Pinko Magazine Hedonism + Activism

Morgan Spurlock, if you are reading this, I think I know the answer to the question “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”. The answer might surprise you. It turns out he’s in Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign ad, scaring all the nice white folks in Pennsylvania. See if you can spot him.

As a native Pennsylvanian, I’m not sure if I should be insulted by all the absurd lowbrow pandering Hillary is vomiting up in my home state, or embarrassed by the fact that it appears to be working.

Remember, If you think this is bad, it’s nothing exactly like what the Republicans will be dishing out in the fall.

As the Jewish-nationalist-spiritual-human rights-ecofriendly-GLBT friendly-generally progressive-whatever your cause is holiday of Passover begins tonight (for those who can afford it) I just want to take the time to say to our Jewish readers “Next Year in Japan”

Ever lament the dearth of high quality glossy magazines devoted to global and domestic humanitarian efforts? I know I have.

Enter Need Magazine, the brain child of husband and wife Stephanie and Kelly Kinnunen, who lived out of their car for a time to afford to publish it. So often those who want to save the world have no sense of design, so it’s nice to know that you can be a charitable do-gooder and still think about aesthetics. The combination of detailed narrative and striking images dodges that old problem of poverty porn, a la Sebastio Salgado, robbing the subject of context and transforming suffering into an aesthetic experience. Still the high gloss magazine is pretty and I can just see the trend catching on. Paris will just be dying to get the latest toys from the kids of L’Athletique d’Haiti.

is the Pope reimbursing New York and Washington D.C. for the costs of all the security for his visit? Seriously. I don’t know. [Update: Maybe I'm being to snippy and harsh. I read this article about the Pope and immigration this morning and it was pretty interesting.]

The election has gone from crazy to insane to plain stupid in the course of a few short weeks. I decided to take some time off from the virtual campaign trail and get reacquainted with the popular culture of our great nation. Finding nothing of interest there, I turned to Japan.

Two shows have been dominating my DVR recently: Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke. Both shows air on the last-on-the-dial network G4 and feature superhuman feats of athleticism. What is perhaps most interesting about them is that, although the are ostensibly “competitions” they don’t carry with them the stench of backstabbing and do-anything-to-win that you see in american reality shows.

The point of both of these shows appears to be the overcoming of insurmountable obstacle through the competitors strength and agility. Only the absolute best of the best can hope to win. Frequently, nobody wins at all. In spite of being, often literally, “unbeatable” neither show appears to offer any sort of prize beyond the recognition of being a “Ninja Warrior” or having your name added to the “Banzuke”.

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My co-worker Deanna has found a very cool and simple way of eliminating the need for plastic sandwich bags. The Wrap-N-Mat is an almost offensively simple reusable sandwich wrap/place mat. You just fold the PEVA lined cloth around your sandwich and secure it with a velcro strap.

Yes. I am mad I didn’t think of this. Furious even.

As a bonus, they also comes with a ton of hippie cred, what with it’s patterns printed with vegetable based dyes and it’s “Fair Labor/Fair Wages” production. It can also be machine washed and dried on low heat, although if you mix your underwear in with your Wrap-a-Mat you could end up with remnants tuna salad in your briefs or a chicken bra, which some of our readers might be into but we’re not, so much.

Get them here.

One country has eliminated a shortage of transplant kidneys, by creating system to pay kidney donors, and (I’m about to link to a Cato Institute report, ready? Here we go…), it’s apparently working. That country is Iran.

The Iranian system works through a volunteer organization and is “highly standardized and regulated with only modest room for negotiation.” I like to imagine this negotiation with the Iranian practice of T’aarof , where it is only polite to turn down any offer of payment at least two or three times, with the expectation that the other party will insist. I’d like to buy a kidney and get a free carpet thrown in.

At least 70% of the kidney donors participating in this program are impoverished, which has led to cries of coercion, which the Cato report writes off a bit too quickly. The author of this report writes: “Voluntariness is antithetical to the concept of coercion, and an offer cannot be coercive if the relationship is initiated by the person in danger of being coerced.” Tell that to child prostitutes or child soldiers who “volunteer” for service because of the lack of other economic options open to them. However, the Iranian system does provide safeguards, which we could learn a lot more about if there was more open exchange between Iranians and Americans.

The basic recommendation of the report is plausible: repeal section 301 of the National Organ Transplant Act. I would add that we must immediately put market safeguards in place, and not allow the market experimentation this report calls for. The black market exists, we might as well get it under control. Legalize it! Support fair trade organ farming! And start talking to Iran. Because I might need this guy’s kidney one day.

Also, and unrelated, check out this map of Pirates!

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t watched the debate yet. I was going to watch it last night, but I didn’t. Seriously, who schedules a debate during Top Model?

From what I’ve been reading on other sites, it sounds like I got a more intelligent discussion of the issues by watching “Real World XX: Hollywood“. (Ok, get this: It’s called “The Real World” and the whole thing is set on a Hollwood sound stage! And they have a pompous ass called Prety Boy[sic] who was voted on to the show through an online competition! Finally the people’s voice is being heard. I love democracy!)

What was I talking about? Oh, right. Here are some highlights from the debate I didn’t watch:

• Hillary Answered three seperate questions by screaming “9/11!” and shooting a small Iraqi boy in the back with an automatic “hunting” rifle.
• Barack Obama was noticably shaken when, after a full 63 minutes of inane questions, he was asked about policy. He got so flustered that he accidentally denounced and rejected his own economic stimulus package.
• It was finally revealed that Barack Obama, at the age of 7, was the youngest member of The Weather Underground.

Wow, that actually sounds kind of exciting! Maybe I’ll fire up the DVR and watch it tonight. Either that or watch an episode of Lost that I’ve already seen twice… Hmmm. Tough call.

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I’m back from a few days at the Green Festival in Seattle, which was a nice event and gives me a lot of ground to cover the next few days on some really neat finds. In the meantime, a few random notes for Wednesday:

(1) We just got a fax at my day job at The Nation (not that Pinko is a night job, really, or any kind of job, or anything that will ever pay anyone anything ever) and the fax makes a fairly compelling case that Jews did 9-11 and are about to force all the superdelegates to hijack the election for Hillary Clinton, just like we hijacked the planes and flew them into the Empire State building or whatever. The fax, in 14 tidy pages, argues that “we need a change to break away from Bill and Hillary’s forced compliance to the underworlds pyschopathic mafia monster, Israeli leader Shimon Peres.” That change, of course, is Barack Obama.

The fax calls the conspiracy the “Mossad Monster Network,” and argues that they are about to kill Barack Obama and that they can change votes remotely from anywhere in the world and that they sent hookers to seduce Elliot Spitzer entirely so that the news could come out on the day that Obama won the Mississippi primary, thus depriving him of momentum from the win. We jews are so complicated: did we need to make our Jewish brother Elliot have sex with the hookers just so that we could win the news cycle when we’re going to kill Barack Obama anyway? What drama queens!

It’s the best fax ever…the closing point is one I hadn’t considered: We need to vote for Barack Obama because Israel is using dark skinned sephardic Jewish youth for testing experiments and each one will be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of X-Rays through the head, and Barack Obama can stop that from happening but he can only stop it from happening if we can stop the racist Israeli Mafia Mobster Mengele government from killing him first, brainwashing the superdelegates, then kidnapping all dissenters and putting them in concentration camps because … wait for it … the holocaust was a hoax perpitrated by Jews to gain worldwide sympathy. Yes we can! It’s very confusing since as a Jew I’ve already voted for Hillary Clinton in several states and now I don’t know what to do.

As a sidenote, just including the phrase “9-11 was an inside job” in this blog post pretty much guarantees our best traffic day ever at Pinko.
[UPDATE/UH-OH: As soon as I posted this, Talking Points Memo posted something about Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, saying 9-11 was good for Israel in lots of ways! Yikes! (that was Yikes, with a Y people.) Fax not so crazy?]

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