Video of the Day

I swear I'm gonna post something real here. Someday. In the meantime, enjoy the video. If you're like me and now live in a part of the country where there's no TJs, this video will make you sad, nostalgic, and hungry, all at the same time.

Religious art is so...

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

What's in your...crisper??

In response to this post over at Fed Up With Lunch ...


Lettuce, half a bell pepper, half a carton of sliced mushrooms, a cucumber, raspberries, cherries, green onions, and half a watermelon. On the shelf above: strawberries, fresh homemade salsa, and Swiss chard from my garden.

And why is it so much fun to peek into other people's fridge's? I think "what's in your ... pantry?" should be next. In my experience having a strategically stocked pantry is the secret to good cooking and not giving up and going out all the time or eating lots of processed crap.

things that are awesome

We have two yardsale gnomes in our little piece of the community garden. They started out as ironic gestures, but have morphed into characters we take Very Seriously. This is Gunther, who watches over the strawberries, what's left of the spinach, and the sunflowers.



This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

The moral of the story

By now you may have seen the news that, once the full video of Shirley Sherrod's speech was released, it became clear that what she was saying was actually the exact opposite of what Fox News and other conservative outlets were claiming she was saying. OMG, that's shocking, right? Except it really isn't. Remember the ACORN videos, and how they showed ACORN employees saying and doing things that they actually weren't saying and doing at all ever? Of course, those videos were artfully edited by conservative groups as well.

So what have we learned here? That Fox and it's ilk are dishonest? Um, we already knew that. What should we learn? This: If a radical conservative news group releases a video containing "damning evidence" of anybody doing anything, you should ask for the full video before reaching any conclusions. I mean, wtf is it with these Obama administration bigwigs that just swallow every doctored video the conservahacks spew out? Whatever happened to critical thinking and reserving judgment until you have all the evidence? Because besides making themselves look evil, the conservahacks are making you guys look like gullible, impulsive idiots.

And whatever happened to asking your employee for her side of the story and giving her a chance to defend herself before demanding her resignation? Jesus H Christ.

How they roll

"In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda ... instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up..."
Source

And

"A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee Tuesday recommended that the agency withdraw its marketing approval of the blockbuster cancer drug Avastin for treating breast cancer, concluding that new trials showed no apparent benefit from the drug. ... The new studies presented to the panel failed to confirm those initial findings. The progression-free survival improved by as little as a month and, again, overall survival did not improve. In fact, because of complications from the drug, survival was actually slightly less for some women. ... In a statement released Tuesday, the drug's manufacturer, Roche subsidiary Genentech, said it stood by the data it presented to the FDA and that it believed Avastin 'should continue to be an option for patients with this incurable disease.' "
Source

Get that? So the drug not only fails to significantly improve your chances of survival, but it also has side effects that can hasten your death, and make life miserable with symptoms like high blood pressure and fatigue. But the company still thinks patients should be taking it. Why? Because there is only one relevant motivating factor here: profit. Patients be damned, we want to keep raking in our billions on this drug.

But beyond this feature of the pharmaceutical industrial complex is another disturbing trend. If you look at the way committee members vote in both the case of Avandia and Avastin, you'll see that nobody has clean hands here. In the case of Avandia, the claim has been made that committee members who voted against the continued use of the drug had economic interests in pharmaceutical companies with competing drugs, while those who voted for it held SmithKline stock. So nobody appeared to be voting on actual results in actual people's bodies and futures and lives. No, on both sides it was all about the money.

So to answer a few questions I've received by email, that's why I call it the pharmaceutical industrial complex. When economic interests are the driving force behind a system that ostensibly exists to benefit people but instead ends up harming them for the benefit of those who stand to profit from that system, you have an industrial complex that has a momentum of its own and that will run you and your loved ones over without batting an eye or losing a night's sleep. Because what are a few heart attacks and early deaths compared to billions of dollars?

Monday Miscellanea

Remember that one time I ranted about how separating abortion services from all other medical services further stigmatizes abortion and the women who need abortions, and makes abortion clinics a highly visible target for hateful anti-abortion protesters? Well, I didn't either until I read this article in NYT Magazine about a growing effort to bring abortion services back into a mainstream medical context. According to this article:

The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

So it turns out that my irritated rant was actually a bold idea - that we should provide services for all aspects of women's reproductive care in the same place with the same healthcare professionals as if it were all just the exact same kind of thing. Because it is.



Other items in the "good news" category include the fact that illegal rain forest logging has been significantly reduced thanks to the efforts of local governments, activists, NGOs, and entities in the private sector. And by "significant" we mean 50-75% which is really...significant. So yay for actually seeing change in the world as a result of a lot of hard work and consciousness-raising! I cut my 16 y/o activist teeth in the Rainforest Action Network, so I'll always have a soft spot for the cause.



In the "stupid shit the Vatican did this week" category we have the papal pronouncement that ordaining women is the moral equivalent to molesting children and then lying about it. Tim Padgett has some interesting thoughts on this development from an insider perspective:

When any institution is as convinced of its own moral infallibility as the Catholic Church is, it tends to lash out at criticism — especially charges as serious as the priestly rape of children — with Dostoevskian paranoia. And the church then fortifies its less popular stances, like an all-male priesthood or the condemnation of gays, becoming even more uncompromising. Most Catholics, according to polls in the U.S. and abroad, support women's ordination; but the Church peevishly views that trend as an insidious sub-agenda of its sexual abuse accusers. Hence last week's astonishing aside from Rome that both female priests and pedophilia are graviora delicta, or grave crimes.

Read more here: The Vatican and Women: Casting the First Stone.



And finally, I've been thinking a lot about the way we construct the experience of addiction, as well as the often-contradictory narratives that surround addiction, in our culture. So this article: Does Teen Drug Rehab Cure Addiction or Create It? is both timely and will likely spur a more in-depth post on some of my recent thoughts about our cultural scripts concerning addiction. Of course, in the case of teen rehab programs you often have the further complicating issues of the way we do prison and juvenile detention in our culture, which is a clusterfuck all its own. So that puts teen rehab programs at an interesting crossroads of strange and often counterproductive cultural narratives and practices, now doesn't it?

What women can expect

"There's more to life than a Volvo. There's what you can expect: being kissed, desired, loved, missed. Then there's everything you can't expect. But being ready for it, that's why you drive one....blah, blah, blah..."

Apparently we're still supposed to be passively waiting around for someone to kiss, desire, love, and miss us. But in the meantime we should buy a Volvo. Just in case we ever need to outrun some werewolves on a scenic mountain highway in the pristine wilderness of Oregon. Or is it the men who are supposed to buy the Volvos so that they can rescue the objects of their kissing, desiring, loving, and missing in case of a scenic werewolf encounter? I mean, if women can't even have an active role in a bunch of angsty kissing, desiring, loving, and missing, how on earth could they ever muster the agency to buy a fucking car already?

Webcomics of the day

**Trigger Warning**

Sensationalism 101

In Helena Montana, a committee of school administrators, teachers, and parents have put together a comprehensive health education curriculum, including sex ed, based on local practices and national guidelines. The plan would gradually introduce students to concepts, starting in K-1 with basic vocabulary such as using the correct name for your body parts (no wee-wees and hoo-hahs) as well as the concept that you could love someone of the same or opposite gender, and moving on to eventually discussing such things as the social and political aspects of LGBT relationships once the kids are in high school. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

But OMG this is soooo upsetting!!! To all the parents of Helena!!! The school district is proposing to teach comprehensive sex ed in Kindergarten, you guys!!! If you only read the headlines, that is. A Google news search:

Montana's school board battles morals in education
Proposed K-12 Sex Ed Program Shocking and Outraging Parents‎
Sex Ed in Kindergarten?‎
Montana School System Wants Sex Education for Kindergarten
Grade 1 Student to Learn about Gay Relationships in Montana Sex-Ed ...‎
Children Exposed to Montana Sex-Ed for Kindergartners Will 'Suffer in Countless Ways'
Proposed K-12 Sex Ed Program Shocking and Outraging Parents
Sex Education Debate Sparks Outrage
Helena, Mont., Mulls Kindergarten Sex Ed

What's the reality of the situation? A few parents are upset, because they object to any sex ed, or any sex ed that's not abstinence-only, or any mention of homosexuality, period. And this fringe group is to be expected. But that's OK because any parent can choose to opt their kid out of health education. But in fact, the majority of the parents in Helena are just fine with the proposed curriculum. And notice that the local paper has taken a calm tone and an even-handed approach to the topic. No shocking headlines, no inflammatory rhetoric. It's almost like they skipped the Shocking, Inaccurate, and Sensationalist Headline Writing 101 course back in Journalism school. How refreshing.

Urban Farming and Nonmarketable Goods

I've been having this discussion concurrently with my cousin, who lives among the cornfields of Minnesota, and with a couple fellow gardeners at our local community garden. And here's what I'm thinking.

Proponents of sustainability, and improving the quality of life in urban environments, and improving the American diet, have supported urban farming for decades and decades. Carving out sustainable and productive spaces where we live and work seems like a no-brainer. But opponents of urban farming (and often organic farming, and the local food movement) say that urban farming will never be economically self-sustaining or produce enough food to meet the demand. And these claims are probably true, but are they relevant? And are they as decisive as they're taken to be by the people who utter them?

Most urban farm projects do require grants and foundational funds to keep them afloat. And since the space available is limited, the amount of food they can produce is also limited. These things are true. But this only tells half the story. These same people who bash organic and urban farms are big supporters of rural conventional farming. And rural conventional farms are not economically self-sustaining either. They get loads of money every year. Their money comes from the government rather than from private donations, but what of it? The point is, if capitalist standards are the only standards that apply, then no farming is worthwhile.

Obviously farming is necessary, since everyone, from the most ruthless capitalist to the most idealistic flower child, must eat. But if you step outside the capitalist values that dominate in our culture, there are all kinds of other reasons why urban farming is worthwhile. Urban farms reduce the oil used in transporting food to the city. They provide clean soil and open spaces that can serve as a respite from the stresses of life in the city. They provide educational opportunities and jobs for at-risk youth who have few options open to them. Meanwhile, government-sponsored conventional farms produce toxic runoff, deplete the soil, rely heavily on oil-based chemicals, and utilize an exploitive labor system. And they're still not profitable.

So it seems to me that the calculus that we use to determine which types of agricultural practices pay off are extremely skewed. Selectively choosing which costs and benefits to factor in is a great way to get the result you want out of any analysis, but all that's revealed are your personal biases and political/economic interests.

Beyond this issue, the kind of reasoning involved here assumes that one must adopt an all-or-nothing stance. For instance, some will argue that organic farming is a waste of time because you could never produce enough bushels per acre to feed the world with organic farming alone. First, this claim is extremely controversial and basically unsubstantiated, but second, this doesn't count as a reason not to support organic farming. A similar claim is that urban farming alone can't feed a city, and neither can the efforts of individual families in their own backyard gardens and chicken coops. So this is a reason not to support them?

Every bushel of produce that comes out of a sustainable urban space is one less bushel that needs to be produced with the toxic industrial methods that are so terrifically unsustainable. And every family that has increased access to clean and healthy foods is one less family that's likely to be caught in an unhealthy inter-generational cycle. And every productive urban space makes a small dent in our oil consumption, as well as in the accompanying air pollution and toxic runoff that oil consumption leads to. These are reasons enough to support urban farming, even within a capitalist value system that is incapable of recognizing the value of nonmarketable goods.

the Blue Wall

By now you've probably heard about Janice Wells, who was tased repeatedly after calling the police to report a prowler outside her home. And all the news coverage has been focusing on the fact that the two officers involved no longer work for that police dept, since one was fired and the other resigned. And that's good news, right? Yeahno. Actually, the officer who gleefully began tasing Wells while she was laying on the ground the second he arrived on the scene now works for the Chattahoochee County Sheriff’s Office, while the other will no doubt be employed with some fine local law enforcement agency soon. Cuz that's how it works, folks!