for that same old nasty wine. wow. a Missouri state deputy attorney general has made it all too clear why they want the death penalty:
“Are you suggesting,” the judge asked the prosecutor, that “even if we find Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?”Frank A. Jung, an assistant state attorney general, replied, “That’s correct, your honor.”
wow. you can read the full story, contact this hoser’s boss to tell him what you think, and of course, take action.
the new issue of the Prison Art newsletter is out, covering a lot of bases like
what? the missed connections ads posts have got you curious, and you’re writing a research paper on personals ads and dating sites? well, you should look at the dmoz personals and dating categories for sure. they include niche population sites like jewish vegans, dating simulation games, and speed dating (the last two of which i’d never heard of). kids these days.
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The Hollywood Bowl is Portland’s gigantic bowling alley. not very good food, but generally fun. the shoes, however, suck (unlike this classic pair). faded neon color and velcro straps. ‘nuf said. so i was there for a pal’s b-day the other night and the cutest, funniest thing did i see: a 3 or 4 year old boy, very short of course, with older bro and mom and dad, bowling a couple of lanes over. |
they put up the bumpers and this kid starts bowling with them. he waddles up to the wood, heaves this ball no less than a third his weight, over to the line and as best he can, and rolls it with a thump. after i got done laughing at how sweet this was, i realized that is quite a feat. it’s as if i were to try and bowl with a ball roughly two feet in diameter and over 60 pounds! sheeeit! you go kid.
on your list for today are a few bloggers whom i’ve now finally added to the sidebar: Stingy Kids, Naked Knitting, and Eat the State (among others, take a peek).
ok, as always, feel free to keep commenting with gems from craigslist and elsewhere, but i don’t think i ever will need to read any others except those from the portland mercury, like this weeks wild ones to start it off:
Dan - you should bring your beautiful teeth back to JustinsYou: dressed well with perfect teeth. I may have slapped you. When you lifted up your shirt I was impressed; that polo shirt was great. We evaded gun fire and the exchange of phone numbers. I’m wishing there was more.
| a very enthusiastic determined young canvasser came to the door the other night. having canvassed myself a bunch of years back, i always feel bad for making up some excuse, like no money on hand, no time, the dogs etc etc… it gnawed at me, cuz i even told her i had canvassed. once i’d looked at the material, however, i realized these folks seem to be doing good work and on my way out for the night, i found her up the street and gave a donation. they are OregonAction and that work is on issues like Food Stamps, Living Wage, Affordable Housing, Fair Taxation, Precription Drugs (a member is pictured here in a campaign-building game), Health Care for All, and Immigrant Rights. |  |
People who are abused and treated with violence are those most likely to treat others abusively and violently. Confining people under conditions of extreme violence, fear, and hostility, and releasing them into society is like throwing a ticking time bomb into a crowd
Native American political prisoner Eddie Hatcher’s campaign is keeping on, and needs our help.
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Joy Harjo is one of thousands of poets who’ve contributed to the Poets Against the War project. pour your self a cup and take a read. Here’s an excerpt: |
Yes, that was me standing in the back door of the house in the alley, with a bowl of beans in my hands for the neighbors, a baby on my hip.No. I did not foresee the flood of blood. How they would forget our friendship, would return to kill me and the baby.
Yes, that was me whirling on the dance floor. We made such a racket with all that joy. I loved the whole world in that silly music.
No. I did not realize the terrible dance in the staccato of bullets.
there have been some excellent pieces of late on the wranglings of dubya and co. to try to destroy and/or take over iraq. more on those in a sec. but first, isn’t it interesting that folks on all places in the spectum are saying things like “If a war begins,” and “the Bush administration wants to go to war.”
what part of killing between half and 1.5 million people with sancitons, and bombing the country hundreds of times since the end of the gulf war up through last week would not be considered war? more good information on sanctions can be found on pages from:
more generally, tons of compelling info is being put out there now about this crisis. here is some of the best i’ve seen:
update: and, as usual, one of the best places to get good analysis, links, and very funny comix on the subject (and so many others) is ampersand.
if you are not familiar with the issue of resident work hours, here’s a very brief intro:
A true story: “I was operating post-call after being up for 36 hours. I was holding retractors when I literally fell asleep standing up and nearly face planted into wound. My upper arm hit the side of the bed and I woke up at that point and caught myself before I fell to the floor. I nearly put my face in the wound which would have contaminated the entire field and could have resulted in an infection for the patient.” - Anonymous orthopedic surgery resident from CA
and you could check out this fact sheet (and powerpoint presentations and more) put together by the med students association with nuggets like:
so, last year there was a flurry of activity around this issue. and at the moment i’m quite confused: the nice folks at the legislative resource center told me that both hr3236 and s2614 died on Dec 18 with the last congress. yes, lthe legislation meant to put a cap on work hours and instill some santiy in the field went to this committee and that subcommittee and then now they are no more. former. deceased. they also said that nothing on the issue has been re-introduced. yet the med student activists are still urging people to push on those bills. so something seems to be going on with the issue that is not readily apparent…
in the hospitals like the one my sweetie works at and those of our friends from med sku, now scattered around the country, programs are scrambling to try to limit work hours as if the boom will be lowered any day. um, sadly, it does not appear as though much of anything, let alone any boom lowering will happen any day soon.
do watch this space as i will post updates as i get them, perhaps there will be a ray of hope or even just some clarity
update: the american council for graduate medical education wrote guidelines to limit work hours, which will go into effect july 1 (they have a detailed and rather large pdf format FAQ on the issue as well). the legislative affairs director at AMSA says that is what is prompting many programs to reduce work hours at this point, but that they are continuing their activism in hopes that legislation will in fact be re-introduced in a matter of weeks.
missed it at the time, but there were lots of reports last week on the Chicago cop who got a life sentence for his role in a cocaine ring. two things:
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one, stories like this exposing the crap they do are good and needed and all, but often appear as the exception. they aren’t. that was the tip of a massive iceberg. need convincing of this case’s utter ordinaryness, and the gerneally widespread thuggery that is so widespread, and how ’bout while we are at it tons of sordid details exploding the myth of those nice folks in blue? subscribe to the list and your box’ll be filled daily with more than you will know what to do with. |
two: funny how these stories all lead with headlines calling him an “ex-cop” and “former gang crimes officer.” hello? he only became an “ex” cop because of the corruption. he did all that stuff as a cop. erg. again i say, bad cop. no donut..
a few of us were talking last night about learning more about the Black Panther Party, the BLA, and the threads carried through from civil rights organizing. we are reading some pieces and gearing up to watch parts of Eyes on the Prize. I was reminded of this interesting piece, via David Grenier, from Lorenzo’s blog about MLK vis-a-vis the grassroots activism of more militant organizing going on in the south. His newer pieces on racism among white anarchists and on imperialist power are also compelling, check it out.
in a brilliantly silly sort of way. joel veitch is at it again and this time while the kittens are fully unhinged, the spongemonkeys tell us why they like the moon. go, cuz life is better at rathergood. note, you can now get professionally goofy with lunchboxes, apparel and more. yow.
     
remember villa alegre? i still have that tune stuck in my head more than 25 years later. relive the memories of the CTW-like edutainment featuring “a mix of roving parent-less children, adult-aged authority figures and assorted fantastical characters including the town parrot.”
if you are in the LA area, mark you calendar. go. get inspired. my old pal Stanya is doing a new show called downdiverdown at diverseworks (scroll down for show description). critic F. Lennox Campello once described Stanya’s work, saying
Once again I must admit that I went into San Diego’s famed “Sushi” performance space with a bit of a prejudiced mind. After all, I’ve been to so many vapid “performance art” wastes-of-time, that I’ve pretty much decided that most of this genre is neither (a) art nor (b) performance. Leave it to energetic, funny, loud, sexy, slightly mad and hugely talented Stanya Kahn to change my mind in one brilliant swoop! Kahn, who writes her own scripts for these demented performances, is an interdisciplinary performer and writer from San Francisco whose work/performance Delirium has played in front of sold out audiences in San Francisco, New York and Dallas. |
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[update - the noamazon.com domain was taken over by some kind of strange spam site that at first looks like a page about the rainforest but is actually just tons of links to strange non-content. so that link’s not live, but the others seem good.]
if you didn’t notice, my prompt to order the book in the last post was linked not to amazon.com, but to abebooks.com. there’s just so many reasons why i’m just never going to shop at amazon again, and some of them are talked about at Corpwatch, by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, the GNU Project and lots lots more collected at (no longer) noamazon.com.
let’s revisit the question raised by last month’s post about burgerville. especially after responding to Jim Kunstler’s writings, i was somewhat fired up and wanting to further flesh out the question of whether and to what extent consumer choices can have the necessary impact on polluters and other purveyors of death culture. well, we need not go much further than Brian Tokar’s book Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash. my suggestion: order the book. while you’re waiting for it to arrive, check out the intro, where his analysis cuts to the heart of the issue:
“Green consumerism” arrived on the scene during the lead-up to the 1990 Earth Day anniversary. It is based on the myth that environmental problems are largely the result of individual consumer choices, neglecting all the ways these choices are shaped and constrained by decisions made in corporate boardrooms, well beyond the reaches of public scrutiny. Corporate managers indeed make the vast majority of decisions about what is produced and how, seriously limiting individual choices and shaping patterns of consumption in countless unacknowledged ways.Green consumerism largely overlooks this reality, instead viewing all of life as one big shopping mall. If everyone is equally responsible for the destruction of the earth, the solution is merely to buy more natural and recycled products, and companies are more than willing to make such products available at a premium price. Not only does green consumerism dilute the challenge that an ecological ethic might pose to the very idea of a consumer society, but the corporate promotion of fashionable “green” products makes life more difficult for small, local producers of everything from organic food to hand-sewn clothing. Further, as “natural” products have become a niche market for those affluent enough to pay a premium, the goods available to everyone else are even shoddier and more toxic than before. In a highly individualistic, economically-driven society such as ours, green consumerism makes it possible for people to feel they are doing something for the earth without questioning the lifeways or the economic system that have indeed driven us to the brink of ecological collapse.
Thus three closely related phenomena—the absorption of the mainstream environmental movement by the political status-quo, the emergence of corporate environmentalism, and the proliferation of “ecological” products in the marketplace—have all helped fuel the perception of a declining popular commitment to environmental protection. Indeed, they have helped set the stage for today’s anti-environmental backlash. To better understand the backlash against environmentalism, and its considerable popularity among corporate managers and political operatives, will require a look at some unique and widely misrepresented economic realities.
the organizers in the bay area in the 1990’s who were urging us to “fuck corporate earth day!” had a lot of this in mind. so, with all that as a lens, the catalog from Real Goods arriving in our mailbox was that much more interesting. i’ve bought stuff from them before, all the while wondering what this purchase was really all about. but this catalog has a frontpiece by the founder, John Schaeffer, which while it didn’t make me want to scream “boycott!” or anything, just laid even more bare where they are coming from. JS says in his little missive to potential buyers,
Dear Customer, On June 8, 1978 Real Goods Trading Company was born. On the cusp of our 25th anniversary, as I reflect on the tremendous changes we have helped to engender in the world, I feel proud. But there’s still so much more we need to do to make our planet sustainable in the 21st century. That’s why I invite you to explore the pages that follow.
now, don’t get me wrong. i believe these folks mean well. as do some of the folks who started all those natural grocery places like the now anti-union and harsh-to-workers Nature’s. but there’s two things about this that twist my biscuit:
1. hey, instead of saying “explore the pages that follow” maybe you could just say, “buy our stuff!”
2. “tremendous changes we helped to engender…” ok, so exactly how are things so much better now than they were in 1978? less pollution? nope. less corruption? nope. better regulation? COUGHCOUGH!! um, nope. any real progress in terms the impact we can measurably expect ot have in the areas of animal rights, clearcutting, carcinogenic crap in our food, water, air, and packaging? don’t think so. an increase in the number of people buying “green” stuff and recycling isn’t necessarily related to these factors. take a look at jay’s and rachel’s for lots more info on those issues.
3. “so much more we need to do to make our planet sustainable in the 21st century” dude. who ever thought that the planet itself wasn’t sustainable. it’s pretty human-centered to think that we and we alone are responsible for whether or not the planet continues to spin. and as you may or may not have noticed, despite basically all life being wiped out multiple times, the planet keeps regenerating. a bumper sticker was made a while back echoing professor Paul Erlich’s take on this issue: “Nature Bats Last”. indeed, long after the last pair of green cotton flax seed aromatherapy spa booties are completely turned to dust [yes, after i was able to breathe again from laughing so hard at that, i found the link and they are real] and the last “healing voice - sacred sounds” compact disc has been fossilized, earth will freeze over, then thaw, then likely spawn some form of life. if we don’t make it, well, bummer.
not that i don’t think water filters and solar power etc are important and good and something i want to have, but let’s have some perspective, shall we? maybe those things would be available to all of us if we had a real democracy. what do you think?
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hmm. wonder how come we didn’t hear about this in the mainstream press? found while i was looking for info for the recent index: Greenpeace tank girls occupy war machine. A few days ago, 14 activists entered Southampton’s Marchwood Military Port (that’s in England) and occupied tanks and jeeps bound for the Gulf. They were all removed, but made quite a stir. you go! |
no nukes is good nukes [see comments for sources]
without sounding trite i’d like to posit that it’s way past time for the US to simply quit the nuclear game and assist in the international efforts to stop this madness.
