death with Dignity" initiative people at the University District Street Fair reminded me of it. I supported Jack Kevorkian, my family supported Jack Kevorkian, people protested with him and for him on the steps of the federal court house in Pontiac. It's strange for me to think of people not supporting him, but during all this I was fortunate enough to go to a summer writing program at Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and I found that the impression of Kevorkian there was shock and disgust. He really was "Dr. Death" to them. They seemed sort of horrified when I told them that he had actual support in Michigan. Death with Dignity makes sense; the medical community is committed to keeping a person alive no matter what, no matter if they're in constant pain and have been for years, are barely functional, have no chance of recovery whatsoever, and are likely to either stay that way or slowly decline for years to come. Having physician assisted suicide or other measures gives the person them self a way out of the situation. The idea that it could lead to mass killings is sort of not tenable.

Peter Singer, maybe best known for his work on Animal Liberation, has also written about this, saying that if your motivation is to reduce the pain felt by people and increase the happiness or pleasure that death with dignity is a good idea. So is abortion. So is not keeping people alive at birth who are so severely deformed that they would have horrible lives and require constant care until they die. He attacks the notion that human life is absolutely sacred pretty forcefully, and his arguments are very applicable to the controversy surrounding abortion, in that in his opinion there's not a good idea of just what personhood. It's always a grey area. If life begins at conception than the zygote is eligible for the rights and privileges that full grown individuals have. If personhood starts when someone is a fetus who is not viable outside of the womb then abortion in totality is wrong and is tantamount to murder, even though the fetus may have spontaneously aborted later. Are miscarriages murder? Why not? The sanctity of life argument has no reference to practical realities. We want to protect all life for the sake of the principle and not for the sake of the people whose lives we are committed to saving.