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Thursday Night Links: Antiwar Badassery, “Fortunate Son”, Sex Offenders, Bourbon, and Bitches

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  • It's all true.

    It’s all true.

    A meeting of minds on sites for which I write: Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo chats with Rare’s Kurt Wallace, mostly about Rand Paul’s prospects.

  • Also, I enjoyed this Eric Garris (also Antiwar.com) chat with Alan Colmes, of all people, from this summer. They talk about the return of Americans to Iraq, which is a topic that gets more relevant every damned day.
  • Since I’ve been internet creeping on Eric and Justin lately — thanks to many epic Eric stories — here are some other good things. Let us admire Justin’s completely un-hidable contempt for a security state creep who looks like a painted LEGO in this Freedom Watch interview. And Eric being generally insightful and well-spoken in this RT thing from a few years back.
  • Boohoo, Bruce Springsteen played “Fortunate Son” at a 11/11 rally. Jesse Walker has the best response to this non-controversy.
  • Apropos of none of these topics, I wrote a thing for Rare about how the sex offender registry is bad.
  • I guested on Tiffany Madison’s Bourbon and Bitches podcast twice in the past month.

This one is about online harassment, rape laws, and other feminist-leaning topics.

This one is about net neutrality, the troops, and my half-assed defense of Lena Dunham. Also sex robots. Tiffany loves to discuss sex robots.

Let me declare this is today’s video, if only to keep on practicing at not being a music snob. Or being the kind of music snob who likes certain pop music. Which I don’t usually.

But this is pretty fun.

And yet — and yet:

This is why I don’t understand people who only or mostly listen to poppy stuff. It’s fun, it’s good, until you listen to realer stuff. You’re not bad, Taylor, you just gotta know your place.

Tuesday Evening Links: Old Timeyness, Hank Williams Sr. Bio Pic, Nuclear Terror, Yelling at John Bolton

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  • r4ru2qdrwzm954iylcmrNathan Salsburg, the fellow now in charge of the Alan Lomax archive has brought back his Root Hog or Die radio show, which can be listened to this a-way on Tuesdays from 3 p.m. EST to 4 p.m. Do it.
  • That very same fellow has also written up for The Oxford American a good look at the massive, Jack White-produced 400 dollar (so that’s not happening) box set Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917–1927).
  • My previous experience with Root Hog or Die is this amazing playlist (forever a grateful hat tip to Jim Epstein) which contains my first experience with weird-ass shapenote singing and other important thing like that.
  • My friend Rodge has weeks and years of killer radio shows. I’ll never get through them all, but he’s a great, weird, diverse, but country and old time-loving DJ.
  • Oh hey, there will finally be a Hank Williams Sr. biopic and a…British guy will play the lead. He looks right, but will he sound right? (On a side note, British people doing bad American accents remains one of the funnier damn things in the world. We all sound like John Wayne Valley Girls, it seems.)
  • In my dreams, there’s a site like Jezebel except it only reports on documentaries about conjoined Vaudeville twins. I very much watch to watch this.
  • How to dress like Gary Cooper
  • Overwrought VICE Motherboard piece on the fax machine brings up interesting points — maybe analog right before the internet is the only way to truly, securely communicate. Also, I do — mostly while wandering in antique or vintage stores, sometimes starring at eight tracks — wonder about all the stuff not old enough to be interesting, yet useless in the digital age. (On another note, I don’t get the hipster love for cassettes, I really do not. But then, I don’t understand 1990s nostalgia either.)
  • I haven’t yet clicked all the way through Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time, but I did laugh for a solid 30 seconds upon discovering the song title “She’s Actin’ Single, I’m Drinkin’ Doubles.” Perfect.
  • In honor of Tuesday Apocalypse: io9’s Vincze Miklos collected some of the most amazing, eerie Soviet Civil Defense posters possible. I desperately want them all. If I were rich, I would have the creepiest house in the entire world, I really would. I would have a room of gas masks, terrifying nuke pamphlets, and old weapons and everyone would think I was a serial killer. I know this. I accept this about myself.
  • Further Tuesday Apocalypse: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog’s Alex Wellerstein on the nuanced and myriad meanings of Robert Oppenheimer’s “I am become death, destroyer of worlds”  thoughts post-Trinity Test. (He may not have thought that all in the moment, but realized it sounded all epic and full of gravity more than a decade later.  He was right.)
  • This is not related, but a plea for your strong female character to actually do something for the plot. I approve. And on a side note that is more related, if you don’t understand why this matters to anyone, read Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, then watch the 1990s movie. Compare and contrast the portrayal of “Mary” between the two mediums after 50 years of what we all thought was progress. Sob into your pillow. Thank you.)
  • Also unrelated — unless 2003 is old timey — but I was pleased to see some fight in The Independents re necon bullshit. Former Ambassador John Bolton starts off the scuffle by accusing libertarians of being pro-Saddam Hussein and it goes down from there. (I also love that even when the show is at its most cable news-ish talking over each other, the yelling is about George Orwell and Iraq war casualties. Classy.)

Today’s video: Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua singing an unrecorded Fuqua number, to get us all jazzed for the new Old Crow album next month:

(and not to cry too much over it being sans Willie Watson — whimper). I did not see this show, nor have I seen them play this song, but I did catch their reunion tour, and it was amazing.

Oh, okay. Here. My hat is basically the first thing you see.