I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is 8 Frugal Tips for Legal Matters.
At the last Blogger MeetUp one of the discussions ranged around being a locavore in Northeast Ohio. We are blessed with farmer’s markets, organic farms and work-share programs where people can actually help to work a farm and take produce as their pay. In many ways being a locavore is not difficult in our part of the state.
But that’s not true everywhere as James McWilliams writes:
The argument that we must relocalize the nation’s distribution networks to accommodate small growers ultimately runs into a really inconvenient question: should every region even have a local food system?
The query, however much it causes locavores to grit their teeth, is a critical one to ask. Regions with climate and soil conditions poorly suited for diversified agricultural production must dedicate substantial inputs to fossil fuel and water.
This is true whether the operations are big or small, mom-and-pop, or franchised. Should regions that are seeking self-sufficiency in environmentally stressed locations be accommodated with a custom-designed distribution and processing system (not to mention a community willing to engage in the massive contradiction of sacrificing precious local resources to support a supposedly environmentally friendly ideology)?
Williams does ask the more important question, however.
Ought people to live in those regions with climate and soil conditions poorly suited for diversified agricultural production? Say, like Phoenix, Arizona?
He says yes. I disagree.
People should not live in regions that require substantial inputs of fossil fuel and water. Or at least, people who do live there should not expect tax dollars to subsidize their life style at the expense of people smart enough to not live in those places.
More than a decade ago I wrote about the absurdity of subsidizing people who live in unstable regions where hurricanes, earthquakes and fires are a constant hazard, solely because they like the view. That last is important. Floods and tornadoes are a constant hazard in the Mid-west, but those lands are also ideally suited for growing food. The hazards must be weighed against real societal benefits.
McWilliams also makes a case for the inconvenience and sacrifice to go locavore, citing a British Food Journal article (purchase required for full text), he writes:
In recent decades large scale food processing and production has been undertaken in factories on industrial estates, but a return to small units within communities may well bring environmental problems such as smell, pollution, waste disposal, visual intrusion, and nuisance for those communities.
Ah nuisance. Life is blood and feces and urine and death. As much as a lot of people would like to pretend that their brisket didn’t come from a steer, the truth is not pretty.
People should live next to slaughter houses and farmers’ fields spread with manure. People should know the joy of seeing the first fruits of the year.
Where is the awe in the Shehechiyanu if we never have first moments or reach the beginning of yet another cycle?
Why are we second-guessing the coaches and the players right now? Simple. We want this win desperately. We’re deeply, personally invested in the outcome of this election. This is so critical to the future of this nation we can’t step back and catch our breaths because the stakes are so high. And we’re putting together our own game plans based on the scores we get every 10 seconds of the game.
What we’re losing sight of is the best thing we can do right now is CHEER.
The lesson of the Ramsey case and the moon beads is that you never have all the evidence, even when it’s right in front of you. There’s always more to be learned from a technology you haven’t yet tried. You still have to make the best judgment you can at the time. You can’t expect that judgment never to be corrected. But you have to leave it open to correction.
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Self Made Scholar.
What if there were a way to screen out the bad teachers before they get entrenched? Currently, New York City teachers get their union cards their first day on the job. In theory they’re on probation for three years after that, but in practice very few are forced out. Lombardi suggests replacing this system with an apprenticeship program. Rather than requiring teaching degrees (which don’t seem to improve value-added all that much), new recruits would have a couple of years of in-school training. There would then come a day of reckoning, when teachers-to-be would face a serious evaluation before securing union membership and a job for life.
Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.
These are the words (in bold) that Sen. John McCain chose to cherry pick:
Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.
This is how John McCain uses his cherry-picked words to lie and sow fear.
According to iCausalities, to this moment, a lying president has cost our nation the lives of 4,148 our fighting men and women in Iraq and a further 580 in Afghanistan.
If John McCain can’t be bothered to tell the truth when he’s running for office, what can hold him back if he wins that office?
Hat tip to The Daily Dish.
John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush’s second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush’s first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose.
I was born into a trifecta of sorts that put me among the Earth’s most privileged of groups: I’m male, I’m American and I’m White. I remind myself of that thrice-blessed status when I consider the plight of those lesser born and it makes me angry when I consider how those less fortunate tear at each other when they ought to come together to raise themselves and others like them to greater lives.
That was what I thought of this morning as I read a brief, moving exchange between a reader at The Daily Dish and its blogger Andrew Sullivan.
The reader wrote:
I am a 36 year old African American woman. I have two girls ages 10 and 8. The country does not get the full import of this moment. My daughters and I sat together along with my husband to watch Michelle Obama tonight. Mr. Sullivan, we were all in tears. This is a day that cannot be fully described. This country has systematically oppressed Black women for centuries. My ancestors were slaves and my great, great, great, grandmothers raped and treated as property. My daughters have very few Black women to look up to in popular culture as role models. They do not feel seen, they are not held up as the standards of American beauty. We shed tears tonight as a family because Michelle (with her elegance and grace) is holding all of us up with her. You don’t understand the burden that she bears.
And Andrew replied:
No, I don’t. How could I? But as she spoke of somehow being able to reach for the American dream, through struggle and disdain and marginalization, it wasn’t just about race or gender - but about all those things that Americans have overcome. I couldn’t help but think, perhaps solipsistically, of my wedding a year ago this week. And what it means. And what it would have meant to countless gay people who, for centuries, were brutalized, mocked, jailed, murdered and beaten for who they were. And I get a part of this in a different way. And am glad.
The connection between Andrew and his reader is obvious. Yet there are horribly bigoted and racist homosexuals just as there are African Americans who would gladly stone gay men and women given half a chance.
And both of these subgroups make Those In Power, men who, like me but different, are Americans and White smile and congratulate each other on their success.
One of the unexpected discoveries of the Human Genome project is that that which is different among us at our most basic level, in our DNA, is so infinitesimal as to be beneath consideration. Our shared gene pool is as a drop in ocean.
Differences do not separate us. Those who exploit our false perceptions of other do.
But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters — the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.
Rachel Papo is an Israeli who was born in 1970 in Columbus, Ohio but was raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine-arts high-school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen she served in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer. These two intensive years of service inspired her current photographic project titled after her own number during service — Serial No. 3817131.
If you are not doing everything you can to talk down the whispers of hate speech and racist undercurrents in this election, then you will be partly responsible if anything happens to the first black man nominated to run for President of the United States.
When I write I hold two personalities in tension. There is the self-assured son of a bitch Jeff Hess who is arrogant in the way I imagine surgeons are arrogant, certain that they, and I, know what will happen as the scalpel begins to slice a living person. And there is excitedly terrified Jeff Hess jumble processing exactly how I’m going to kiss Kay Byrd at the school dance.
I believe in the first, but I cannot forget the second. From that tension, that process, comes fiction.
This morning I watched a master at work. A writer with a Pulitzer Prize in fiction sitting down cold and writing.
I thought I was going to observe craft, in way I’m sure that golfers watch Tiger Woods. Looking for the nuance. Searching for the angle of a wrist or head. Trying to steal that which makes Tiger Woods Tiger Woods.
What I saw was the making of sausage.
In our culture, the making of sausage has become a trite way of saying you can’t handle the truth.
I remember reading Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man in high school and the one scene, the one image I have from that book more than 35 years later is of the main character making sausage.
The world would be a better place if we all more closely observed the making of sausage.
But I’m talking about writing here and what I did this morning was to watch a two-hour video of Robert Olen Butler write 429 words of a short story.
This is an educational experiment that Butler conducted at the end of October and into November of 2001. For two hours on 17 consecutive evenings (he takes Saturday nights off), Butler sits down in front of a video camera and writes, and describes for the camera the process of his writing.
I’m fascinated.
At about 80 minutes into this first video, Butler wants to describe the way an aeroplane flown by Earl Sandt in 1913 moves at a critical moment in its flight.
At first Butler writes reer. And then he makes a bit of sausage by allowing us to see him consult a dictionary and discover that there is no such word; that the word he thinks he wants is rear, to rise up violently.
He’s dissatisfied with that image and next tries shimmied. But after he consults his Merriam-Webster he discovers that the word does not come into use until 1919. And so Butler goes in search of another and reaches for his thesaurus; a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer not only keeps a thesaurus on his desk, he consults it.
But he gets no help there.
He likes the horse image — the juxtaposition of the 19th century horse with the 20th century aeroplane — and reaches for other equine words.
At this point I’m shouting at my computer (on which I’m watching the video): Quivered, the word you want is quivered!
And when I see him type first a q and then a u I want to pump my fist yes! I’m editing a Pulitzer Prize winner (remember that arrogant son of a bitch part?). But an a follows the qu and the word Butler types is quaked and the sentence comes out:
…the plane quaked a little, like a nervous horse, but Earl kept him steady, kept him coming forward and I felt us all ready to cheer again.
The artist at work is an awesome experience.
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