So:

Once upon a time I used to post about politics and social issues. 

Shifting the terror frame.

If you get as tired as I do of the whole "terrorist, terrorist, they want to kill us, can't be reasoned with.." line of thinking and the subtle racism found in to whom and how the "T word" is applied, maybe its time to shift the frame. If corporate interests are going to sic their boys in Washington on environmental activists and forest defenders and start flogging "Eco-Terrorism" around, (Rep. Scott McInnis [R-CO] is yapping about "These are hardened criminals. They are dangerous, they are well-funded, they are savvy, sophisticated and stealthy, and if their violence continues to escalate, its only a matter of time before their parade of terror results in a lost human life.", and James F. Jarboe's [FBI] schpiell to McInnis's "Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health" is worth a read too.), I think we need to be talking about acts of violence by Anti-Choice extremists and White Supremicist hater groups as well.

Which is why I was so glad to stumble upon this article (by fellow Hampshire College Alum Jenn Pozner), "The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News", focusing on media coverage of actis of violence against abortion providers.

Here's an excerpt:

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.

If were going to talk about terrorism, lets talk about all of it.

ouch!

I had a real "makes you think" moment with this story recently. As a white hip-hop fan its interesting to ponder the use and abuse of "the N word". You can talk "reclaiming" all you want, and dig out that old copy of Midnight Marauders and spin "Sucka Nigga" a few times but shit like this can still smack you hard enough to smart.

Without further ado:

My name is David Sylvester and I recently completed a charitable bicycle trip in Africa, riding over 7000 miles from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa . The trip made me the first and only African American to cross two continents on a bicycle. I have plenty of great and fascinating stories. Many are funny, others bittersweet, some are poignant, but all are entertaining. Surprisingly one story has stood out and if it was not for the fact that I have a picture of it, many would never believe it. and it is for that reason that I am sharing it with you.
While in Lilongwe, Malawi, I came across a store by the name of “Niggers” —that’s right “ Niggers”! The other riders, who were all white, could not wait to inform me of this to see my reaction. Initially, I thought that it was a very bad joke but when the other riders were adamant about the existence of the store, I had to see it for myself.
What I found was a store selling what the owner called ‘hip hop’ style clothing . It was manned by two gentlemen — one of them asleep! (Talk about living up to or in this case down to a stereotype) I asked the guys what was up with the store name. After hearing my obvious non - Malawian accent and figuring out that I was from America, the man thumped his chest proudly and said “P-Diddy New York City! we are the niggers!”

Like I said, you can read more on it here, and the site in general is worth a read too. I'm not here to make any grandiose statements one way or another about how black folk ought to address each other, and I'm definitely not interested in adopting an anti-hip-hop pose. Just something to think about when you feel like squirming a little.

wisdom from the mouths of babes.

If only everyone reacted to these tactics as sensibly.

the oil we eat

been meaning to post this stellar richard manning article from harper's for over a year now. titled "The Oil We Eat: Following The Food Chain Back To Iraq", its the best examination ive read yet of our global food system.

theres not much else to say except that i reccomend it highly. heres a few snippets to pique your curiosity:

Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.

...

What would happen when the planet’s supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

...

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

...

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian’s case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife’s habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won’t stink up the potato fields.
Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I’ve done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances—no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can’t eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person’s individual charge is to find such niches.
Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures—those of South America and Mexico, for example—have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
Still, these livestock do something we can’t. They convert grain’s carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

ok. read it yourself and tell me what you think.

incompetent design - the other ID.

this is perhaps even better than the theory of the intelligent flying spaghetti monster.

univ. of mass. amherst geosciences professor, don wise, is advocating that if the universe was 'designed', it was done incompetently, not intelligently.

The thing that perhaps is closest to all of us is our own skeleton, and there are certainly all kinds of stupidity in our design. No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us. All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution's way of modifying something or else it's just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student. Look at the teeth in your mouth. Basically, most of us have too many teeth for the size of our mouth. Well, is this evolution flattening a mammalian muzzle and jamming it into a face or is it a design that couldn't count accurately above 20? Look at the bones in your face. They're the same as the other mammals' but they're just squashed and contorted by jamming the jaw into a face with your brain expanding over it, so the potential drainage system in there is so convoluted that no plumber would admit to having done it! So is this evolution or is this plain stupid design?

new tactics from the RIAA

from the onion...

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

November 30, 2005 Issue 41•48

LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. "We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material," a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. "We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves." RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth "favorites-sharing" sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

as i once heard alice walker say, 'nothing is ever funnier, or frees the heart more, than the truth.' when satire feels the most effective is when it tells the truth, not necessarily of the actual events transpiring, but, like in this case, of the spirit behind the actions. i am continually astonsihed by the pure vindictiveness of the RIAA and its puppets in the music biz *(er, ahem, metallica) in their choice to agressively pursue people who download a few songs for home use or who share burned cd's with friends when they could be focusing on, say, people who bootleg for profit. why not just be smart like say, frank zappa and pearl jam and saturate the market with your own high quality 'official bootleg' recordings? in most cases, i think things play out best if listeners follow the advice or krs-one on his newest album - 'if you downloaded the album, then come to the concert!'

if this crap pisses you off too, probably the best way to keep up on the battle is to watch the news at the electronic frontier foundation, and, if you can, give em some money. a nickel for each downloaded song might be a good way to preserve open access to the musical 'intellectual property' you love.

the truth is stranger (and more fun) than fiction

what is there to say about a senior police officer in uttar pradesh, india, who is convinced he is a reincarnation of krishna's bride, radha, and has taken to dressing in drag and hugging fig trees?

from bbc news:

TV news channels flocked to his home to film him worshipping Hindu deity Lord Krishna in the form of a tree.

Mr Panda says he is the reincarnation of Goddess Radha, Lord Krishna's beloved.

He has been spending his time embracing a peepal, or holy fig, tree in his garden, chanting mantras to his beloved Lord Krishna.

One room in his house is kept sacred and secret.

"That is my private bed room. Only Krishna can enter there," he says.

There is nothing unusual in a Hindu ascetic getting up early and quoting from scriptures, as Mr Panda does.

Nor is it uncommon for Hindu sects to worship deities as lovers, or for men to live like women devotees.

But Mr Panda's position is a tricky one, seeing as he is a senior police officer.

Colleagues kept his penchant for ladies' clothes a secret for years, but must now decide what to do with a man who has become a figure of ridicule.

cheney gets a scolding

the fallout from the veteran's day speech continues -

rep. john murtha, a hawkish pennsylvania democrat who is a decorated veteran of wars in korea and vietnam, is calling for immediate withdrawl from iraq.

but my favorite part of what he had to say were his words for draft-dodger dick:

Seldom overtly political, Murtha uncharacteristically responded to Vice President
Dick Cheney's comments this week that Democrats were spouting "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges" about the Bush administration's use of intelligence before the war.

"I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Murtha said.

Referring to Bush, Murtha added, "I resent the fact, on Veterans Day, he criticized Democrats for criticizing them."

With a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, Murtha retired from the Marine Corps reserves as a colonel in 1990 after 37 years as a Marine, only a few years longer than he's been in Congress. Elected in 1974, Murtha has become known as an authority on national security whose advice was sought out by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

to be clear, i dont want to fall into the trap of thinking that murtha's veteran status in and of itself gives him more moral authority than cheney. i'd dodge the draft in a hot second if it came to that, either in this war or the one in vietnam. however, im not starting wars and sending other people off to fight them. im not calling for other people to do something i wouldnt do myself. cheney is.

when peacenik leftists (like myself) are calling to bring the troops home, they may well be right, but they're just saying what they always say. when purple heart decorated veterans who serve on defense committes and are friends with high ranking pentagon officials are calling to bring the troops home, it's really time to listen.

the veteran's day speech from hell...

the bushco approval rating is now at, what, a chilly 36%?

he's backed into a corner, foaming at the mouth and lashing out at 'his opponents'. in his veteran's day speech, he goes back and forth between attempting to suggest that he hasn't slashed veteran's benefits, attacking his critics, and repeating his 'war on terror' mantra. i wont even comment on the attempts to paint the 'war on terror' as the new cold war.

read it, then read the commentary by former clinton speechwriter david kusnet here.

just a snippet:

At a time when Bush would benefit from sounding cheerful, forward looking, and above partisan politics, just as Ronald Reagan did during his second term even in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush instead sounded like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson during the worst days of the Vietnam War, although neither is remembered for flubbing a speech on a national holiday. It's as if Bush was reading from a cue-card that proclaimed, "Message: I'm embattled and embittered."