cross-posted from Voices on the Square

UPDATE: Now 166 backers, $10,140 funded of $13,000; 78% funded, 22% to go with 9 days remaining.

What in the Sam Hill is “Yuri Anime”, and what in the Sam Hill does it have to do with supporting Lesbian works?

Erica Friedman at Yuricon starts out an explanation of the term “yuri” by writing:

The term Yuri (百合) is used to refer to stories that contain romantic or sexual relationships between girls or women or, sometimes more generally, stories with a lesbian character.

Yuri is not a dominant niche in Japanese manga (ie, serialized graphic novels), but it does hold a place in the market, and sometimes this shows up in anime that are based on either a yuri manga, or a manga with a yuri side-stream.

Now, manga and anime are commercial media, and so Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of everything is crud. Indeed, we might say that what makes somebody a “fan” of a genre is an appreciation of not just the 10% of the genre that is good, but an appreciation of some of the 90% that is crud.

Every genre has its history. From what I understand, part of the history of yuri is the “tragic lesbian”. And the “Tragic Lesbian” features strongly in “Oniisama E”, aka Dear Brother, originally created as a manga by the manga-ka (manga artists) Riyoka Ikeda in 1975, and made into an anime by Tezuka Productions in 1991.

Now, I’m not a media reviewer, and you can read Okazu non-review for a non-review or skim the Wikipedia Oniisama_e… page if you need an extended introduction to this melodrama.

However, if you reside in North America, you can, instead, stream it starting with Episode One: The Magnificant One as Nanako Misonoo, a first year student, starts her life in High School and encounters the “stars” of the school, “Hana no Sainte-Juste (Rei), Kaoru-no-kimi (Kaoru), and Miya-sama (Fukiko)” (according to the Wikipedia machine ~ I want to avoid charges of plagiarizing from Wikipedia).

Now, to see that free stream, you’ll have to sign up for a membership at the AnimeSols.com site,

That is not a bootleg stream: that is a legitimate stream under permission of the rights owner.

But, how can a more than twenty-year-old anime series that has never had an English license be available with a legitimate, free streaming?

Well, that is a story about what the AnimeSols.com site is, and what its trying to accomplish.

Well, OK, I’m summarizing. I was startled to read at Agent Orange that Summers was a progressive thinker because Summers recognizes the massive increase in economic inequality that has taken place over the past three or four decades:

It would be, however, a serious mistake to suppose that our only problems are cyclical or amenable to macroeconomic solutions. Just as evolution from an agricultural to an industrial economy had far reaching implications for society, so too will the evolution from an industrial to a knowledge economy. Witness structural trends that predate the Great Recession and will be with us long after recovery is achieved: The most important of these is the strong shift in the market reward for a small minority of persons, relative to the rewards available to everyone else. In the United States, according to a recent CBO study, the incomes of the top 1 percent of the population have, after adjusting for inflation, risen by 275 percent from 1979 to 2007. At the same time, incomes for the middle class (in the study, the middle 60 percent of the income scale) grew by only 40 percent. Even this dismal figure overstates the fortunes of typical Americans; the number unable to find work or who have abandoned the job search has risen. In 1965, only 1 in 20 men between ages 25 and 54 was not working. By the end of this decade it will likely be 1 in 6-even if a full cyclical recovery is achieved.

…

 

There is no issue that will be more important to the politics of the industrialized world over the next generation than its response to a market system that distributes rewards increasingly inequitably and generates growing disaffection in the middle class. …

Its been quite a while since I have cast the Beauty Platform at Docudharma ~ nearly four years since Casting the Beauty Platform for the Afghanistan Quagmire (that cast for that one was “Retreat”, by the way … with no moving lines. Just Retreat. Pretty good call for $0.03).

But this morning I saw that Robert Reich had called for a Third Party.

Well, not really, what Robert Reich said was,  

Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street. If there were ever an issue ripe for a third party, the Street would be it.

This is “Calling for a third party!” like saying “ever stronger hurricanes would suck” is “Calling for action NOW on climate change!”. Saying that the Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street is one of those “The Sky is BLUE!!!” statements that is only to any degree controversial to the extend that people have been following an American media debate whether the sky is red or green (complete with supporting daily kos essays about how is it OBVIOUSLY green and anyone who thinks its red is a traitor to the country).

Its an observation of the obvious, rather than actually arguing that a Third Party would be a solution for what ails us.

Still, it got me thinking … what is the reading on the question? Is it time for a third party? As stuck in their various ruts the various established positions on the question are, this seems like an excellent question to reach for a response from the Book of Changes and reflect on the answer that results.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

First off, the thing to do with the BS about gutting the safety net on the excuse that the Take Everything Away Party wants to kill it is to take the idea of gutting the safety programs behind the farmhouse to the mint bed and apply a sharp ax.

How to do that, I don’t know.

But if it can be done, then there’s still the question of whether and how to sell the “Jobs Policy”

The Beauty Platform and Sequential Art

First they came for the guys and gals

   with skeevy comic books.

But I don’t buy skeevy comic books,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals

   with graphically violent comic books.

But I don’t buy comic books with graphic violence^{1},

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals;

   with “adult” gay and lesbian comic books.

But I don’t buy adult gay and lesbian^{1} comic books,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals

   with “excessively” adult comic books of any sorts.

But I don’t buy excessively adult adult  comic books of any sort,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals with politically and socially radical comic books.

And the legal precedent was already set, so it was an open and shut case.

And that’s what I’m in for.

……………………..

That is, in any event, the dystopian future scenario. Right now we are still in a position to push back against the “North American Taliban”, and that is what the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund aims to do.

{1. OK, ok, on some of these sites my sig says otherwise with respect to yuri manga, and some science fiction dystopian manga has some pretty graphic violence, but stick with me here for dramatic effect}

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Back in the 90’s, Texas tried to get an Express HSR system off the ground (that is, a bullet train system somewhere in the 125mph to 220mph range) with the “Texas Triangle” project. It was to be an entirely privately funded project. Not surprisingly, competing against the heavily  publicly subsidized interstate highway and air travel systems, it did not get off the ground.

More recently, the Texas T-Bone was proposed, based on the Dallas to San Antonio leg of the Triangle and a route from Houston to Temple, then running north to Dallas with connections south to Austin and San Antonio.

While the Texas T-Bone seems to be the current plan of the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation, this is more of an advocacy group than an official HSR Commission or Rail Development Commission.

Given that we are in between periods of substantial federal funding for High Speed Rail, I thought this might be a good time to take a look at the prospects for Regional HSR, in some of the existing rail corridors within the “Texas Triangle” region … and so arrived at the Texas Wishbone.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

OK, now, thanks to John Kasich, we are not going to get started on that Rapid Rail HSR network before 2015. Indeed, Democrats would probably have to take back one of the two Chambers of the State Legislature to be able to hit the ground running on getting that Rapid Rail HSR network going in 2015.

On the other hand, if you never lay the foundation, you always end up with an outcome you don’t like.

And I don’t like the way that the Ohio Hub connects to Summit and Portage Counties, so I want to work on how to get a station in Ravenna added to the Ohio Hub.

The reason its on the Sunday Train is threefold: maybe somebody can give me a great tip; maybe somebody can get an idea for something they can work on where they live; and its about making more sustainable transport options available to a medium city and a variety of inner and outer suburban landscapes.

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

“LQD” is an abbreviation I first encountered at EuroTrib: it means “Lazy Quote Diary”.

The quote from Warren Mosler:

Credit ratings are based on ability to pay and willingness to pay.

David Beers of S&P knows this and has discussed this in the past.

…

So why then did David T. Beers decide to downgrade the US on ability to pay, and not explicitly on willingness to pay?

Sure looks like a case of intellectual dishonesty.

And I have no idea why.

So much for his legacy.

Well, its a very short post, so fair use restricts it to an even shorter quote.

But this is the gist of it: no issuer of its own currency is ever forced to default on debt issued in its own currency.

Think about it: if your family’s IOU’s were accepted by the bank to repay debts … could you ever run short of the means to pay your debts?

What would an honest downgrade have said? Below the fold.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

The Story So Far (imagine a Star Wars Scroll):

Under normal conditions, the primary political parties are representatives of distinct interest groups within the status quo. Democracy, after all, is allowing the citizens of the country to choose winners and losers among the elite, rather than having that choice performed by military might, accident of birth, or etc.

For most of its political history to the late 1800’s, the US was either dominated by one or two political parties. The (extra-constitutional) winner take all electoral college system and the winner take all nature of a state legislature selecting the state’s Senator strongly pushed in that direction.

And with business interests always falling on distinct sides of important issues of the day, that meant that political interests have long been distributed among the rival claimants for power or the natural party of government and natural party of (regional) opposition.

But alongside this was a political institution that allowed third parties to emerge and compete for influence ~ and indeed, the Great Re-Alignment from the Democrats and the Whigs to the Republicans and the Democrats occured in part thanks to the existence of third parties that were available to merge with the Anti-Slavery Whigs once they had been purged from the Whig Party. So in the late 1800’s …

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Freedom

Two stories over the last week underlined the determination of the radical right wing that dominates the Republican Party to sabotage America’s future and betray our national security and the interests of our children and grandchildren:

• The Transportation Budget proposed by House Republican Transport Committee Chairman John Mica of Florida would cost 140,000 jobs
• And Republicans proposed to fund emergency disaster relief by rescinding $1.6b already appropriated and awarded to High Speed Rail projects

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Chairman Mica says:

this proposal maximizes the value of our available infrastructure funding through better leveraging, streamlining the project approval process, attracting private sector investment, and cutting the federal bureaucracy, … Most importantly, this six-year proposal provides the stability states need to plan major transportation improvements and create long-term jobs.

Decoding that, Chairman Mica is saying: “Screw You, Cities”.

And of course, a bit of “screw you countryside” too, since those votes can be taken for granted.

Burning the Midnight Oil

(Right: Liberty Line) The Steel Interstate proposal is an effort to build Rapid Electric Freight Rail Tollways across the country ~ east to west and north to south ~ to:

• Take a substantial slice our of our oil imports
• Insure our national economy and national defense against disruptions of our oil supply
• Increase the productivity of our manufacturing and logistics sectors,
• Overcome decades of neglect of our national electricity transmission infrastructure, and
• Protect our legacy investment in our Interstate Highway system from the battering it receives at the hands of long haul trucks.

The point of the Steel Interstate system is that it is a system: it consists of several parts that work together to give more bang for the buck than any one could provide on its own.