Tag Washington Times

“Spirit Cooking”: They Got Nothin’

The latest thing conservatives have got a bug up their ass about concerns something called “Spirit Cooking”. This is an art project by artist Marina Abramovic from 1996. It’s presented as pages from a cookbook, including such “recipes” as

3 glasses of water
that a ruby has been soaking in for 3 days
1 pomegranate

which looks to me like par for the course for a performance artist in the 90s. Other “recipes” call for “fresh morning urine” OR “fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk”. According to the Washington Times article, above, she sounds like a mystic, somewhat crunchy-granola, and provocative. Again, par for the course in the art world.

So why is this suddenly showing up in the political news section? Because WikiLeaks has released an email message from Tony Podesta to John Podesta, relaying an invitation to Abramovic’s Spirit Dinner event.

So we have a weird-ass artist. She knows Tony Podesta, who’s the brother of John Podesta, who’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and generally an important person in American politics. She uses her connection with Tony to invite John, as you do.

And apparently the conclusion to draw here is that John Podesta is into drinking urine or satanic rituals or something, and by extension, that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president. Or something like that.

If that’s the best they’ve got, I’m not impressed. Or rather, I’m impressed that people so disconnected from reality manage to tie their shoes in the morning.

A Couple of News Items

First, an editorial in the Moonie Times about why the Proposition 8 decision was a mistake.

Just to dash any hopes you might have had that it might be well thought out:

First of all, the Plaintiffs have made (deliberately) a glaring legal error which I was at first surprised Judge Walker could overlook with no fallout. The opponents of Proposition 8 argue that homosexuals are a suspect class. But as every student of law and political science knows, homosexuals are not a suspect class. They are not even a quasisuspect class. Homosexuals are a nonsuspect class. This means that the court should only have to apply a minimum rationality standard of review.

I’m no lawyer, but as I understand it, “suspect class” basically means “hey, state! That law looks like it could be bigoted. Show me that it isn’t.” Now, if you’d asked me, I would have thought that since there’s a long history of discrimination against gays, that they’d qualify as a suspect class. Thankfully, Amanda Read managed to prove me wrong, with her “every student … knows”. I guess that settles that.

(Except that she missed the bit on p.117 of the decision where the judge says that the case for Prop 8 can’t even withstand the much less onerous “rational basis review”.)

Speaking of which, I find it amusing that the word “gay” appears three times in her article: twice when she’s quoting someone else, and a third time when she’s mostly paraphrasing someone else. The word “homosexual”, on the other hand, appears nine times, each time when she’s speaking for herself. I’ve seen this a lot. Apparently the far right vastly prefers “homosexual” over “gay”. I can only imagine that this is a compromise since society won’t let them say “faggot” anymore.

The second bit of news is that apparently New York now has no-fault divorce.

Wait, what? They didn’t have it until now? Seriously? New York?

In case you’re not sure why this is a good thing, the article lays out the basic argument for no-fault divorce, which is basically that when a couple falls out of love, they have a choice of either going through a lengthy separation process, or going to court with bogus charges of infidelity or abuse. No-fault divorce allows people to avoid these sorts of expensive and unseemly charades.