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Nick Tosches on Opium Dens | vanityfair.com.

Nick Toshes goes on a hunt for the last opium den.  Real opium.  The Philosopher’s Stone of drugs apparently.

It’s a good read.

Tags: Drugs, Nick Tosches, Opium, Vanity Fair

Naomi Klein on Branding Taking over American Politics

I love this line about Obama’s presidency so far:

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions,

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This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede).

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Obama … follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States).

Tags: Naomi Klein, No Label, Obama

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

These entire article reads like a bizarre Hollywood movie script starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.  Except true.  Worth a read if you feel like maintaining your general ongoing outrage about Gitmo.

The Canadian Press: Robert Parker, 77-year-old creator of ‘Spenser’ private eye novels, dies.

I’m making the saddest of sad faces right now.

My friend Linda wrote about it too.

We Really Need a New Word For Looting (from the Awl)

“Looters,” reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, “were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below.” That “looting” is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one’s own benefit—not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless—seems to have entirely escaped these reporters.

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just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store’s shattered roof, handing out goods can by can.” This article, incidentally, is headlined “Haiti Authorities Battle Looters.”

You can read the whole article but you’ve probably already figured it out.  Haitians intent on surviving are doing what it takes to survive.   But newspapers are nothing if not predictable in their headline writing.

I had MLK day off, but I’ll have a Monday Jam up for you later today.

Tags: haiti, idiocy, newspapers

Six years ago Stuart Stevens, a write and competitive cyclist, contacted a doctor who was willing to guide him through the same regimen of performance enhancing drugs that a professional athlete would use.

The story is the most illuminating article I have ever read about PEDs. How they work, what they are used for, and why athletes use them. In light of Mark Mcgwire finally telling us what we already knew I think it’s worth reading again. I pretty much consider it mandatory reading before you get to have an opinion about PEDs.

Drug Test.

Tags: HGH, Mark McGwire, PEDs, Steroids, Testosterone

I live just outside Indianapolis and I feel I am required by some kind of law to post this.

Hennessy, Dog Crap, And A Touching Glimpse Into The Head And Home Of Ron Artest - The Dark Side Of The Locker Room - Deadspin.

I’ll never forget what I saw inside. Instead of crown molding, there were empty Hennessy bottles glued to his wall. There was dog crap everywhere, and where there wasn’t, there was either someone sleeping or evidence that someone had just slept there — a sleeping bag and pillow. There were guys all over the place. On the landing of the stairs. On the couch. Free-style rapping in the corner. (I can’t help but wonder if one of his stairwell dwellers, transplanted to Los Angeles, was the “box” Artest tripped over last month.) I engaged one for a few minutes as Ron went to change clothes. I asked if all the guys were from the “QB,” Queensbridge, the public housing development in New York where Artest grew up. The reply still sticks with me.

“Yeah,” he said. “We all are. We all made a deal when we were young. If one of us made it out, we’d take the rest with us. Ron made it out.”

Tags: pacers, ron artest, sports

The Great Joe Rollino, Bender of Steel, Is Dead at 104 - NYTimes.com.

Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Rollino was proudest of one in particular. “My finger strength,” he told an interviewer for ESPN The Magazine. “Six hundred thirty-five pounds. See the size of it. At 150 pounds, nobody ever beat me in this world.”

He was run over by a van while crossing the street. Even the world’s strongest man can’t live forever.

I think I’ve written before that I like to wake up and race to work like a napalm dropping Super Sabre. This of course requires a certain variety of toe tapping music that really gets the gas pedal feeling juicy. I never know what I’m looking for. I only know when I find it.

Here’s this morning’s: Go Go Gorilla from the Shandells. Just another forgotten garage band.

Tags: Go Go Gorilla, The Shandells

American Evangelicals Role Seen Uganda’s Anti-Gay Push:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.
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Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

It would be easy to accuse the NY Times of being ridiculously naive and American-centric in writing an article detailing how three schlubs from the Evangelical ghetto of American ideology had an impact on Ugandan domestic policy. Except that Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, has written extensively about American Christians exporting their homophobia to Africa and the impact its made across the continent: The U.S. Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa.

From his article:

Amid the utter hysteria, any sense that homosexuality has been in Africa from time immemorial was lost. While hardly embraced, and indeed illegal in many countries, at least LGBT people were not hounded by churches and police alike – until American culture warriors came to Africa. Bishop Christopher Ssenjonyo, one of the most progressive voices on LGBT issues in Uganda, expressed his own concerns about the Americans’ role to me in March, “I am sure that these lies will incite public hatred against gays.“