Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Liz Phair

I was asked in an e-mail about a review this weekend?  I'd love to review Miley Cyrus' new album and I'm also listening to the Jonas Brothers' THE ALBUM so maybe.  We'll see. Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS  "At Least Satan Wants Her" went up Sunday.


tulsigurus


I don't know what they told you.  Don't even care what about.  All I know is I'm clean as a whistle, baby, I didn't let the cat out.

So don't look at me sideways.  Don't even look me straight on.  And don't look at my hands in my pockets, baby, I ain't done anything wrong.

Some may be saying, "Huh?"  Others may be nodding along.  The first two paragraphs are lyrics to Liz Phair's "Never Said."  It is one of the tracks on her classic 1993 album EXILE IN GUYVILLE -- one of the best grunge, alternative-rock albums of all time.

Today, UPI reports:


Liz Phair is going on tour in 2023.

The 56-year-old singer-songwriter announced a new tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of her debut studio album, Exile in Guyville, on Tuesday.

The tour begins Nov. 7 in El Cajon, Calif., and concludes Dec. 3 in Dallas. Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. local time, with pre-sales to begin Wednesday.

Each show will see Phair perform the entirety of Exile in Guyville, which features the singles "Never Said" and "Stratford-on-Guy," and fan favorite songs. Blondshell will join the tour as a special guest.




November 11th, she'll be in my city.  It's a very brief tour.  

Liz.  

I never reviewed LIZ PHAIR, her 2003 album.  If I had, I probably would have called it out.  It's grown on me overtime.

But the reality is that Liz needed to take accountability -- not write letters to THE NEW YORK TIMES about how mean she felt the paper was over her album.

In 1993, she released one of the greatest albums of all time.

And then she released a ton of crap.  After two crap albums, she released LIZ PHAIR.  It was not EXILE.  But it did rock.  And she does let loose on the songs.  And, again, it's grown on me.

But grasp that when your first full album is excellent, people expect something impressive from you.  

Is it fair?  I don't know.  It's what it is.


If you're ever going to see Liz, this would be the time.  She'll be performing that amazing album track for track.  All 18 tracks.  My top ten from the album?  

1) "Divorce Song"
2) "Never Said"
3) "Flower"
4) "6'1""
5) "Johnny Sunshine"
6) "Stratford-On-Guy"
7) "F**k and Run"
8) "Explain It To Me"
9) "Glory"
10) "Help Me Mary"

I love every track on the album but those are my top ten favorites and in that order.  I've purchased EXILE IN GUYVILLE five times by now.  The first three times were in the fall of 1993.  Both times the CD was borrowed and not returned.  The third one I got smart and refused to loan out.  But I listened to it constantly on road trips and, in 1998, forgot it in the CD player of a rental car.  In 2000, I bought my fourth copy.  And this year I finally got it on vinyl. 



Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"  

Tuesday, May 16, 2023.  A presidential visit to Australia looms as Australians prepare to turn out for Julian Assange, women and girls in Iraq continue to suffer as needed laws are not addressed, hate merchant Lauren Boebert thinks she can lecture others when she should be hanging her head in shame, and so much more.


May 24th may end up being an important day.  US President Joe Biden is expected to visit Australia.  Australians are expected to let him know what they think of his persecution of Julian Assange.


Julian Assange remains imprisoned and remains persecuted by US President Joe Biden who, as vice president, once called him "a high tech terrorist."  Julian's 'crime' was revealing the realities of Iraq -- Chelsea Manning was a whistle-blower who leaked the information to Julian.  WIKILEAKS then published the Iraq War Logs.  And many outlets used the publication to publish reports of their own.  For example, THE GUARDIAN published many articles based on The Iraq War Logs.  Jonathan Steele, David Leigh and Nick Davies offered, on October 22, 2012:



A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat



The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.

The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.

But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.

Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.

Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.


Oscar Grenfell (WSWS) reports, "A poll conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) last week showed that 79 percent of respondents wanted the Biden administration to end its pursuit of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange so that he can be free."  The presidential visits are supposed to be about 'optics' and it won't be the needed optics if news footage, over US airwaves, shows a lot of Australians turning out to protest Joe.  Not really what he or his re-election campaign wants but it could be the push -- or part of the  push -- to finally motivate Joe to end the persecution of Julian.   Fabien Scheidler (PRESSENZA) reminds, "Julian Assange has not been charged with any crime in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, or in his native Australia. He is in custody solely because the U.S. is demanding his extradition to face charges under a draconian World War 1 espionage act and imprison him for the rest of his life." Belén Fernández (ALJAZEERA) notes:


Granted, footage of defenceless civilians being picked off at close range like videogame targets by a laughing helicopter crew does little to uphold Americans’ projected role as the “good guys” – a façade that is key in terms of justifying the country’s self-presumed right to wreak international havoc as it pleases.

Had Assange wanted to save his own skin, he could have stuck to the sort of imperial propaganda that functions as mainstream journalism, a field that was itself instrumental in selling the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq to the US public.

Instead, he is incarcerated at Belmarsh prison in southeast London, awaiting extradition to the so-called “land of the free” while serving as a veritable case study in prolonged psychological torture, as documented back in 2019 by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.


Bruce Wolpe (SYDNEY MORNING HERALD) addresses a new rumor, "President Biden’s slated visit to Australia for the Quad meeting – although there is now speculation that his deputy Kamala Harris might replace him – has presented a powerful opportunity to further press the case."  The protesters will be there regardless of whether it's Joe or Kamala.  And a large protest against the US administration in Australia won't make for happy headlines regardless of whether Joe's the visitor or Kamala is. 







Iraqi activists are urging the government to pass legislation against gender-based violence, as current regulations are so weak that they allow many men to escape punishment.

The country has been rocked by a string of brutal murders, including the killing last week of a two-month-old girl by her father because of her gender.

Soon after, a woman was killed by her father for refusing to marry the man he had chosen for her.


“Violence against women and children is increasing and this is not a new phenomenon,” Suhalia Al Assam, a women's rights activist and member of the Iraqi Women's League, told The National.

“There are many cases that have not caught the attention of the public and they are crimes that must be stopped.

“The country does not have a specific law to tackle domestic abuse.”

Iraq's criminal code outlaws violence within the family but does not specify consequences for domestic abuse, nor does it stipulate penalties for perpetrators.

“There must be no impunity. We have been demanding this for over a decade and no action has been taken. Hundreds of women have lost their lives to this issue,” Ms Al Assam said.




The death on April 18 of a 20-year-old woman in Najaf, possibly at the hands of her husband, should act as a wake-up call for Iraqi legislators to pass a law against domestic violence, Human Rights Watch said today. Iraqi authorities should investigate and prosecute domestic violence, and ensure appropriate sentences for violence against women.

“Domestic violence has always plagued Iraq,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We see case upon case of women and girls dying at the hands of their families, but Iraq's lawmakers have not done enough to save those lives.”

On April 12, a video surfaced on social media of the woman in a hospital with severe burn wounds. Her mother told Human Rights Watch that eight months ago her daughter married a police officer who had only allowed her to visit her parents once since then. On April 8, her mother said, the husband called to tell her that his wife had a “slight burn accident” and was in the hospital.

The mother could hear her daughter screaming. She rushed to the hospital, where the husband’s mother blocked her from seeing her daughter. Police took the young woman’s statement while her mother was blocked from the room, the mother said. On April 11, when she was able to enter the hospital room, her daughter told her that her husband had beaten her so badly on April 8 that she poured gasoline on herself and warned him that unless he stopped, she would light herself on fire.

“I still don’t know if he lit her on fire or she did it herself, but she told me she burned for three minutes while he just watched, and finally his father, also a policeman, came in and put out the fire,” the mother said. “She begged them to take her to the hospital but they waited for over an hour before doing so. Her father-in-law then pretended to the police that he was her father and said to them the fire had been an accident.”

The young woman died on April 18. Najaf’s governor, Loai al-Yasiri, told Human Rights Watch on April 15 that the authorities had established an investigation committee and arrested the husband, father-in-law, and the husband’s uncle. Al-Yasiri said that this case would likely be resolved through a mediation in which the husband’ family’s ashira (clan) would negotiate with Samira’s family’s ashira to reach a non-judicial settlement.

Domestic violence remains a serious problem in Iraq. The Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS) of 2006/7 found that one in five Iraqi women are subject to physical domestic violence. A 2012 Planning Ministry study found that at least 36 percent of married women reported experiencing some form of psychological abuse from their husbands, 23 percent verbal abuse, 6 percent physical violence, and 9 percent sexual violence.



In 2021, ALJAZEERA filed the report below.




Yesterday's snapshot noted   Ali Mamouri (AL-MONITOR) reported:


Following a series of confrontations, it seems an open war has broken out between the Catholic Caledonian Church and the Christian political party and militia of Babylon Movement.

In mid-April, an Iraqi court issued a summons for Cardinal Louis Sako, patriarch and archbishop of Baghdad, in response to an accusation by an Iraqi businessman affiliated with the Babylon Movement over a property belonging to the church.

On April 29, Rayan al-Kaldani, secretary-general of the Babylon Movement, accused Sako of interfering in politics and damaging the reputation of the church.

In response, Sako held a lengthy video conference May 7, threatening to internationalize the Christian issue if the Iraqi government failed to take action against Kaldani. 

The Babylon Movement was founded in 2014 as a paramilitary group of Christians who fought against the Islamic State (IS). It was later integrated into the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) under the name of the 50th Brigade.

The movement has been implicated in illegal land seizures in Ninevah province and Baghdad, as well as several other corruption cases, particularly in the Ministry of Immigration that has been under their control since 2020.

Babylon was accused of multiple human rights violations during its fight against IS, which eventually led the United States to impose sanctions on Kaldani in 2019.





More than two hundred Christians gathered in Tahrir Square, in the center of Baghdad, on the evening of Friday May 12, to show their solidarity with Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, Patriarch of the Chaldean Church, who became the subject of smear campaigns on social media in recent weeks. The "solidarity demonstration", also included nuns and priests who, like the others present, waved Iraqi flags, candles, olive branches and banners bearing inscriptions calling on the authorities to intervene to ensure that the electoral seats reserved for Christians in the Iraqi parliament are not in fact occupied by groups linked to the main parties.




 


Eleven different European countries, together with the European Union, released a statement on Sunday evening affirming their support for Iraq’s Patriarch Louis Raphaël Sako. 

The Patriarch – who heads the country's Chaldean Church, and was made a Cardinal by Pope Francis in 2018 – is facing criticism over comments concerning political representation for Iraq’s ancient Christian minority.

Sunday’s statement expressed the European governments’ “solidarity” with Patriarch Sako, and stressed the importance of his “efforts to protect the rights of Christians on the soil that they have inhabited for two millennia.” 


 Turning to the US and hate merchants, Lauren Bobert declared on Mother's Day:



“So many try to erase the impact of moms these days – calling us ‘birthing people’ and ‘people with uteruses’ – but we know the truth.”
 

Sad for Lauren, we do know the truth.  We know the truth that she was sexually active in high school with guys who didn't care about her and she ended up pregnant, unmarried and had to drop out of high school.  Instead of learning from this and educating her own children, she raised a son who got an underage girl pregnant repeating the cycle.  
 
Again, we do know the truth.  That truth is Lauren Boebert may have competition for stupidest member of Congress; however, she is the trashiest.  That's how she ends up married to a man who exposes himself to girls at a bowling alley and ends up on probation.

Trash.  

 

And we'd leave it at that; however, she didn't just fail to teach her child the facts of life, Bible-thumper forgot to teach him Hebrews 13:4: 


Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.


Lauren, you've got no high horse to ride.  The only event you're racing is is the sewer derby.  I'm sure you'll do quite well.

In the real world, Jacqueline Luqman Tweets:







We'll wind down with this from Will Lehman:

 


 


The following sites updated:


 

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