An Open Letter to Very Important Democrats and their Associates:

Hey, y'all. I had some thoughts I wanted to share about that Afghanistan situation. Hope it's not too long, but I thought you may not have heard some of these ideas before, based on what I know you consider US "options" there. Hope you enjoy the jocular and whimsical tone, I know serious and long-winded writing can get boring so I funned it up a bit.

One argument in favor of a complete or near-complete withdrawal of US Military and military-associated aid organizations in Afghanistan sounds 'radical' among our political elites, but should be CW. That is: the political leadership of this country has already and recently demonstrated that it is completely incapable of successful foreign policy involving the use military force, In other words, the US has a +20 year record of EPIC FAIL at war. It's time to admit we need to 1) stop being involved in war and occupation and 2) try something Completely Different. Subliminal: see, I didn't even spit on the troops there, our Military remains Heroic.

Correntians, I'd like to make a request. Please take a moment and help the Haitian people, in this dire hour of their need. There are many charitable organizations mobilizing right now, and you can help in those efforts. My first choice: Doctors Without Borders, who report that three of their hospitals in Haiti have been destroyed. There's also these easy steps you can take to aid in the relief efforts:

"The U.S. State Department Operations Center set up the following number for Americans seeking information about relatives in Haiti: (888) 407-4747. The department cautioned that because of heavy volume, some callers may hear a recording. The State Department said those interested in helping immediately may text 'HAITI' to '90999' and a donation of $10 will be made automatically to the Red Cross for relief efforts. The donation will be charged to your cellphone bill. The department also suggested contacting agencies such as the Red Cross or Mercy Corps to help with relief efforts."

...

Pop star Wyclef Jean explains an easy way to send aid to Haiti via your cell phone. Text the word "YELE" to 501501 to send $5.

h/t JoeMyGod

Feel free to leave a link to your preferred charity in the comments, and thank you for your consideration. The US has utterly fucked Haiti over the last few years, and we owe them this much.

This essay is very good and I'd encourage you to pass it around, but it likely has too many big words and doesn't have shiny flashy stuff in the sidebar, so I doubt I'll be able to get many folks to read it. Still, this part struck me especially:

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism "capitalism with the gloves off," meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations. In fact, we know that fascism is vastly more complex than that. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is indeed "capitalism with the gloves off." It represents an era in which business forces are stronger and more aggressive, and face less organized opposition than ever before. In this political climate they attempt to codify their political power and enact their vision on every possible front. As a result, business is increasingly difficult to challenge, and civil society (nonmarket, noncommercial, and democratic forces) barely exists at all.

By now everyone who isn't living under a rock has heard about the new movie "Avatar," a very visually impressive movie that is a testament to just how hard it's going to be in the future to tell "real" from "fake" on glowing boxes everywhere. I've seen it twice now, and given how rarely I get to go out to the movies, I thought I'd share my thoughts and get your reactions. Bottom line: go see it. For no other reason than this: it pisses off Republicans. Be petty for once, and know there's a good chance you may even have a good time. It doesn't really make a difference if you see it in 3-D or not (I've done both ways) and anyway how often does Furry Culture get blockbuster status like this? Spoilers below:

Mock me for it, but I still worry about Palin. Not that I'm sure she could ever win, but more for what her presence does in our political landscape. So I count this as a victory:

Speaking today with one of my contractors, a white, high school educated middle aged woman with a daughter and shit ass husband, I convinced her to never vote for Palin, for any office. Simply put, I said, "She's a quitter, and no matter how much I may or may not agree with her positions, that's not a qualification for high office." My hard working, taxpaying, started her own business and made it contractor agreed, where minutes before she said, "I really like Palin and I want her to run for office."

Just a data point. Feel free to apply to any candidate you despise.

Jesse speaks for me.

Seriously, it's a great rant and you should check it out. Not that I wasn't already there for other reasons, but I'm very glad to see more and more people join us out here in the Wilderness. What happened in Maine could've been prevented, with just a modicum of effort on the part of national Dems. But they think gay people are icky, and couldn't be bothered to help us. Oh, and it's all John's fault for being mean to them, or something.

So I just spent 1.25 hours with my sister trying to help her decide her local election choices. It's an off year, so generally only those of us who are Hard Core about voting bother to do so. That just makes our votes that much more powerful. I appreciate the irony of someone like me, frequent Doomsayer on the sad state of our video poker voting reality, talking about good voting. But I'll do so anyway, cause part of me wants to Hope. /scampers away from Lambert/

Anyway, if you're voting tomorrow, are there any online resources that have helped you make your choices? Please, post them here if so. My sister and I agree that one of the really sucky things about off-year local level voting is how hard it is to find useful information about the candidates. And that problem is getting worse. Judge 4 Yourself is one resource she and I found, but it appears to be regional. I really wish there were more, and if I were an Al Gore elected official, I'd be expanding mandated government websites to include more pages about people's records in government, and also those trying to be so. A pipe dream, I'm sure, but voting blogging is one of the aspects of the blogsphere I'm most proud of and hope grows. Brad remains the intertube's own god when it comes to vote blogging.

So it's true: I'm a troll. The worst kind, too: condescending, pedantic, annoying, concerned. I guess we all have our failings, and these are mine. But so long as I'm going to be a purist, I have to rant like one. I like eating and I bet most people do too, that's my "motivation" here.

Hoss asks why urban (commercial) [not/for profit] {large scale/vertical} non-residential gardening is worthwhile. I was a good grrl, I didn't lose my cookies, immediately. But it's Saturday and I'm relaxed and silly, so this comment made me have a Sad:

SoBe is at it again, with another powerhouse common sense post. Be sure to check out the graph, although I suspect most of you have seen its like before. And this is not exactly unexpected, and I bet we'll see more of it:

Even more alarmingly, Putnam County, TN, is in such dire straights it has considered doing away with county primary elections:

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. -- Putnam County is looking at the prospect of eliminating primary elections in hopes of saving $60,000.

On Monday night, the county commission voted 14 to 9 to ask the county parties to forgo primary elections and select candidates through private caucuses.

Primary elections are historically low-turnout, but nonetheless canceling an election for fiscal reasons sends off alarm bells with me. You tea party folks yammering about your loss of freedoms might want to consider what it means to cancel an election because the county doesn’t have the funds to stage it.

Who needs safe school buses, elections, or health care for the elderly, right? Those things are not as important as making sure large corporations don't pay any taxes and the wealthy pay even fewer.

Goddess E has just one of many examples of how the SuperFreaks mostly write dumb books filled with generalizations and incorrect, unscientific conclusions. FWIW, I never thought "Freakonomics" was very impressive or persuasive. It annoyed me that my Republican gf thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, when she read it. It annoys me more that she's not alone.

Look out Paula! Looks like you've got some competition. Although, I confess to being curious: which of you will be better hunting down embarrassing blog comments posted by your boss' political enemies? Shutting down bloggers focused upon issues the rest of the media ignores? Cause that's really what all this mostly unConstitutional and anti-democratic domestic spying monitoring is all about.

Are you going?

I can't, but believe me if I could, I would be there. It's hard not to like stuff like this:

The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits. Meanwhile, Americans face shrinking pensions, rising foreclosures and unemployment, state budget cuts, predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees, and sky-high credit card interest rates.

The American people want oversight, accountability and common-sense financial reform NOW. This is the classic David vs. Goliath fight, with Wall Street spending millions and millions on lobbying to defeat reforms that would protect the American people and our economy

Oh, good Krist, this is wonderful Combined with this, I nearly fainted today, it's so nice to see this sort of thing. Stark is showing the Way, for those truly interested in being a New Media or whatever. It's so frakking simple.

Let me put it this way: I always thought I couldn't take good pictures. Trad film and I don't get along. Then they invented fancee digi cams that I can sort of use, and voila! I'm ansel adams, or something. But anyway, my point is that there should be a lot more of this, please.

Sorry I haven't had the time to gardenblog. I've been, well, in the garden too much, and too wiped out after canning and harvesting to do pics. But I have some. I missed a period for good pics but I'll show some results instead. First up: Fleurs. Hecate has some going still, and I do too:
Mums did well, if a tad slow, this year. Nice and bright.

Baby pumpkins. So cute there's no need to carve them.

SoBe:

Reaction at this busy intersection was mostly positive. There were quite a few horn honks and thumbs up, a couple of thumbs down, but not as many as I had expected. One person, predictably, shouted "get a job!" There's always one asshole who has to remind us of the country's unemployment rate. I'm not being sarcastic here, either: I have yet to attend a rally or visibility event where there wasn't one person shouting "get a job!" Probably the same guy, too.

This is me, making that "she's not wrong" face.

CC declines comment, but I didn't.

it's a class marker. non-elite women serve the "whore" function, it's how the elites define non-elites when not defining us "baby oven" or "handmaiden." elites can pay to have the real thing made, and it sets them apart, special. the semi-celebrity associated with the costume itself, and the social capital that creates, is reserved for elites. now, i don't define Con fans who do this as elite, as most of the time they do it themselves and it's almost an art these days, and surely a craft. but speaking simply as a status marker among the elite, it is on purpose that non-elite women rarely have access to the real costume, and frequently offered whore-esque "choices."

I'd like to start by saying i'm a longtime reader of graphic literature and speculative fiction of a wide range of genres.

The Patriarchy is hard at work here, employing a pretty wide range of tools here, tools which are literal pressures upon the shape of a woman, the way she shapes herself and is shaped.

What do you think intelligent alien life would make of us?

I'm a big scifi reader, and I've read countless stories about this question. Seems to me most of the time, writers posit one of two things. Either they would be highly advanced, ethically and morally speaking, because that is a prerequisite to achieving the technology of space travel; or they would be totally predatory, and treat us as we treat "lower" forms of life on this planet. Personally, I'm not excited about the idea that intelligent life would come by for a visit. I'm too embarrassed by our own primitive natures to want to have to explain it to the Vulcans.

This is science fiction thread, so none of that downer stuff about how interstellar travel is impossible or how if other intelligent life is out there we'd have heard it by now. According to this NASA guy, the aliens are already here, btw.

Fuckers. They won't let me embed. Oh well, it's not about the video. Portishead. Only the Blood can appreciate their depths. No, I'm not a "Twilight" fan. Heh.

Harsh, but true:

People don't go to demonstrations or marches to be talked to death, they don't go to be harangued, they don't go to listen—God forbid—to poetry. They show up because they want to do something, they want to do something themselves, they want to take symbolic action. Part of what made ACT-UP so successful back before it was overrun by the same sorts of fuckwits and yahoos who ran yesterday's rally and march was that ACT-UP didn't waste your time. There weren't many speeches at ACT-UP actions—they were called "actions" for a reason—and certainly no poetry. If someone spoke, they said, "This is why we're here, this is fucking unacceptable, and here's what we're going to do about it." Then the ACT-UPers shut down the FDA, put a condom over Jesse Helms' house, throw peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the governor of Wisconsin, etc.

"People who took the time to show up at an ACT-UP actions were presumed to be on the right side of the issue and therefore not in need of indoctrination. If someone wanted to listen to speeches—or make them—he or she was welcome to come to long, weekly process meetings, where positions were hashed out and actions were proposed and discussed, shot down or endorsed. But when it came to the actions themselves people felt it was important not to waste the time of the people who showed up. Because if you did, if you alienated people by wasting their time (and lots folks were at ACT-UP actions were dying and so didn't have any time to waste), they were unlikely to turn up at the future actions."

The same critique is true for blogs. It's all well and good to provide commentary and analysis, but gosh it would be nice if more posts in the blogosphere were followed up with 'click this link and find out what you can do about it.' Sending an email or making a phone call barely count, in this respect. Sending a check, going on a Volunteer Vacation, and/or knocking on doors while there's still time, does.

You won't be surprised to learn of even more change you can't believe in.

Meet the newest addition to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. If you've been reading Mother Jones recently, then you already know quite a bit about Scott O'Malia. Like the fact that he once worked as a top in-house lobbyist for an energy company, Mirant, that manipulated California's market Enron-style. Or that, while on this company's payroll, he lobbied against a bill to expand the CFTC's authority to police derivatives. Or that the Senate Agriculture Committee, which reviewed his nomination, declined to ask him any specific questions about his pro-deregulation lobbying on not one but two occasions.

So I guess I hit a nerve with my food fight post, or rather, several of them. I think it's worth breaking down some of the comments and sub-discussions into a longer series. One topic that seemed to bring out the very Correntian best in folks: how we define "obese."

Reader Jeff W points us to this helpful link from the CDC, in which they have determined that there have been "noticeable increases" in the number of overweight or obese people in this country. Reader Aeryl questions the methodology with this link. Other comments in that thread had other definitions and methods to measure the size and number of "healthy" bodies.

I'm a long way from my scientific research days, but I'll say that generally, I think obesity is both a "nature" and a "nurture" issue. On the Nature side: I fully recognize that the FSM has been kind to people in my family; we're generally tall and thin with only a modicum of exercise effort and don't tend to "overweight"-edness until quite late in life, if at all. I doubt I could find the link for it now, but I recall reading a fascinating report about a group of indigenous people from South America, recently relocated from their ancestral lands to a reservation. Apparently, in a single generation they went from thin and fit to outrageously overweight. The report's conclusion was that they had evolved to live on a fat-poor diet for thousands of years before being relocated and fed "government cheese" instead of their previous natural, "jungle food" diet, and as a result their bodies were incredibly efficient in terms of fat storage. "Too" efficient when fed a more modern diet, and thus their current obesity.

I'm tossing out those two examples and asking for your thoughts, because before we can make policy progress on the "nurture" argument, it's important to correctly frame the "nature" part.

How do you define "fat" and "obese?" How should government, for the purposes of health and food policy? How important is identifying obesity as a public health "problem?" Then there are questions about how Big Industry (Fashion, Food, the Exercise-Industrial Complex, etc) define "fat." Definitions generated by the discourse of the Patriarchy play a role as well.

And once again, consider this an open thread for recipes, especially those good for people who want to reduce or change their body's shape. Warning: I will delete comments that are inappropriately insensitive to people who don't conform to mainstream body shape standards. Consider this is a safe space for people of all body shapes to contribute.

Update: Well, at least they don't hate me because I'm queer. Whew. I feel so much better:

In an email to the Huffington Post on Monday, Harwood clarified that the quote was not meant to convey any displeasure on the part of the administration for the gay community's public advocacy.

"My comments quoting an Obama adviser about liberal bloggers/pajamas weren't about the LGBT community or the marchers," he wrote. "They referred more broadly to those grumbling on the left about an array of issues in addition to gay rights, including the war in Afghanistan and health care and Guantanamo -- and whether all that added up to trouble with Obama's liberal base..."

I have a writing assignment due today. I'm going to make the deadline, but I just looked at the time and I'm sort of amazed at how quickly the morning got away from me. Because I've been reading original sources, analysis and commentary from many different places all morning, and even though I'm a fast reader, it has still taken some time. It's too important to me, a pajama wearing blogger, to check and double source my facts and otherwise make sure what I'm about to write is reality-based and correct, to prepare my pieces any other way.

If I were employed by the mainstream press, I wouldn't have to do any of those things. I could just toss off an anonymously sourced playground insult and add some snotty, insider comment, and call it day.

I wonder if the next Blogger Ethics Conference will have a panel on the latest in fleece and microfiber jammies. I hope so.

Tristero recently caused a bona fide flame war at the normally staid and Serious Hullaballoo comment community, in those two posts about food. I didn't really find too much of what he said outrageous or stupid, and I respect the fact that he came right out and admits that he eats what he likes because it tastes good. I confess I didn't think the Hullaballoo community had it in them, way to sling that pizza across the lunchroom, kids!

I just wanted to make a couple remarks and see what others think, because I believe that food is a critically important topic in many political debates, from those on the environment, health care, racism and more.

From my perspective, it's beyond obvious that far too many Americans aren't eating well. I was shocked, moving to this Heartland community where I now live, by the contrast of people's shapes here, vs places like DC and Chicago. That is, people in flyoverland really run to fat, in my eyes. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but the 'beautiful body' culture of my previous environment is almost nowhere to be found here, except among the Greek set of the local big state university. And I suspect those young women are not unfamiliar with some unhealthy food habits like binging and the dangerous, speedy drugs that make crash dieting an easy task.

Anyway, I bet I could get most of you to agree that the problem isn't just a regional one, and that there are many areas in which the quality of our food and the habits people have consuming it could be improved. But as the comments at those two posts remind me, a lot of people seem to have the attitude of "You can take my daily Twinkie when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands." What can be done to change that?

Further, I guess I don't understand the idea that people like me are overly righteous food snobs. Do people really want to have diabetes and be obese? I can't believe that. I understand that not all people have good food choices, but I would hope that if they did, they'd make them, at least most of the time. I'd also think people would enjoy the benefits that come with "progressively produced" food, organics and locally grown, food free of synthetics and chemicals and suchlike. That kind of food really does taste better. And if food is about satisfaction, well...I guess I just don't get the resistance to that.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a terrific restaurant in this area, after long months of my despairing of ever finding a place that compares to the upscale, "progressive" dining option I had when I lived in big cities. It's in a town that defines "podunk backwater." It serves locally produced, organically grown, reasonably priced, fucking outstanding tasty food. And it's doing really well as a business, apparently, even in this Depression we're having in this state. So I know there's 'a market' for better food. My question is: why are so many people resistant to good food and healthy eating habits, in favor of unfood horror found at fast food restaurants or the junk food aisle? Marketing? Ignorance? Addiction to unhealthy but "good" tasting things like corn syrup and trans fats?

Also: consider this a Saturday Morning open recipe thread, if you've got any. I'm always looking for new cooking ideas, especially now that "chef" is practically my 4th job.

It's probably just me. But still, of course it makes me wonder. Just now, here at Chez Dyke, a lot of blogs aren't working for me. That is, I can load them, but the comment functions don't seem to be enabled. I'm no intertube expert, I have no idea how this sort of thing happens (or if it is just my old, funky Mac and my unwillingness to "upgrade" to the latest browsing platforms) but I'm always reminded at times like these:

Know the people you "meet" online, and be sure to make contact with them outside of the phone, computer, or other electronic device you usually rely upon. As in, know exactly where your friends live, what they do, where they work, about their lives. Once upon a time, it was normal for Americans to know their neighbors, "in person." Today? I do wonder if that is at all still true.

I'm not trying to be all CT or anything, so much as reminding people that our Revolutionary Technologies of the Future with Flying Cars...well, "we" don't really control all that. And that's on purpose. Any Revolution that relies on the Internets? Doomed, from the start. Just sayin.

For those of you who can't do youtube, here's the transcript:

I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive.
I think that the basic premise that we can alter afghan society is greatly flawed. Afghanistan is simply the part of Asia that was never occupied by the Russians or the English (inaudible). It’s not a country, it’s not even a place. It’s just an empty place on the map. It’s terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.
All over the country you find different people who have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that we call them Afghans, and they don’t even call themselves afghans. They’re (inaudible) or they’re Pashtuns, or they’re (other groups, inaudible)). The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

And the idea that we could transform that society or any other society through aid I think is entirely questionable. I’ve never seen it happen, probably never will happen.