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May Day news

I interrupt this Happy Valley Sunday (yes, Penn State is in a place called Happy Valley) for a couple of brief updates.  One, this florid blog somehow entertained 175,000 visitors in April, shattering its previous record of a lot less than that.  Thanks, everyone.  We are at once humbled and vainglorious.  Two, we’ve updated the blogroll.  No kidding.  I mean, we’ve added tons and even long tons of blogs.  We’ve even gotten the name of “The Weblog” right, at long last.  That was a really tricky one.  Three, in other news, the workers have thrown off their chains.  It’s the final conflict!  And the earth shall rise on new foundations!  Cool.  I hope it’ll save Social Security.

UPDATE:  In real news, read the first comment below.  And check out the story, too.

Posted by on 05/01 at 09:43 AM

  1. Hi,
    Please read the story here:
    http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/001242.html
    and consider helping generate a little publicity about the situation.  Thanks.

    Posted by Ann Bartow  on  05/01  at  11:04 AM

  2. Here’s two more of the same shit:

    http://www.mahablog.com/2005.05.01_arch.html#1114946218557

    http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/04/more-places-i-dont-want-to-live.html

    The latter also commented upon here:

    http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/04/bad-faith.html

    This is some sick shit.  I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with talk of “judicial activism.” This is judicial and legislative rape.  No two ways about it.

    Well, may all have a Happy May Day in any case.

    Now where are my pistols?

    Posted by  on  05/01  at  12:01 PM

  3. Say hi to Jo Pa!  And how is a Nittany lion different from all others?  Thanks for the add to the blogroll as well.

    Posted by The Heretik  on  05/01  at  12:25 PM

  4. That’s the best corner picture you’ve ever had, even better than the “gates” one.

    Posted by Adam Kotsko  on  05/01  at  12:39 PM

  5. How geeky am I? During the course of my Mesa Refuge residency this month, when I went on a ten mile solo hike without water on a warm day just to get away from my goddamn book for a morning, the song that went through my head endlessly was The Internationale. That’s how geeky I am.

    I’ve always thought someone should do a reggae version of the song. But then I’ve always thought someone should do a bluegrass version of The Harder They Come. (Can’t you just hear the opening banjo riff?)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/01  at  12:48 PM

  6. Oh, and thanks for adding me to the blogroll, Michael.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/01  at  12:49 PM

  7. Tell me you did not just add us to your blogroll.

    You nut. wink

    Love,

    Hanna

    Posted by Hanna  on  05/01  at  01:34 PM

  8. Ok, news to me—I’ve been a May Day-celebrating neo-Bolshevist for some time now, but no one ever told me that the US and Canada have different versions of The Internationale.

    Their translation is more polite.

    Posted by Alex  on  05/01  at  02:12 PM

  9. And neither has my favorite verse:

    The law oppresses and deceives us,
    the wage slave system drains our blood;
    The rich are free from obligation,
    The laws the poor delude.
    Too long we’ve languished in subjection,
    Equality has other laws;
    “No rights,” says she, “without their duties,
    No claims on equals without cause.”

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/01  at  02:17 PM

  10. Sure I should be grateful for having a place on your blog roll, but I wonder if it isn’t all part of your evil plot to rid yourself of readers to save your bandwidth.

    “Look,” people in Starbucks T Mobile hot spots all over blue state America are exclaiming to each other, as they drop their biscottis and spit out their lattes in shock and dismay, “Berube put that idiot Lance Mannion on his blog roll! I guess Michael’s not as smart, hip, and internet savvy as we thought.  Time to quit wasting our time reading him and give those taste makers at Powerline another chance.”

    Posted by Lance Mannion  on  05/01  at  03:21 PM

  11. … this florid blog somehow entertained 175,000 visitors in April ...

    “Somehow”? Come off it, you little media ho. You know that 50,000 of those clicks were from one paranoiac.

    Posted by GForce  on  05/01  at  03:34 PM

  12. "You know that 50,000 of those clicks were from one paranoiac.” --GForce.

    He thinks the carpet pissers did this?

    Posted by  on  05/01  at  04:11 PM

  13. I’m with Adam:  most excellent corner picture to date.  Even though there’s a little part of my heart that still misses the Deiter visits the Gates picture.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  05/01  at  04:40 PM

  14. Here, in honor of May Day, is one of my favorite “Internationale” reditions, by Japanese band Soul Flower Mononoke Summet (via Critical Montages).

    Incidentally, is having a favorite version of the Internationale enough to make one a Neo-Bolshevik™?  I hope not.  I’d always fancied myself an Affective Leftist™.

    Posted by  on  05/01  at  05:35 PM

  15. Chris Clarke wrote: “But then I’ve always thought someone should do a bluegrass version of The Harder They Come. (Can’t you just hear the opening banjo riff?)”

    Your wish became a North Carolina moment by a band named Snake Oil Medicine Show, who plays a style of music they call BluegrassTafari!.  They have played the Internationale and Anarchy in the UK as well as the full Jimmy Cliff and Wailers/Marley repetoire. 

    A great sadness re: South Carolina’s legal enforcement of fundamentalist orthrodoxy and the young 13 year old girl in Florida living in a care home refused an abortion by the State.

    Posted by  on  05/01  at  06:34 PM

  16. Chris wants a reggae version of “The Internationale” but for yer basic street march, nothing beats a Dixieland brass band rendition. That does wonders for “We Shall Overcome” too.

    Posted by Ron Sullivan  on  05/01  at  07:35 PM

  17. A few thoughts on the heinous reproductive politics in South Carolina--

    If you’re a zygote in SC, you’ve commanded the rapt attention of state leaders. Not so women and children who already walk the earth, however, and especially not if your skin has any pigmentation. In the late 1990s, medical vigilantism encouraged at the Medical College of South Carolina led to in-hospital arrests of pregnant women testing positive for cocaine. At that same time, according to Lynn Paltrow, a civil liberties lawyer and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the waiting lists for women seeking drug treatment were incredibly long; but oddly enough, there’s no wait list for incarceration. And if you smoke and give birth to a stillborn child in SC, you can be prosecuted for murder. Basically, any threat to the fetus is prosecutable, just don’t expect the state to sponsor adequate treatment programs or health systems for women.

    Clearly, one wouldn’t want to congratulate women for choosing risky behaviors while pregnant, but choosing to handle such situations as a criminal matter rather than a public health matter creates dangerous dynamics and some serious blind spots. For instance, already by 2001 in South Carolina, fewer women were seeking prenatal care, child mortality had increased, and border states were receiving requests from pregnant women for services. Let that sink in for a minute: medical refugees in the USA and disinterest in improving (much less guaranteeing) access to prenatal care--arguably the single-greatest factor in reducing risk to fetal health. As Paltrow noted during a talk at a bioethics conference I attended, this is health policy being developed in legal and extralegal systems with utter disregard for real social and medical factors.

    Remind me again, what exactly does the Republican Party mean by a “culture of life”?

    Posted by  on  05/02  at  11:26 AM

  18. Remind me again, what exactly does the Republican Party mean by a “culture of life”?

    No chance of parole.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/02  at  11:31 AM

  19. Days like today make “Happy Valley” seem like the biggest misnomer around. It’s enough to make me miss Chambana.

    And Heretik: afaik, a nittany lion is a mountain lion that lives in the moutains around here, or something like that.

    Posted by Vivek  on  05/02  at  11:39 AM

  20. Nice blogroll update!  I noticed you skipped over Scrutiny Hooligans though.  We gotta wonder why.

    Posted by Screwy Hoolie  on  05/02  at  12:18 PM

  21. "choosing to handle such situations as a criminal matter rather than a public health matter creates dangerous dynamics and some serious blind spots”

    Well-put and, I would think, obvious to any rational being.

    Posted by  on  05/02  at  12:27 PM

  22. Michael, are you gunnin’ for some kind of Longest Blogroll Ever award?!

    the S.C. story and its companions upset, but no longer surprise me.

    there was another Sub-Mason/Dixon state not so long ago that was trying to make it a crime if you had yourself, or if you knew of anyone else who had, MISCARRIED, at ANY POINT IN THE TERM, and failed to make a police report within 24 hours...how sweet is that? there you are, perhaps heartsick over a planned pregnancy that had never-the-less self-aborted for some physical reason, and you risk JAIL TIME if you don’t drag your aching body & soul to the damn POLICE station to file a report?! i think this was Virginia, by the way (and the bill was defeated, i believe.)

    what can i say? clearly it’s a man’s man’s man’s world.

    -L.

    Posted by Librarian  on  05/02  at  01:14 PM

  23. Michael, thanks for adding All Spin Zone to your blogroll.  Your site has been a valuable link in ASZ’s own (admittedly shorter) blogroll.

    One thing.

    You’ve linked to ASZ’s old site.  Here’s the link to the new one:

    allspinzone.com/blog

    Posted by Richard Cranium  on  05/02  at  01:38 PM

  24. Michael,
    As a State College native who managed to escape into the real world I wish you would do your part to stop the spread of that terrible “Happy Valley” canard.  Years ago it was a kind of local in joke, since State College - in the NITTANY Valley - was a pocket of prosperity in the middle of Appalachia.  It was picked up by some idiot football broadcaster who spread it to the world and we expatriots have had to put up with it ever since.

    Posted by  on  05/02  at  03:21 PM

  25. Tell me you did not just add us to your blogroll.

    You nut wink

    Oh.  You did not.

    Posted by Dr Kwanda  on  05/02  at  03:30 PM

  26. D’oh!  (Applicable to nearly all of the above comments.)

    Posted by  on  05/02  at  03:34 PM

  27. As it happens, I interviewed the Nittany Lion back on Earth Day.

    Posted by Dave  on  05/07  at  08:14 PM

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