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Jan. 12th, 2006 @ 12:18 pm
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so um.... i havent written in this thing for a really long time.
i have an online romance. i think it's funny to call someone my boyfriend when i've never even met him.
his name is taylor and unfortunately he lives in des moines. but he wants to come visit me here in seattle. an online relationship is about all i can handle right now after bruce. that whole situation still pisses me off. it's too bad a childhood of growing up in africa was wasted on an yellow bellied sack of pussy shit like him, but what can you do?
i'm not bitter! no really ;)
what else is new? amy came back from nicaragua for the holiday. i finally got her to sign up on myspace. i miss her so!!! she has no running water, but at least she has electricity. we sent her back with some dvd's and a new dvd player, so hopefully that will eleviate some of the boredom. the people in her town aren't exactly friendly and she's really lonely.
when we picked her up at the airport i joked that she should just stay here and have them mail her dog to her. i was halfway serious. but painful experiences can only make you stronger.
well, they can make you more calloused too, but our mama didn't raise no assholes.
or sort of.
okay! but at least i feel bad about being an asshole! which is more than i can say for some people...
so all we pretty much did while amy was here was see movies. she had a lot of catching up to do. we saw brokeback mountain with my aunt jen in that ridiculously huge theatre at the lynnwood mall. it was the second time i saw it. some asshole was being all loud and obnoxious throughout the whole thing and started laughing during the last scene with jake and heath where they fight. some woman was like "shut up" and the dude yelled back "omg YOU shut the fuck up!" and then some other woman was like "get up and leave if you cant take it!" he finally shut up after that, but it was too late, the whole movie was ruined. i told amy and jen that that is what we get for seeing it in lynnwood.
i also made my sister watch mala educacion with me. she couldn't believe all the controversy over brokeback mountain after seeing that. ahh you gotta love pedro almodovar! and gael garcia bernal! now if only he and jake gyllenhaal would get together in a movie! then my life would be complete and i could die happy. actually no! they should film a porno together! then i could truly be content!
anyways, kevin got a new piano and i'm excited to go over and start practicing again. he got shit like les mis and the phantom which i can't stand! but he also got some mozart and chopin and beethoven so it will be fun to clear the piano cobwebs. i should get some more jazzy numbers.
oh but he did get hedwig and the angry inch piano music! some of the songs are originally done on piano and they sound really good, but they also have the punk rock songs which just sounds like the church couple from saturday night live when you play it on the piano. i wanna get some elton john or cole porter. that would be fun. ooh i've also always wanted to learn the charlie brown song. that's a good one too.
hmmm it seems like there's other good piano music out there that i cant think of right now.
i really want to go back to school too. i wanna do storyboards or pre-production design or something using my skills. all i want is to get paid for something i like to do anyways. something besides sleep. it is nice getting paid to sleep, but the other shit i have to deal with at my job with the retards really sucks. one good thing is i know that after this job i can handle anything. some may think developementally disabled people are all cute and innocent, but i tell you it is an excercize in maintaining your sanity without going postal the entire time they are awake.
i'm not sorry i didn't get my art degree though. the "art world" is bullshit. it's so arbitrary and fake. i would rather use my talent to make something worthwhile.
inertia isn't real!!!
well that's what i try to tell myself at least |
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so here's the latest mix cd i made for my sis in nicaragua:
1. hope there's someone... antony and the johnsons
2. milk... coco rosie
3. heartbeat... annie
4. my world is empty without you babe... diana ross and the supremes
5. tekno love song... coco rosie
6. falling and laughing... orange juice
7. symptom finger... the faint
8. a kick in the teeth... fischerspooner
9. new york, NY... nina hagen
10. lipgloss... pulp
11. war... edwin starr
12. steven smith... the organ
13. noah's ark... coco rosie
14. sigourney weaver... edie sedgwick
15. giving you up... kylie minogue
16. the tears of a clown... smokey robinson and the miracles
17. blokes on #45... orange juice
18. i'm so excited... le tigre
19. papa was a rollin stone... the temptations
20. the flowers... regina spektor
21. beautiful boyz... coco rosie feat. antony and the johnsons
i named the mix Anchorman (it's very dramatic). also i made a case for it and painted an album cover which can be viewed on my myspace profile. it's the one with the pink bunny with the tatoo of a ship sitting on top of the person with the tattoo of a tear. |
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...this is from an email i sent to my sis who's living in nicaragua:
"...speaking of retards, i found out that bruce just has no concept of
social constructions or how rigid gender behavior is stupid. now i
realize i was wasting my time with him. it's sad, but he just doesn't
get it and you can't force someone to think out of their paradigm. he
wouldn't even get what i'm talking about right now and think i'm just
using all these words to sound 'cool'.
we kind of had a bitch fest over email that was total junior high
drama. but somehow strangely i feel better now. i don't really
regret not being with him, i only regret thinking he was something
totally different than he is.
its funny how your judgement can get so impaired when you think you're
in love. from now on no more boys who don't like david bowie or freak
out if some girl at folk life has pit hair! ;)
love
peter"
fyi - folk life generally sucks and the only reason i went is because it happened to be going on at the seattle center when i met bruce at the EMP for the first time. |
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Aug. 24th, 2005 @ 10:40 am
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okay so i got this message from bruce after i left a comment on his site that said:
"remember your dream about the train? well it's gone and left the station... careful boys! this one here is a real HEARTBREAKER. no, really."
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Conway
Date: Aug 23, 2005 7:04 PM
If I broke your heart, if I hurt you, whatever I did, I am sorry, it was never my intention, I tried to be honest with you and myself, and deal with everything that was going on in my head at the time, I am not perfect Peter, I never claimed to be, I told you long before this all went down that this was a bad idea, that you would end up hurt, you chose to stick around, telling me to use you as a resource to mend what was going on inside, you stuck around and you got hurt, but you sticking around and running when you didn't get your way, hurt me too, but I'm not blaming you, so kindly refrain from pointing fingers and take a look in the mirror, cause it takes two to tango Peter, but I made it very clear, I did not want a relationship. If you thought you could change me or swing it your way, thats your business, not mine, sure I gave some mixed signals, but I corrected them the minute I became aware of how they were affecting you, or tried to atleast. I wish you happiness in life Peter, I wish and hope you find someone who treats you like gold and appreciates you and loves you, I am sorry you are sore, and I am sorry I can't help you with that.
I will leave you comment up as a warning to others if you feel that that is necessary, it gives the impression that this is ALL I do, just break hearts, it makes no mention of the good in me, but you know what, behind it all, you loved me for a reason, your heart is broken for a reason, so I can't be all that bad.
Maybe one day you will accept we were never meant to be, and miss my company and contact me for the right reasons, in the meantime, please don't try make my life difficult because you are pissed, I'm not bothering you am I?
Good luck peter, I wish you well,
me
----------------------------------------
okay so what does that mean "your heart is broken for a reason, so i can't be all that bad" --? god i wish i could just forget that he ever existed! AARGHHH! |
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...i've been really sad lately. i stopped seeing this guy whom i've been with for almost the past 3 months. i know it shouldn't still hurt this much, we didn't even know each other that long, but i'm still having trouble getting over it.
i reaaally liked him. he was from south africa, and he had the cutest british accent! we spent every weekend together, and he would tell me all these great stories of growing up in the bush in africa. he was a handyman and he had the cutest stubby caloused fingers and the bitch never gained an ounce even though he never worked out. he knew how to ride a motorcycle, and was good with power tools! i would sit there getting all moist inside while listening to his stories.
i think i was in some sort of out-of-africa fantasy land.
he was the first to initiate anything when we first met. when he kissed me for the first time he said "i've been waiting all day to do that". but we never fucked. at first i thought it was kind of fun, the anticipation of it all... but after a couple months i wanted to take it further. he responded by writing me an email saying that he "wasn't ready for a relationship right now" because he had "just gotten out of a really bad one. it's not you it's me" (his exact words).
i know i should have dumped him after throwing every cliche in the book at me, but i stupidly told him we had a good thing going, and that it was worth working through our issues. he agreed, he even said he wanted things to "stay the way they've been between us". after that, things were fine for awhile, but toward the last couple weeks we hung out, i noticed i was initiating all the sex and he was putting a pillow over his head when we would fool around.
the last two days we were together, i helped him make a cool fort for his niece. it was a big tree we cut out of wood and i painted all these little bugs and birds and flowers in it. every one thought it was adorable. we built it into an alcove in her room with a ladder leading up to a platform behind it where she could look out through the leaf-holes we cut in the tree.
i thought that by doing something like that for his niece, it would show how much i liked him, but now i almost regret it.
not only did he not make any advances toward me, he flat out refused to have sex.
imagine how you'd feel if some guy you really liked lost all attraction to you. i thought it was shitty that he used to show all this affection towards me and now was just kind of leaving me in the dust. it hurt that he wasn't reciprocating anymore. that night after he refused me i turned over and said "fine whatever" and he jokingly said "Oh, so you're gonna pout now?" i said "yeah, maybe," and he said "well thank you for the tree house."
i responded by saying "at least you appreciate me for something".
that night i had a dream that he fucked me. i woke up, and couldn't even sleep in the same bed with him.
that morning we barely said a word to each other. he did ask me why i said he didn't appreciate me. i just said "i don't know." i knew if i got into it then i'd start crying.
i'll never forget his face as he dropped me off to go to work. it was this mixed look of anger and confusion and sadness.
i simply said "bye" and walked off never looking at him again
he wrote me an email telling me he didn't want a serious relationship with me and he never would. he said that just the fact that i argued with him (at the time i thought it was a discussion) about strict monogamous relationships (i said they were a limiting hetero-normative social construction) that it was a "big red flag".
but i think it was more than that.
he had told me before that he couldn't have sex with a condom on. i thought that was bullshit, and he should learn to (i didn't say it, but you know...) he said that if we were truly monogamous, condoms shouldn't be an issue.
i did tell him that i would be monogamous with him if that's what he wanted because i think it's irresponsible to go off and fuck whomever whenever. but i pretty much hinted that i'd never have sex without condoms.
i still can't believe he "broke up" with me over email. he said he just wanted to be friends, and i told him i couldn't cos i'd want to have the previous intimacy we shared. that's when he accused me of using him for sex and thinking with nothing but my dick.
sorry if i can't just be friends! i didn't want to be strung along like the other people he's "just friends" with.
i havent seen him since that awful night after we finished the tree.
i wonder if he ever thinks about me |
| » gee it's been a long time... |
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...here's a quote i read in harpers magazine i thought y'all might find interesting
when the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few... The poor were clad in rags and skins- they devoured crusts and gnawed bones. THe day of Science dawned, and... There is more of value in the brain of an average man of today- of a master mechanic, or a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.
These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. The were not found in cathedrals or behind altars- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation, and experience- and for them all, man is indebted to man.
-ingersoll "god and the constitution"
May. 5th, 2005 @ 04:21 pm
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| » been the ruin of many a po' boy |
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Follow the instructions below for the genuine thrill that comes with discovering your blues name: From the first list,
take the name using the initial of your first name. From the second list, do the same with your middle name. From the
third, your surname.
First List:
A=Fat; B=Muddy ; C=Crippled; D=Old; E=Texas; F=Hollerin';
G=Ugly; H=Brown; I=Happy; J=Boney; K=Curly; L=Pretty;
M=Jailhouse; N=Peg Leg; O=Red; P=Sleepy; Q=Bald; R=Skinny;
S=Blind; T=Big; U=Yella; V=Toothless; W=Screamin'; X=FatBoy;
Y=Washboard; Z=Steel-Eye
Second List:
A=Bones; B=Money; C=Harp; D=Legs; E=Eyes; F=Lemon; G=Killer;
H=Hips; I=Lips; J=Fingers; K=Boy; L=Liver; M=Gumbo; N=Foot;
O=Mama; P=Back; Q=Duke; R=Dog; S=Bad Boy; T=Baby; U=Chicken;
V=Pickles; W=Sugar; X=Cracker; Y=Tooth; Z=Smoke
Third List:
A=Jackson; B=McGee; C=Hopkins; D=Dupree; E=Green; F=Brown;
G=Jones; H=Rivers; I=Malone; J=Washington; K=Smith; L=Parker;
M=Lee; N=Thompkins; O=King; P=Bradley; Q=Hawkins; R=Jefferson;
S=Davis; T=Franklin; U=White; V=Jenkins; W=Bailey; X=Johnson;
Y=Blue; Z=Allison
my name's Sleepy Money Brown what's yours?
Dec. 18th, 2004 @ 12:13 pm
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| » Don't get pissed off... |
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(i sent this to some guy on myspace that had this group called "straight people for gay marriage"
...i just thought i'd write to you and say that while i think your intentions are well placed i don't actually think it's wise for anybody (including straight people) to push for gay marriage.
now before you dismiss me as a right wing nutjob, i'm not saying this because i believe all that fundamentalist bull shit about marriage being only for "a man and a woman" or some such nonsense
i'm sure you know that marriage is not (contrary to popular belief) a biblical institution. marriage started in most patriarchical societies as a proprietary economical arrangement.
this archaic view of people as property (men and women) is something progressives might want to distance themselves from, as it can lead to a host of other hegemonic problems in society.
i think your boycott on marriage is good, it shows that you recognize one group is being favored over another... but why not take it one step further and boycott marriage forever? why should married people recieve benefits over non-married people?
i believe a lot of queers want marriage not only for the economic benefits, but also because they want to participate in an intitution that validates their relationships in some kind of heterosexual paradigm.
it just seems to me like a step in the wrong direction. not to mention that the republicans totally used it against us to help get bush re-(un)-elected. Sad.
thanks
<3
peter
Dec. 14th, 2004 @ 02:38 pm
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| » Why vegetarians are retarded |
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The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to Iraq
Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning.
The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac
The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.
We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”
If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.
As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark—a conservative portfolio of investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to “sponsor its own fertility,” to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson’s phrase. This is the plant world’s norm.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.
When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar’s satchel.
I’ve already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe’s primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.
Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. 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. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.
Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the center of domestication for the Western world’s main crops and livestock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.
Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now China and India and one centered on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its expansion depends on water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people’s coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.
The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn’t need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That’s not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.
Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren’t trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes, “The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile.” The world’s surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best idea of the nature of these interactions.
Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native state today. Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.
The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First World, the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of wheat and beef but also the globe’s islands of Caucasians, of European surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands, the neo-Europes, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in the world, and about 86 percent of all corn. That is to say, the neo-Europes drive the world’s agriculture. The dominance does not stop with grain. These countries, plus the mothership—Europe—accounted for three fourths of all agricultural exports of all crops in the world in 1999.
Plato wrote of his country’s farmlands:
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. . . . Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.
Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.
The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: 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 accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.
For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.
Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people—that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.
More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.
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.
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.
Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995—not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and desperate corners of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen’s less sensational chemistry.
The chemophobia of modern times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry’s periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic compounds—polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of thing—not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture’s use of the more ornate chemistry is benign—an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county in the United States has about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as one born in a rural place that doesn’t produce wheat, an effect researchers blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen—the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper—that we should fear most.
Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the earth appears to breathe—it thrives by converting a short list of basic elements from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet’s most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is nitrogen.
Nitrogen can be released from its “fixed” state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.
This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else.
That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation’s Corn Belt, is an environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means “oxygen-depleted.” Here there’s no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has no long term: everything dies immediately. The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
America’s biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can’t eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can’t eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don’t. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.
About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.
It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam—sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today—double what nutritionists recommend.
There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way—and it appears they will—we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel.” This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs’ demands for fuel compete with the poor’s demand for grain.
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.
This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest of the world will adopt America’s methods. He should be, because the rest of the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31 percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world’s population, has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places have poor people who could use the grain, but they can’t afford it.
I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge.
Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my household’s annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice—an act not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe’s ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.
About the Author
Richard Manning is the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, published by North Point Press.
This is The Oil We Eat, a feature, originally from February 2004, published Friday, July 23, 2004. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
Nov. 25th, 2004 @ 01:48 pm
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| » Well, shit..... |
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Shit may just be the most powerful word in the English language. You can be shit faced, shit out of luck, or have shit for brains. With a little effort, you can get your shit together, find a place for your shit or decide to shit or get off the pot.
You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit and die. Some people know their shit while others can't tell the difference between shit and shineola.
There are lucky shits, dumb shits, crazy shits, and sweet shits. There is bull shit, horse shit and chicken shit. You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, or duck when shit hits the fan.
You can give a shit or serve shit on a shingle. You can find yourself in deep shit or be happier than a pig in shit. Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plain shitty.
Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and there are times when you feel like shit. You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit. You can carry shit, have a mountain of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.
Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit and other times you swim in a lake of shit and come out smelling like a rose. When you stop to consider all the facts, it's the basic building block of creation. And remember, once you know your shit, you don't need to know anything else!
Nov. 24th, 2004 @ 11:03 am
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| » (No Subject) |
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not that anyone cares, but despite being a fag, i don't believe in gay marriage. not because i believe in all that superstitious mumbo jumbo about marriage being "between a man and a woman" bullshit, but because it's an archaic and dying institution that faggots shouldn't need to validate their relationships.
but some might say that it's not about validating relationships it's about equal rights
to them i say, why give special priveledges to people who enter into proprietary contracts (like marriage) with one another? a person can never truly own another person, and we shouldn't keep perpetuating this myth by giving economic advantages to those that participate in it.
anyway just to show how stupid fundamentalist christians are, i posted a funny thing about literal biblical marriage below. it just shows that the next logical step (if we keep whittling the rules for biblical marriage down) is abolishing marriage altogether
Nov. 12th, 2004 @ 03:56 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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As Republicans now have a mandate to prevent marriage between two people of the same sex, others of us have been busy drafting a Constitutional Amendment codifying all marriages entirely on Biblical principles.
After all, God wouldn't want us to "pick and choose" which of the Scriptures we elevate to civil law and which we choose to ignore. Right?
LOVE THAT BIBLE!!
DRAFT OF A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO DEFEND BIBLICAL MARRIAGE:
* Marriage in the United States of America shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Genesis 29:17-28; II Samuel
3:2-5)
* Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Samuel 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chronicles 11:21)
* A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deuteronomy
22:13-21)
* Marriage of a believer and a nonbeliever shall be forbidden. (Genesis 24:3; Numbers 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Nehemiah 10:30, 2 Corinthians 6:14)
* Since marriage is for life, neither the U.S. Constitution nor any state law shall permit divorce. (Deuteronomy 22:19; Mark 10:9-12)
* If a married man dies without children, his brother must marry the widow. If the brother refuses to marry the widow, or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Genesis 38:6-10 Deuteronomy 25:5-10)
* In lieu of marriage (if there are no acceptable men to be found), a woman shall get her father drunk and have sex with him. (Genesis
19:31-36)
Hopefully, this helps to clarify the finer details of the government's righteous struggle against the infidels and heathens among us.
To check the accuracy of these you can go to: http://bible.gospelcom.net/
Nov. 12th, 2004 @ 03:33 pm
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| » red states and blue states |
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Blue States: Home of good schools
Red States: Homeskooled good
Blue States: Want a big tent for their Party.
Red States: Wears a big tent to her party.
Blue States: Favor electric cars
Red States: Favor electric chairs
Blue States: Concerned about ballooning deficits' effect on capital markets turning gains into thin air
Red States: Concerned about whether it's demons that make balloons float in thin air
Blue States: Dream of making enough money to kite and swim with Czechs in Biarritz
Red States: Dream of kiting enough checks to swim in Schlitz
Blue States: Favor institutionalized health care for the poor
Red States: Favor institutionalizing the poor
Blue States: After the 9/11 attacks, put coffins in the ground
Red States: After the 9/11 attacks, put magnetic flags on the car
Blue States: Forget that God did not give Adam a Steve
Red States: Forget that not only did God give Abraham three wives, He gave Solomon 300 concubines
Blue States: Enormous cities that serve as the engines of human progress
Red States: Enormous Hummers that serve as the engines for Arab oil
Blue States: Provide the "tax" part of "tax and spend"
Red States: Provide the "spend on a new 8-lane highway to link a Wal-Mart to the Olive Garden" part of "tax and spend"
Blue States: Believe we're all brothers and sisters under the skin.
Red States: Don't mind if we're brothers and sisters under the sheets.
Blue States: Fighting to clean up skid row
Red States: Fighting to clean up skid marks
Blue States: Concerned about global warming
Red States: Don't like to travel and are too fat to fit in an airline seat anyway, so glad to hear that the tropics are coming to Texas. Yee-haw!
Blue States: Follow Jesus, but doesn't believe in Him
Red States: Believe in Jesus, but doesn't follow Him
Blue States: Want to repeal the Patriot Act
Red States: Want to repeal the Emancipation Proclamation
Blue States: Looking for a method to weaken China every day
Red States: Sold everyday china for a weekend of meth
Blue States: Favor drafting annoying laws on assault rifles
Red States: Assault annoying in-laws with rifles after being drafted
Blue States: Want the right for everyone to worship as they choose
Red States: Want the right to choose everyone's worship
Blue States: Women wrestling with the right to choose
Red States: Choose women's wrestling
Blue States: Want a rational energy policy
Red States: Want policy of energetic irrationalism
Blue States: Used benefits to assist victims on account of attacks
Red States: Used attacks to benefit Toby Keith's bank account
Blue States: Watched friends in New York die in foxy attacks on America
Red States: Attack New York on Fox for not being friends of America
Blue States: Believe God loves us and gave everyone free will to be different
Red States: Believe God willed us to freely hate everyone different
Blue States: Believe absence makes the heart grow fonder
Red States: Believe abstinence saves the tart from plunder
Blue States: Believe in Mr. Darwin's theory of "Evolution"
Red States: Believe in Mr. Jesus' "Talking Snake" theory
Blue States: Slave to pay inheritance taxes
Red States: Inherited slaves
Blue States: Buy art
Red States: Collect Beanie Babies
The above was ripped off - stolen, if you will - from www.bettybowers.com
Nov. 9th, 2004 @ 03:38 pm
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| » Subject: The Republican Mind Set |
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Things you have to believe to be a Republican today:
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.
If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.
Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery.
You support states’ rights, which mean Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have the right to adopt.
What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.
If you don't send it to at least 10 other people, we're likely to be stuck with Bush for 4 more years.
Experience is a wonderful thing... It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Friends don't let friends vote Republican. Please remember to VOTE NOVEMBER 2nd
Oct. 28th, 2004 @ 07:19 pm
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| » Anyone But Bush |
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i just want to make it clear- i don't think kerry is all that and a bag of chips. HOWEVER! at least he's not on a theocratic crusade to usher in the apocalypse. lets face it- Bush subscribes to the elitist born-again notion that Jesus = Money. after all would jesus let people be rich and powerful if it didn't fit in with his divine plan? No, of course not, and i should know, i grew up in a non-denominational (whatever that means) born again christian church (a la SAVED)
So therefore staging an illegal war so that you can give no-bid contracts to your corporate buddies so they can overcharge american tax payers billions while shifting the tax burden off the rich and onto the middle class (recent congressional report on the budget anyone?) is the "moral" thing to do. (sorry for the run-on sentence i use them a lot when i'm angry)
But the only price we have to pay for this is an unprecedented deficit, record unemployment, a gutted constitution, women's rights, our crisis of a healthcare sytem, global warming(finally the administration admitted to this one- they must have recieved a revelation from jesus, cos god knows it wasn't the SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, or anything),and the scorn of the rest of the free thinking world.
And you may not care what other countries think of us- but the fact is we DO live in a global economy and if everone hates us- WE suffer. i mean, how do we hope to maintain the standard of living in this country if the entire globe stops allowing our cultural influence to keep exploiting them? I mean, we can't even adequately take over afghanistan (remember that one? osama? what?) let alone invade the entire globe. which is what we'll have to do if we let this president stay on track.
yes we do have more freedoms here that just about everywhere else. but those freedoms weren't won by being ASSHOLES.
Vote for what you KNOW is right. vote Anyone But Bush!
Oct. 20th, 2004 @ 10:49 am
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| » (No Subject) |
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Oct. 12th, 2004 @ 10:36 am
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| » so i did indeed meet jake shears... |
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...and here are the photos to prove it. i just can't get over how this totally validates my life! heheheh
click here!
Sep. 28th, 2004 @ 10:02 am
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| » the scissor sisters... |
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...are coming to seattle and i already have my tickets. i am also going to the record signing cos my friend is getting me a wristband and i'm painting jake shears a portrait of himself and he's going to fall in love with it and me and we'll run away together. the end.
oh, but we'll kiss and stuff too.
<33333333
the end.
Sep. 20th, 2004 @ 05:53 pm
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| » garrison keillor: prarie home upstart! |
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An anonymous friend of mine here passed on the following essay, written by Garrison Keillor. Keillor, the longtime host of NPR's acclaimed variety show Prarie Home Companion, brilliantly says what's probably been on most of our minds here these past four years.
--Tim, from Get Rid of Bush
By Garrison Keillor
August 26, 2004
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.
The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day,who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned - and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics.
"Bipartisanship is another term for date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for re-election on a platform of tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear - fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public ducation to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.
Sep. 8th, 2004 @ 12:27 pm
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