action figures sold separately

1. In a posting today, Michael Novick dissected a recent “hatchet job” from the L.A. Times. Michael is an activist, an educator, the editor of Turning the Tide, the founder of the stop-polabuse list, and the author of White Lies, White Power: The Fight Against White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence. Also see Michael’s Open Letter on Terror from TTT, republished by Refuse and Resist.
2. In it’s most recent issue, Portland new age journal New ConeXion has a piece by Toby Christensen titled White Skin, African Heart: Finding my Life’s Purpose through the Power of Drum Healing. Now, one could slam this article and this publication altogether for the vague and rhetorical nature of the new-age-tons-of -money-for-our-spiritual-healing-ceremony stuff, and for the threads of cultural appropriation found throughout, i’ll only comment on this portion:
   

   Some people are frankly put off by the fact that I am a white man and wonder how someone of Scandinavian descent can deem himself qualified to speak about drumming and other shamanic practices of indigenous Africa. I have no defense except to say that shamanism, like energy is universal. It cannot be owned exclusively by an individual or a particular culture. When I traveled to Africa with Malidoma and Sobonfu I was not judged by the color of my skin, but by the strength and integrity of my connection to Spirit. I was included in all the rituals and made to feel a part of the community. My skin color was such a non issue that the only time I remember it being referred to was one night after we drummed for the village elders

   Maybe the shamanism practiced by these indigenous Africans can’t be “owned” by an individual or culture, but that doesn’t mean white folks like Christensen aren’t making money off of it. And yes, Christensen’s skin color does matter, is most definitely an issue, it’s not simply his “connection to Spirit.” To assert otherwise is to deny the important ways that the power relations inherent in a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy inform all aspects of culture, including spiritual drumming.

3. Finally, in the past six weeks, four Sergeants (three of them Special Forces) at Fort Bragg have killed their wives. The Guardian UK, the Baltimore Sun, and India’s Hindu have all run stories. The Straits Times also put together this pdf doc highlighting the cases. The pieces quote Major Gary Kolb, a spokesman for the Army Special Operations Command, as saying “it would be a reach to link the family killings to Afghanistan.” No it wouldn’t. When anyone kills someone, kills an intimate partner, it always has everything to do with what is going on in the rest of their life, the culture of violence they live in, and in this case especially, they way they are being trained to kill and are killing others as their job.

• raised beds
• the classic, barn-style garage door
• new jacks at a friend’s new house up the street
• lots more scanned in photos (i’ll post a link when they’re all ready) and new links (67 in fact)
• our new office (getting crap filed away and labelled and recycled and cleaned up is some serious therapy)
• an appetite, cuz our new neighbors just went berry picking and are having us over for waffles. extrayum.

<rant>As reported by the excellent AFL-CIO Paywatch Database, Lucent CEO Henry Schacht pulled in $21,567,312 in 2001. And yet, as reported in the Boston Globe today, Lucent is now $7.9 billion in the hole and will be cutting 7,000 jobs. That’s laying off 7,000 people. That’s taking 7,000 people’s lives and going whoop! yer screwed! And remember both IBM and HP recently laid off twice that (and of course the CEO’s made off with even more of their loot). Ug!</rant> Let’s scrap the whole thing and start all over, ok? in the meantime, United for a Fair Economy are excellent folks to be organizing with.

ok, so they may not be burning you, but for me they have all been driving me crazy for some time, so i’ve been collecting them. comment with your own and any answers you have…

• what the hell is m.s.g.? yeah, cool, there’s the nomsg folks but what was it before, like what actual stuff do they have to mess with to make it into m.s.g.?
• same with baking soda and baking powder. do they mine that stuff from a mountain somewhere? is it really really really ground up vegetable or mineral matter? the difference between the two is simple enough, but it’s this weird white powder! what the fuck was it before?
• being a fan of italian soda (like you make in the cafe with torani syrup), i didn’t know what the orgeat flavor was. yes, it’s almond. mix with hazelnut for a deliciousity to remember. or something.
• why do playing cards have a diamond, a spade, a club and a heart? there’s a very impressive and scholarly and more extensive answer than you prolly want to read, but it has to do with chinese domino-like thingies, way back, being transmuted into spanish games, etc. long before your mama’s mama’s mama was born.
• i’ve long wondered how many of us out there are afflicted with ACHOO (Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome). hannah holmes, a frequent columnist for discovery online has an interesting piece on it, that says about 20-30% of us.
• how big is betelgeuse? fuckin big. my sister told me it was basically the size of the earth’s orbit around the sun. still trying to get my brain around that, i saw at that site that it will probably shrink down to the size of the earth, in its post-kablooey state. zow.

Democracy Now just keeps churning out the hard hitting news. yesterday’s program had five really interesting pieces:

• New Report Reveals Latinos Are Incarcerated For Drug Offenses At Thirteen Times The Rate Of White Youth
• 150 Nigerian Women End Their Unprecedented Peaceful Protest Against Chevron, Winning Major Concessions
• Valium, Hallucinogens, Anti-Depressants, And Chemical Cocktails: A New Report Details The Pentagon’s Plans For A Psychopharmacological Arsenal For Use In The U.S.
• Justice Department Secretly Charters An Airlift To Deport 131 Pakistanis Imprisoned For Months
• As Ahmad Omar Sayeed Sheikh Appeals His Death Sentence For Murder Of Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl, A Look At Sayeed Sheik’s Links To The Pakistani Intelligence Service

included:

• on their early walk, all three dogs (we’re babysitting Ramona the hound) went at the same time
• a gorgeous amazing trip to Sauvie Island with A’s folks and a dear friend, where we picked 30 pounds of berries and walked and birdwatched
• napping
• making blueberry and marionberry pies - so yum!
• enjoying the perfect martini on the porch in the evening breeze with our new neighbors, who are very cool.

ah, summer!

brilliant, i tell you, just brilliant. it was for a new video game. i had the whole scenario worked out. now, mind you, i’m not a programmer, so i just thought, wow, i should sell this idea to someone. yeah, well, thank goodness folks like Tom Sloper had put some real thought into this already. a lot of thought, in fact. duh. thanks, tom.

Since you’ve been wondering where Stu was, here’s a blurb about Hample and his new book. Stuart Hample wrote the best kid’s book ever, The Silly Book, which is way out of print, but if you can find a copy, get it.

• couple years ago, i and a lot of other folks purchased this lemon of a printer. well, HP was sued by folks who had lots of problems and said that “these performance problems result from defectively designed separation pads which oxidize, degrade, and harden during the expected useful life of the unit, and often cause the printer to multifeed paper.” True that. Happened to me LOTS. HP has finally decided to settle a class action suit on this. Except of course the settlement is that for our trouble, those of who purchased the lemon get a $20 credit towards another HP product (wow!, hurry before it’s too late!!) [removes tounge from cheek, ouch]. And oh yeah, the attorney’s fees will be a bit mroe than that of course, like 3.5 million dollars. Hey, gotta keep up with the new lease on the S.U.V., of course.
• Despite now having those annoying pop-up and pop-under ads, street-tech.com has a good review of the Micro-Scope PC diagnostic toolkit. Check it.
• Dan Engler, the dood who wrote the excellent script for comments used here and on lots of other blogs, keeps a blog with good stuff on scripts, gaming, web back end and other stuff. Check it.

• Critical Resistance is calling on folks to protest CA governor Davis’ illegal parole policy. Save the date - August 20th.
• Lots more good background and up to date info on these issues can be gotten from the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison.
• The rad folks from Support Coalition International besides all the good campaign work they’ve got going on have teamed up with the founder of the Prison Activist Resource Center (uh, that’d be me…) to launch a new network for people in the psychiatric survivors and prison justice movements. Things are rolling with a new yahoo list. Watch this space for more news as it develops.
• the International Solidarity Movement has re-vamped their page and resources, in conjuction with their summer Campaign Against Occupation, and you can stay up to date on that as well with thier pal-solidarity list. Also, locally here in Portland, the Palestine Action Group is organizing a forum on “Arab Media And the Perspectives of Children in Conflict” this coming weekend. Check it out.

we were walking down to the coffee shop (A had the morning off!) and heard a kid crying - howling crying, sitting on his bike. we came up to him and asked what was wrong. he was lost. got seperated from his older brother. 5 year old ian was shirtless, with all his teeth capped, and one pierced ear. he lives at “thirtiest an division - acwoss from natuws maket.” ok ian, it’ll be alright, that’s just a few blocks away, we’ll walk back with you and help you find your brother and your house. ian stopped crying and stared riding along. suddenly we hear older kids on bikes up in the next block. ian tears off on his bike towards them, saying (and this stuck with us the whole day, it was just so sad and hilarious), “dere he is, da widdle bastawd!!“

at a graduation ceremony last month, dr. pizzo, the dean of the stanford med school, said that through medicines’s recent advances we have basically done away with childhood cancer and AIDS. (yeah, and that’s not a paraphrase, that’s what he said.) wow, i’d say that’s news to the folks at the childhood cancer foundation, who have alerted us to the fact that:

&nbsp

• Each day, 46 children are diagnosed with cancer
• One in 330 children will develop cancer by age 20
• Although cure rates are steadily increasing, 35% of children will die
• Cancer remains the number one disease killer of children; more than genetic anomalies, cystic fibrosis, and AIDS combined

and dean pizzo, i guess it’s also news to those neophytes over at that little outfit called the united nations, who in their report last week said that

AIDS will kill 70 million people over the next 20 years unless rich nations step up their efforts to curb the disease, the United Nations warned on Tuesday in a report showing the epidemic is still in its early stages.More than 40 million people worldwide have AIDS or are infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease, up from 34 million two years ago, and infection rates are climbing, said the latest report from UNAIDS, the agency that coordinates U.N. AIDS programs.

hmm. guess those folks really should have conslulted the good dean first, cuz surely, he knows all about great advancements in medicine that they, somehow, just musta missed.

re-braodcasting an archived episode with new and updated info, the National Radio Project’s show this week detailed the monstrous “debt” that certain hoseheads at the IMF and the World Bank seem to think that people in the global south owe the rich northerners.

Heads-of-state, rock-stars, activists and many others have called for debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries of the Global South. On this archive edition of Making Contact, we take a look at international debt, its causes, and why some are calling for the debts to be cancelled.

so here, for your education ‘n activism are a couple a places to check out:

• the Whirled Bank Group
• 50 years is [more than] Enough
• Jubille Plus
• Mobilize for Global Justice
• and lots more at the Whirled Bank’s link page and the DMOZ debt cancellation page and from Jay’s Progressive Links, the National Liberation Movements
  and Third World Solidarity Links page.

chris has got these stories about smooching going. so people, here’s action figure’s very own smoochy story section: i’ll tell the story of my very first real kiss, and it involves a certain 9th grader named Natalie and the swooning sounds of Journey’s Lights. But first, let’s ask A, what was your first real kiss like?

now i know it’s nothing like phoenix or LA or NYC, but it’s still hot. and thanks to this piece by one of the best and funniest writers i’ve ever encountered, we get to laugh through it, sweating all the way.

oh, and from a recent post over at resblog, A inspired me to look this up. it’s just time for those who don’t want women breastfeeding in public to get over it. ok? here’s where to get more good info on the issue. [anyone with good links to this info not just for oregon, but national, pls put them in comments, k? thanks]

after listening to his amazing amazing new albums, alice, and blood money we read this interview with tom waits in which he deftly describes his collaboration with kathleen brennan:

I trust her opinion above all else. You’ve gotta have somebody to trust, that knows a lot. She’s done a lot of things. I’m Ingrid Bergman and she’s Bogart. She’s got a pilot’s license, and she was gonna be a nun before we got married. I put an end to that. She knows about everything from motorcycle repair to high finance, and she’s an excellent pianist. One of the leading authorities on the African violet. She’s a lot of strong material. She’s like Superwoman, standing there with her cape flapping. It works. We’ve been at this for some time now. Sometimes you quarrel, and it’s the result of irritation, and sometimes it comes out of the ground like a potato and we marvel at it. She doesn’t like the spotlight. She’s a very private person, as opposed to myself. [Laughs.]

wow. that’s it. wow.

um, t, where you at homes?

the best jazz station on radio now has a much improved listen-on-line feature. check it.

the dogs have been freaking out, yelling at these kows for kids statues here in the best city on earth.

as we blog along, having just moeved here, we will elucidate on just how that is. one quick one is that it has the very best ymca i’ve ever been to. it’s got bball courts, raquetball, a bike trainer which has a pc connected to it, so you can browse the web while working out (and listen to your own cd’s, etc), it’s got a great pool, a track, and jacuzzi, sauna and steam room. wow. i’m loving it.

another great thing about our experience so far is the awesome group of folks that are amanda’s co-interns. [note that as of friday afternoon, this page is still showing last year’s first year folks. check again soon, if it’s still that way]