Lucky White Girl

oh desire!

I soooo want to see this movie.

The Grand Delusion

James Howard Kunstler has a thought-provoking editorial in Sunday's Washington Post about how delusional we (USians) are being when we keep talking about looking for "solutions" to the energy crisis (hybrid cars; other potential Iraqs awaiting invasion) without admitting that the way we've structured our society over the past 50 years has been --will be-- our biggest downfall. 

While it'll probably be argued that he's oversimplifying the global food crisis a bit, his main point should cause quite a bit of soul-searching amongst those who plan to be around on this planet over the next few decades.  In the short term: without cars or airplanes, he asks us to imagine how important our passenger rail system --yeah remember that?!-- will become in the near future.  I imagine long-distance travel becoming nearly as difficult as in horse-n-buggy days!  Definitely something to think about!  Let's hope others in this city are listening too.

Twitter TMI

It's the ultimate in technophile arrogance --Twitter, the service that allows you to post tiny little updates to your blog (or twitter site) via "txt msgs", IM, or now apparently right from your browser (if you're using the beta version of Firefox 3).  People can read the mini-updates on your site, or have them sent directly to their phone as text messages.  For the hyper-connected blog-o-phile it's pure bliss but until now, I've never been tempted to use it (because honestly, do y'all really need half a dozen updates throughout the day on what I'm thinking or doing?)

But last weekend I was thinking about another blog I write for, -the one I created for the non-profit that now provides me with my "gainfully employed" status.  Blogging is new to them and new to their audience (indeed it's supposed to help them reach a whole new audience) so it's been a bit slow to catch on.

The problem is that since neither my boss nor my co-workers had ever blogged before they weren't used to the fact that in order to sustain a blog, one has to generate content on a pretty consistent basis.  To non-bloggers this sounds overwhelming (--hey, to some bloggers this can sometimes be overwhelming!)  It's hard.  You go a significant time without posting and you WILL lose a certain percentage of your readership. 

[LWG is a case in point.  When I was in school I posted regularly because I had a lot of rich material to mine for subjects (check out the "academics/academia" category for a sample).  My blog was another study tool.  If I could explain the epistemological effects of the structure/agency debate on my blog, I could certainly answer the question in my oral defense.  When I started the job in DC, however, I couldn't post (much) about the stuff my brain was immersed in 10 hours a day, so the blog languished and readership went way down.  (I still get between 100-200 hits a day but mostly they're from google searches).]

So the result is, for this work blog, about 90% of the content comes from me and the problem with that is that I'm not the ones people want to hear from over there.  I lack the experience and expertise in the subject areas that my boss and coworkers have.  I needed a way to make it easier, for my boss at least, to generate content for the new site.  And I needed a way for him to get that content onto our site without having to sit down and write a full-on editorial (which is still what he thinks a post has to be).  Being a denizen of DC he's already got a Blackberry attached to the end of his arm, so Twitter was the logical choice.

It's not ideal.  Twitter only gives you 140 characters, that's 1-2 short sentences, something that's hard for me to do much less a lawyer!  But it's better than nothing.  So I talked to him and he's willing to try it and so in order to help him out I thought it'd be good to become an experienced twitterer myself, ergo the inane little updates over there in the right sidebar providing all of you with way too much information about the personal life and random musings of the author of this blog.  What can I say but ... what a dedicated employee I am!

What's the deal with the Farm Bill?

Someone back home asked about the Farm Bill because they knew I'd been following the story (see previous post).  Not knowing many specifics about it but generally having the impression that it's usually filled with bloated subsidies that go to big agribusiness corporations like Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland Corporation, my friend was asking if that impression was wrong since I was interested in the thing and wanted it to pass. 

First of all, thanks for having the faith in me to think it incongruous that I would support any legislation that benefits corporate profits over the welfare of regular ol' people!  I appreciate thatl! ;-)

My answer to the question is no, that impression is NOT wrong, it's dead on right and for more details you can read this Mother Jones article, The Big Farm Scam, an interview with the President of the Environmental Working Group about why the Farm Bill is unhealthy and, despite its outer veneer of wholesomeness, perpetuates the killing off a lot of what is or was good about rural life in this country. 

Then, your next question might be why in the world is the President against it? And why am I for it? 

To answer the last first, I'm not really for it as much as I'm resigned to it.  I don't think there's any real possibility that, short of a major revolution in how we do politics in this country, we'll ever get our legislators to NOT create a pork-laden Farm Bill.  Under our current political system, corporations have way too much sway over politicians for them to ever do anything drastically different.  It's not the politicians' fault; it's the result of a system set up to limit popular power*.  Supposedly this Farm Bill is less pork-laden that the last one but who knows?  I wanted it to pass simply because there is also a lot of good stuff mixed in there with those giant subsidies for giant corporations such as food stamp programs for the poor and, particularly relevant to the organization I work for, a bit that would create a program for doing research on pesticides.

As for why the President is against it, well that I still don't understand.  Any guesses?

----
* Now THAT would be another interesting post!  How the right-wing proponents of the status-quo maintain that status-quo by getting YOU the people to blame individual corrupt politicians instead of a cleverly skewed system set up to benefit the wealthy (and their corporations) at the expense of the majority.  And what we can do to resist that ploy.

Exciting week in Washington

It's been a crazy week but I am happy because it involved lots of writing.  I even got to write a press release for a representative's office although honestly I'm not really sure why --it's not like they don't have their own press people!  My boss asked me to do it.  Apparently if there's some very specific piece of legislation they'll just request stuff from other people/organizations who are more versed in the subject and use that --the slackers!

Anyway it was kinda weird because we didn't know what was going to happen with this thing and so I wasn't real sure how to write a story about something that hadn't happened yet.  Plus I got all these really vague and somewhat contradictory instructions on the language I should use.  Say this; don't say that.  They're the ultimate believers in reification.

And the Farm Bill!  Good Lord, after all this hoo-hah, someone shoulda seen this coming: they sent the President the wrong bill!  He vetoed it like he said he would but it wasn't the bill they had voted on.  It was missing 34 pages.  So then they had to figure out what to do.  Would they have to do the whole thing over again or could they just pass that part separately?  Apparently something like this happened back in 1892 and they allowed it to be done separately so I think that's what they're doing.  Can ya believe it?  Really I don't make this shit up!

Finally I saw this post on the DailyKos that included one little line pondering the possibility of Obama winning Florida.  And it stuck in me --the thought of Obama winning Florida.... Could it possibly be?  and I got the spark of an idea.  What if I use my vacation time to go home and do some campaigning for him?  He surprised me by winning Iowa and becoming a serious contender in this race, maybe he could surprise me again by winning Florida!  I want to help him do that!  So I have finally come up with a good use for all this vacation time I'm accruing! 

So that's what's been going on around here lately.  Exciting, eh?  I'm exhausted though.  And in between bouts of exhaustion, homesick.  But that's another post.

LWG explains the global food crisis

The global food crisis is a product of a market-based (capitalist) system of food distribution and Raj Patel, a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy and author of the new book Stuffed and Starved agrees with me:

"People go hungry not because of a lack of food but because of poverty"

Mr. Patel lays it out in an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.

foreboding

My nephew's joining the Marines. They promised him money for college and training as a helicopter technician. He'll almost certain to be sent to Iraq.

I don't care what anyone says, I cannot see how it's possible that he is NOT making a huge mistake. It's possible that he'll come out of it okay. But I feel it's more possible that he won't.  Much more possible.  Even if he isn't killed. What he'll be doing over there... will very likely mess him up.  That's what war does.  Messes up a lot of people.  His life will be forever changed.

I am thinking about what this will mean for my family. What it would be like for my sister, my parents, if he didn't come back. Or comes back with PTSD or missing arms or legs. Or comes back and commits suicide. It makes me think of when my own parents lost their son at a really young age. It happened before I was born but for as much as it impacted my life, it may as well have happened last year. So much of who we are and why my family is the way they are is due to that single tragedy. The reverberations are still felt today, more than 30 years later.

My nephew's going to Iraq and I have the most awful feeling about this...

We are the ones

Bush explains the global food crisis

Isn't it reassuring to think we have someone so smart running the country?  Bush's comment over the weekend that the food crisis is due to countries like India raising their standard of living has really pissed off the developing world:

"When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food.  And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.

What a moron!  The global food crisis is caused by people in poor countries eating more??!  You've got to be kidding me!  Sometimes I can't decide if he's an asshole or just stupid.  He could take some lessons from this columnist in the Hindustan Times:

"these comments are a brazen admission by the industrialised West that their levels of prosperity are mainly dependent upon the levels of impoverishment and malnutrition in the developing world.  Having plundered for centuries through colonialism, they seek to continue to fatten themselves by a similar plunder through current phase of imperialist globalisation, whose hallmark is the sharp escalation of inequalities"  full column here.

This is going to be excellent fodder for editorial cartoonists all over the world!  I can't wait to see pictures of the US as a bloated overweight giant looking at this average sized kid sitting next to him and telling him he's eating up all the food!  If you see any please leave a link here and I'll be sure to post the ones I find too!

You've gotta hear this!

Oh wow there is the most incredible story on NPR right now about transgender children!  They explore two cases of very young children, both biologically male, who strongly believe they are really females.  Each set of parents have completely different responses to this: the first boy/girl's parents take him/her to a therapist who bans girl things and pretty much forces them to make the child "learn to be comfortable with being a boy" saying it's like a black child who wants to be white it's the product of dysfunction.   The second boy/girl's parents let the child be the person she feels she is.  They take her to buy her first dress and let her start kindergarten as a girl.  They say they don't want to repeat the mistakes of years ago when homosexuality was viewed as a dysfunction and therapists encouraged patients to repress it.

It was such a powerful story I'm still crying as I'm typing this.   If you haven't read the novel Middlesex yet, you should! My god it's good!

Rich on "The All-White Elephant in the Room"

Here's an even better column on the controversial issue of candidates and their loud-mouth preachers.  Frank Rich says

... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

...which means all these white Republicans seeking out endorsements from racist bigots like the Rev. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell better think twice about throwing stones at Obama.  What's more,

...the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house.

Thanks for the perspective, Mr. Rich!

Thanks EJ!

Finally!  I've been waiting for someone to say something that makes a little bit of sense in the Obama-Wright controversy.  No surprise that EJ Dionne steps up to the plate, pointing out the hypocrisy of how quick our society is to condemn radical black preachers while being more diplomatic and understanding of racist white preachers who say things like "God doesn't hear the prayers of the Jews" and call the Catholic church "the anti-Christ". 

I disagree with the biblical scholar he quotes towards the end of the piece who says Wright was wrong to cloak himself in the mantle of a prophet because "prophets of old didn't announce their prophetic prerogatives at press conferences and press clubs".  Well, duh! They lived 2,000 years ago!  That has nothing to do with anything.  I think we do have prophets today just as human society had prophets 2,000 years ago and just as we will 2,000 years from now.  Who knows how they're going to deliver their messages?  Prophets just might use press conferences and press clubs to speak truth to power.  Whether Rev. Wright is one or not is up for debate but it's silly to attack the means of delivery instead of the message.

Happy Maypril's Fool's Day --from the White House!

This cracked me up!  In a pathetic attempt to draw attention away from the rallies and marches around the country yesterday --and I have to say this is also an example of very unsuccessful "framing"--the White House has proclaimed May Day as um, hold on, I can't type it without laughing... er-hem, excuse me, International Loyalty Day!  I have to believe this is some belated April Fool's Day joke because it's just so hilarious --in an slightly Orwellian kind of way.  Just the sort of humor this administration might be expected to have.  Anyway I hope you all got out to a march yesterday, danced around a May pole and enjoyed your International Loyalty to the Worker Day!