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Awesome Woman: Christine Jorgensen

2012-01-22T08:56:00.000-05:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Christine Jorgensen (1926 - 1989), the first person whose male-to-female sex reassignment surgery became, in 1952, a mainstream news item. She grew up as George William Jorgensen, Jr., in a blue-collar family in Bronx, New York, living as an uncomfortable child inside a boy's body that, according to some sources, never fully developed into male adulthood.

After Jorgensen did a tour of duty in the Army, she studied and worked in the fields of photography and dentistry. With access to doctors and information when working as a dental assistant, she began taking a form of estrogen. She then made her surgery arrangements through her medical connections and traveled to Denmark where, under the direction of Dr. Christian Hamburger, the removal of her male genitals was done. (Several years later she had a vaginoplasty when the procedure became available in the U.S.) She chose the name Christine in honor of Dr. Hamburger.

Jorgensen's return the the United States after her first surgery was a major media event in 1953. She stepped off the airplane into an excited sea of cameras and news reporters. Given the tightly defined gender roles of that time, and the prevalence of violent homophobia in our culture, her decision to "go public" -- very public -- was immensely courageous. A common joke going around was that, "She went abroad, and came back a broad." She conducted herself in that press event with incredible grace:

Apparently, Jorgensen's carpenter-contractor father from the Bronx was quite supportive of her and did not withdraw his paternal love -- after her surgery he built a house for her in Long Island. There she met Howard T. Knox, a typist, and in 1959 the two announced their engagement to be married. Sadly, because Jorgensen's birth certificate still said she was male the marriage license was not granted.

Jorgensen used her publicity for more than personal fame, making appearances on talk shows and speaking on college campuses throughout the 1970s and 80s about her experience. In 1970, she sent a telegram to Spiro T. Agnew asking him to apologize for calling one of his adversaries "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican party." (No apology was forthcoming.) In addition to assuming the role of a public figure on the speaking circuit, Jorgensen worked for years as a stage actress and nightclub entertainer. (A recording of her performance at The Frog Pond restaurant in Hollywood is available in the iTunes Music Store.)

Christine Jorgensen embraced a course of action that was so radical for her time, and by thrusting her story into the public arena she opened a pathway for other queer and gender-queer individuals, and for straight women whose societal role in the 1950s had been reverted from Rosie the Riveter to the demurring housewife and whose place in the scheme of things was as much a prison for many women as sexual mis-assignment was for Jorgensen (and countless others). And perhaps even straight men saw their gender role become more malleable from that point forward -- with the realm of acceptable possibilities for a man's character broadening from the iconic square-jawed image of a dominance and controlled emotions in 1950 into today's stay-at-home dads and Burning Men.

Of course gender and gender roles have never been set in concrete, but it was Christine Jorgensen who had the courage to help us reexamine our belief that they are, and to step out into new territory that allows us to become who we are rather than force ourselves miserably into a mold.

Rehabilitation runs into brick walls, a sad story

2012-01-21T15:04:00.002-05:00

Some of the writing in AlterNet is worth reading but whoever writes the stupid sensationalist headlines should be fired. This is not really about "Is AA Too White". This is worth reading.

This about what happens when an individual in recovery, specifically a single mother, gets out of jail and makes a strong effort to pull her life together and wants to get her kids back. This is about a system that is designed to send you right back to jail (that would be the privatized penal system that makes a profit off of your return and not off of your rehabilitation), as a result of problems getting employment and housing. Add to that the ridiculous requirement that you pay back to the state a huge bill that was racked up for "child support" while you were inside.

This is worth reading. This is about a white judge with self-righteous hemorrhoids.

This is worth reading. I hope anyone with influence in hiring at their business or job makes a special effort to seek out ex-cons, especially parents trying to get their kids back, and give them a chance.

This is worth reading. I don't agree with the author's implied premise that 12-step programs are the answer for everyone, IMO from what I've seen every recovery is a different story (and, yes, AA *is* too: White. Middle-Class. Middle-American. Christian. Higher-Power-oriented for it to work for everyone). But, still, this is worth reading.

Is Alcoholics Anonymous Too White?
Dismissing AA as a white-person's movement, many black addicts take a pass on the 12-steps and seek salvation from their church.

Awesome Women: Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia

2011-12-18T02:59:00.000-05:00

The Awesome Women of the Day are the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, a shareholder-activist order of Catholic nuns that deliberately invests its pension funds in corporations that need a good talking to. Thus entrance is gained for team members of the order's Corporate Responsibility committee to shareholder meetings and executive offices to protest unfair and greedy practices.

The New York Times recently featured the sisters in a Business section article:

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

... The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards — anything to bolster the value of their investments.

The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority.

The order is comprised of about 540 women who engage in a variety of ministries -- including education, health care, shelter and foreign aid in Africa and Haiti. They own a community farm on one of the last undeveloped tracts of land in Delaware County, PA, on which they grow food for 130 CSA members and the sisters themselves, in keeping with their dedication to sustainability. They have published reports on the SEC's recently issued requirements that energy companies seeking investment for fracking operations disclose all the risks involved, and another two reports on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the need for BP to be held responsible.

A page on the order's website answers, for those who might be contemplating joining the order, "Who Will I Be?"

As a Sister of St. Francis of Philadelphia, you possess a heartfelt determination to make a difference in the world. You are prepared to live as Jesus did, with a clear vision of God’s care for all creation, loving every man, woman, child, and creature as brother, sister, mother, father, and friend.

To paraphrase my friend Betty Fokker -- Mammon wept. Jesus smiled.

Awesome Woman: Nina Smith

2011-12-08T11:08:00.001-05:00

The Awesome Woman for Today is Nina Smith, founder and executive director of Goodweave (http://goodweave.org/). Goodweave encourages handmade rug-weaving shops in South Asia to refrain from using child labor. Goodweave obtains a contractual agreement from shop owners to:
- Adhere to the no-child-labor standard and not employ any person under age 14
- Allow unannounced random inspections by local inspectors
- Endeavor to pay fair wages to adult workers, and
- Pay a licensing fee that helps support GoodWeave’s monitoring, inspections and education programs.

Exported Goodweave-certified rugs then carry the Goodweave label so that you know your rug purchase does not support exploitation of children. Non-Goodweave certified rugs might be made by children who kept locked inside dark shops, are not educated nor fed well, and some of whom are slaves who are not even paid. x

Goodweave also rescues children who have been sold into rug-making slavery, out of desperation, by their parents for amounts as small as $2.50. The rescued children are given refuge in a rehabilitation center where they also receive education, training and love.

A fair trade advocate and marketing professional for over 15 years, Nina won the 2005 Skoll award for Social Entrepreneurship, acknowledging her work to employ market strategies for social change. Nina was formerly the executive director of The Crafts Center (1995–1999), a nonprofit organization providing marketing and technical assistance to indigenous artisans around the world and publisher of Crafts News. As president of the Fair Trade Federation (FTF) from 1996 to 1998, Nina raised funds for and launched FTF’s first consumer education campaign. Nina’s overseas experience includes a crafts export consultancy to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala, India from 1994 to 1996, where she oversaw the development of new market-driven product lines, quality control mechanisms, and artisan training programs. Nina’s broad expertise includes nonprofit management, writing and publishing, marketing, public relations and small business development.

The Goodweave program has won The Best in America Seal, that is awarded to less than 1 percent of U.S. charities, and only after rigorous independent review has determined that the highest standards of public accountability, program effectiveness and cost effectiveness are met.

Full disclosure: Nina Smith also happens to be my super awesome first cousin.

Awesome Women: Queen Soraya Tarzi

2011-11-13T15:54:00.001-05:00

Today's Awesome Woman is Soraya Tarzi (1899-1968), who after being born in exile and returning with her family to Afghanistan in the early 20th century, married Prince Amanullah. She became Queen when her husband gained his ascendancy in 1926, but their reign lasted only three years before she found herself living out the rest of her life the way she began, as a woman without a country. But she made a mark during those three short years as the first Afghan queen to promote women's rightful place in public life, and she took significant personal risk in acting as the first public role model of a modern Muslim woman.

During the three years that Soraya was Queen of Afghanistan, she took bold steps to modernize the position of Mulsim women in general, and Afghan women in particular. Her husband was receptive to the egalitarian philosophy Soraya had received from her liberal, intellectual family (the reason they had been exiled to begin with). Soraya set many "firsts" -- the first woman to be the only wife of an Afghan King, the first Afghan Queen to accompany her husband as an equal at public events, the first queen to wear Western style clothing, and the first to openly champion the right of women to education and employment. She was present at Military Parades with the king. During the war of Independence, she visited the tents of wounded soldiers, talked to them, offered them presents and comfort. She accompanied the king even in some rebellious provinces of the country, which was a very dangerous thing to do at that time.

Influenced by Soraya and her father, King Amanullah campaigned against the veil, against polygamy, and for the education of girls. At a public function, after her husband said that Islam did not require women to hide behind veils, she tore hers off right at the table. Other women at the event followed suit. While her husband was in the process of having the nation's first Constitution drafted and passed, Soraya publicly exhorted women to take their part in the nation's political life and future.

In 1926, Soraya delivered the following message in a speech commemorating the seventh anniversary of independence from England:

It (Independence) belongs to all of us and that is why we celebrate it. Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset needs only men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation and Islam. From their examples we must learn that we must all contribute toward the development of our nation and that this cannot be done without being equipped with knowledge. So we should all attempt to acquire as much knowledge as possible, in order that we may render our services to society in the manner of the women of early Islam.

In 1928 honorary degrees were conferred upon both Amanullah and Soraya by Oxford University, and Soraya spoke to a large audience of students and leaders. However, the British government had an interest in destabilizing Afghanistan, and distributed in the Afghan countryside photos of Soraya having dinner with men other than her husband, having her hand kissed by a Frenchman, and the like.

The British goal of destabilizing the Afghan monarchy was achieved. When the royal family returned from their trip to Oxford, a violent uprising broke out among religious sects and Amanullah was compelled to abdicate to avoid a civil war. After three short years on the throne, he and Soraya left their country for good. Their first stop was India, where they were applauded by thousands. Indians were still under the colonial thumb of Great Britain, and they gained and lost hope for their own cause as the watched Amanullah gain and then lose power to truly make changes happen in Afghanistan. It is said that Indian women gave Soraya a special ovation, calling out "Soraya! Soraya!" without mentioning "Queen."

Soraya Tarzi lived out the last 40 years of her life in Italy, with her family who were living there in exile once again. She only returned to Afghanistan in a coffin in 1968, where she was given a state funeral and buried next to Amanullah.

Awesome Woman: Marlene Dietrich

2011-10-30T10:09:00.001-04:00

Today's Awesome Woman is Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) a German-born actress and singer who defied social mores, and who succeeded in reinventing her public self several times over during the course of her long career. She defied the conventional image of how a woman is supposed to dress, becoming one of the talkies' first femme fatales and was a fashion icon. She defied how a woman is supposed to act both in her movie roles and in her personal life (which she managed to keep relatively private). She defied the label "box office poison" after a flop and went on to star in several more successful movies. She defied the public's conception of her as a haughty movie star and rolled up her sleeves to do heavy wartime work during World War II. Then she stepped into a new era of being mostly a highly paid cabaret star from the 1950s through the end of her active career in the 1970s. And after retiring from the public view, Dietrich remained politically active. Marlene Dietrich defied everything except being herself.

Dietrich's first stage appearances were as a chorus girl in vaudeville-style revues in the 1920s. She was bisexual, and enjoyed the thriving gay scene of the time and drag balls of 1920s Berlin. She married her only husband, Rudolf Sieber, in 1923 and gave birth to her only child, Maria Elisabeth Sieber, in 1924. After some smaller parts on stage musicals and in silent films, her breakout as a star came when she was cast as Lola Lola, a magnetic cabaret singer who brought down a respectable professor, in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930).

The film saw international success and Dietrich moved to Hollywood under a 6-contract deal with Paramount. Her first American film was Morocco. She knew very little English and learned her lines phonetically, but earned the only Oscar nomination of her career. In Morocco she wore a tuxedo and white tie, and kissed a woman. Dietrich was known for cross-dressing and her image had (oddly, considering the times) unquestioned appeal to men and women alike. She once said, "I dress for myself. Not for the image, not for the public, not for the fashion, not for men."

Five more highly successful films were made with Paramount (also under von Sternberg's direction): Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman. After the contract was up, under a different director Dietrich starred in a 1937 film that bombed, resulting in her and many other major stars being labeled as "box office poison." But she revived her stardom and went on to make many more films.

With the ascendancy of the Nazi part in Germany, which Dietrich vehemently opposed, she became an American citizen in 1939. When the United States entered World War II she became the first celebrity to raise war bonds. She toured the U.S. for a year and a half, and it is said she sold more war bonds than any other star. During 1944 and 1945 she made USO tours of Europe, even performing for troops on the front lines, even inside Germany. She sang songs, performed on her musical saw (a skill picked up during her early cabaret years), and entertained the troops with a "mind reading act" that was rife with sexual innuendo and had church groups complaining. She recorded songs for OSS use, recording at least one in German, and actually became a favorite of soldiers on both sides of the war. She also toured the military hospitals to pay personal visits to bring cheer to wounded soldiers.

Dietrich was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the United States in 1947, which she said was her proudest achievement, and the Légion d'honneur by France as well. She had been raised as a Protestant but lost her faith during her wartime experiences, once saying, "If God exists, he needs to review his plan."

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly-paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theaters in major cities worldwide, working with Burt Bacharach as her arranger and recording albums with him as well.

As for her rich private life through all these decades, as summarized in Wikipedia (be careful, this may make you dizzy):

Throughout her career Dietrich had an unending string of affairs, some short-lived, some lasting decades; they often overlapped and were almost all known to her husband, to whom she was in the habit of passing the love letters of her men, sometimes with biting comments. During the filming of Destry Rides Again, Dietrich started a love affair with co-star Jimmy Stewart, which ended after filming. In 1938, Dietrich met and began a relationship with the writer Erich Maria Remarque, and in 1941, the French actor and military hero Jean Gabin. Their relationship ended in the mid-1940s. She also had an affair with the Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta, who was Greta Garbo's lover. Her last great passion, when she was in her 50s, appears to have been for the actor Yul Brynner, but her love life continued well into her 70s. She counted John Wayne, George Bernard Shaw and John F. Kennedy among her conquests. Dietrich maintained her husband and his mistress first in Europe and later on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, California.

In her 60s and 70s, Dietrich's health declined, after a bout with cervical cancer and several stage accidents. She was known to be an alcoholic and became dependent on painkillers. But even after retreating to the privacy of her Paris apartment for the final, mostly bedridden, 11 years of her life, she stayed active politically via telephone, including having had conversations with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. She also stayed in constant contact with her daughter (her husband had died in the 70s), and with biographer David Bret, with whom she had developed a close relationship and who was one of the only people allowed into her apartment. It is believed that Bret was the last person that Dietrich spoke to, two days prior to her death: "I have called to say that I love you, and now I may die."

Awesome Woman: Mahsatī

2011-10-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

The awesome woman of the day is Mahsatī Ganjavi (b. circa 1086), a poet philosopher who lived in 12th century Ganja, a city in modern-day Azerbaijan. She was an eminent Persian poet, said to have associated with famous contemporaneous poets Omar Khayyam and Nizami Ganjavi. She was also, it is believed, a consort of Sultan Sanjar, and lived a free lifestyle that included many love affairs.

She is often described as writing poems about love, sexuality and freedom. English translations of her poetry seem to be locked inside the copyrighted, for-sale domain of academia and I was able to find only two examples (translated by Edward G. Brown) on the Web that go beyond the genre of love poems; they are transcendent and highly evolved philosophy:

The Pathway Finally Opened

When my heart came to rule
in the world of love,
it was freed
from both belief
and from disbelief.

On this journey,
I found the problem
to be myself.

When I went beyond myself,
the pathway finally opened.

English version by
David and Sabrineh Fideler

A world there is for those in love with mines of precious stones

A world there is for those in love with mines of precious stones,
But bards select a different world as setting for their thrones.
The bird who eats love's magic grain lives on another plane -
His nest beyond both worlds, ignoring riches, scorning fame.

English version by
Edward G. Brown

According to the site where these poems were found and echoed on other sites on the Web, "Her poetry was a strong voice against prejudice and hypocrisy and patriarchy, while upholding love -- both human and divine. She was celebrated at the court of Sultan Sanjar for her rubaiyat (quatrains), but later persecuted for her courageous stand against overly dogmatic religion and arbitrary male dominance."

Awesome Women: Janet Siddall

2011-10-22T13:53:00.002-04:00

The awesome woman for today is Janet Siddall. After a long career in various diplomatic positions in the Canadian foreign service, including a final stint as High Commissioner (ambassador) to Tanzania, Siddall retired from her career but not from life, nor from her love for service and her connection to Africa. She now serves as an organizer for a branch of the Grandmothers to Grandmothers ("G2G") campaign, in which grandmothers from the West help grandmothers in Africa.

Due to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases, older women across Africa, after having already worked so hard to raise and support their families for decades, find themselves in the position of raising their children's orphans. About 15 million orphans now live in sub-Saharan Africa. Not only do the African grandmothers face caring for themselves in old age, after a lifetime of hardship and poverty and without a national retirement pension of any kind, but now they also must provide the love, nurturing, schooling and material support for their grandchildren.

Siddall's knowledge of Africa, gained during her days as a diplomat, helps inform her local branch of G2G. But in spite of her elite career she sounds like just a down-home grandma engaging in grassroots actions to raise money for the cause. She organized a potluck dinner that raised $2,500 Canadian, and a "Stride to Turn the Tide" walk that raised $6,000.

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2011/0808/Janet-Siddall-helps-African-families-through-Grandmothers-to-Grandmothers.

A ClusterFuk(ushima) of Contamination

2011-10-15T12:17:00.002-04:00

Remember the radiation? Oh yeah, that. Remember how so many folks thought Dr. Helen Caldicott was sounding hollow alarms about Fukushima potentially being 30 times worse than Chernobyl?

Citizens of Tokyo have joined forces to test radiation on the ground, because their gov't had dismissively waved its hand, told everyone not to worry, and stopped testing shortly after the Fukushima disaster. Turns out that radiation on the ground in Tokyo exceeds the "safe" limits established after the Chernobyl meltdown. And Tokyo is 160 miles from Fukushima.

And that's just what's on the ground -- and the ground of course includes playgrounds, ball fields, and, oh yes, farms. Now what about the air? What is still circulating? Where is it falling? And what about the plume that must have washed out into the sea? Does anyone care?

Now let's revisit Dr. Caldicott's post-earthquake analysis of the potentially unimaginably huge impact of the damage to Japan's nuclear plants. And if you were one of those who waved your hand and dismissed what she was saying, maybe it's time to come out of denial.

Bottom-Up Change: Apple Eco-Friendly Cleaning Cooperative

2011-10-12T11:18:00.002-04:00

Mexican women who used to stand on the street hoping to be picked up for a day of underpaid day-labor cleaning homes and offices using deleterious chemicals, have organized an LLC, "cook up" their own nontoxic cleaning products, and are looking for more clients for steadier employment.

GA may use prisoners to bust unions

2011-10-11T21:45:00.000-04:00

(image by ilyse kazar, CC NonCommercial)

Camden County, Georgia is considering replacing union firefighters with unpaid convicts. That's right, this brilliant plan contemplates placing two loosely monitored prisoners in each firehouse, who will respond to all emergencies including residential fires. And it seems that this would be forced, not optional, labor.

Let's say that nonviolent, nonlarcenous prisoners are selected. Let's say that even though the prisoners did not _choose_ to fight fires, they nonetheless put their all into protecting life and property, rather than doing the bare minimum. What do they get in exchange for running into burning buildings? _Maybe_ some time off. And the right to work as a firefighter 5 years after release, instead of the usual 10.

Oh, yes, and let's say the unionized firefighters are down with this. AS IF.

This is the worst. Cost-saving idea. Ever.

Awesome Woman: Roz Savage

2011-10-09T11:36:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Roz Savage (b. 1967), a British woman who at age 34 left behind everything familiar to her and set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a row boat. This was followed by an 8,000-mile row across the Pacific that took two years, and last week she completed her row across the Indian Ocean, thus completing a trip that has nearly circled the globe. Along the way, Savage has spread awareness of the perilous condition the ocean, the mother of all life on Earth, is suffering because of the actions and inaction of the human race. She now says she is retiring from rowing across the oceans in order to campaign full-time on behalf of them. She has blogged her journeys at http://rozsavage.com.

A few years back, after 11 years as a London management consultant, Savage sat down and wrote two versions of her own obituary -- one that she was headed for in the life she was leading as a married employed woman living in a big suburban house, and the other for the life of adventure she had always wanted. When she looked at the two hypothetical versions of her life, she quit her job, soon was divorced, and set out on her rowing odyssey.

Savage's first ocean crossing was as a contestant in a 3,000-mile race, a 103-day journey from the Canary Islands across the Atlantic Ocean to Antigua, completely solo. (She rows truly solo, without a chase boat.) This was in 2005, the year of Katrina and a record number of other tropical storms that were generated in the Atlantic. Savage describes the nearly 2,500 hours crossing the Atlantic -- without a roof over her head, working only with the natural forces of weather and sea current, able to rely only on her own muscle power as propulsion, drinking the sea water that had been pumped through a desalinizer, and nobody to talk with but the wind -- as an inward journey, a psychological odyssey. In the process she also had formed a connection with the ocean that was not over yet.

When Savage decided to row across the Pacific, she leveraged the notoriety she had gained to advocate for protection of our oceans that are under assault, a situation that gets much less media exposure than global warming and other environmental crises, perhaps because so many humans do not live near the ocean and are out of touch with the critical role it plays in the health of our whole planet. From 2008 to 2010, Savage became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific, in three legs, after an abortive troubled start that ended in Coast Guard rescuing her against her will. She was a designated 350.org Athlete and wore their t-shirt. Mid-ocean she encountered the crew of the "Junk Raft," a boat made mostly of plastic water bottles that Savage said was built to call attention to "the North Pacific garbage patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre."

Before the final leg of her Pacific journey, Savage gave a TEDtalk, "Why I'm rowing across the Pacific," to bring awareness to her voyage and to report first-hand on the evidence of plastic poisoning she had encountered in the ocean. Just afterward, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, causing the biggest oil spill in history and at least temporarily calling sharp public awareness to the state of affairs with our pollution of the oceans.

When she completed her Pacific journey, Savage wrote this piece for cnn.com:

In the couple of months since this TEDTalk was recorded, I have rowed 2,000 miles from Kiribati to Papua New Guinea in the third and final stage of my Pacific crossing, becoming the first woman to row solo all the way across the Pacific.

During those two months the ocean has suffered new assaults -- notably the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but also smaller insults, as I have witnessed with my own eyes. On a beautiful calm day, with sunlight glinting off the waves, it is heartbreaking to see a plastic bottle floating on the water. Even thousands of miles from land, the ocean wilderness is no longer pristine.

Mankind's impact is felt everywhere. When I have been alone for a long time at sea -- sometimes over a hundred days without seeing another human -- this evidence of our carelessness is especially jarring. There are times when I feel ashamed to be a human being, and feel obliged to apologize to the small community of fish that congregate beneath my boat for the mess we have made of their home.

And it doesn't impact just the fish. Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth, and are an integral part of our weather systems, climate control, and food supply. How can we have a healthy planet -- or healthy bodies -- if we don't have healthy oceans?

I row across oceans to inspire people to take action on environmental issues. Something the ocean has taught me is that any challenge, no matter how huge, can be tackled if you break it down into little steps. Crossing the Pacific has taken me about 2.5 million oar strokes. One stroke doesn't get me very far, but you take all those tiny actions and you string them all together and you get across 8,000 miles of ocean. You can achieve almost anything, if you just take it one stroke at a time.

And it's the same with saving the oceans. On a day like Oceans Day, when we feel part of a huge global community, it's easy to believe we can change the world. But there will be other days when maybe we feel alone, and that anything we do as individuals won't really make a difference -- that it's just a drop in the ocean.

But every action counts. We all have it in our power to make a difference. In fact, we're already making a difference -- it's just up to us to decide if it's a good one or a bad one. Every time we say no to a plastic bag or refuse to drink bottled water, it matters.

If I can row 8,000 miles to make a point about the state of our oceans, then you can do your part too. Start by going to http://ecoheroes.me/ and log a single green deed that you are going to do today, Oceans Day, to help save our seas. We have a lot of work to do, but the longest journey starts with a single step -- or oarstroke.

NYPD = Judas Goats

2011-10-02T12:21:00.003-04:00

There ought be no mention made of the arrests yesterday when Occupy Wall Street marched onto the Brooklyn bridge, without making it clear in the same piece that it was the NYPD who deliberately led the marchers onto the motor-vehicle roadway, in order to trap them part-way across the bridge and arrest hundreds.

Are the strategists within the Department actually so clueless as to think this would not be obvious when the world sees it on video? (Note around 6:15 that one officer has clearly been tasked to video-tape the marchers, including those who were legally filming from and shouting their support from the pedestrian walk above.)

Regardless of where anyone stands on the American political divide, I think we all should agree that this sort of police tactic is, well, it is un-American!

Awesome Women: Alixa and Naima - Climbing PoeTree

2011-10-02T06:57:00.000-04:00

The Awesome Women of the Day are Alixa and Naima, a performance duo called Climbing PoeTree. Poets, performers, print-makers, dancers, muralists, and designers, the Colombia- and Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based team has toured the world, working the intersections of so many artistic disciplines and presentation modalities that they defy categorization. They describe themselves on the Climbing PoeTree website as "the Heart Beat Soul Sister Artist Warrior duo." Their work confronts difficult issues of social and environmental justice and offers a perspective shift, an incensed yet loving realignment to everything about today's world that could get you down, a thinking/feeling view that will infiltrate the heart and mind of anyone who has even a small chink left open in their emotionally protective armor.

In a review of their 2009 show Hurricane Season, Onome Djere writes:

Climbing Poetree were already touring as a spoken word group, waxing eloquent about the economic greed and racism that fuels the prison industry. Using dance, poetry, tapestry, and storytelling, Alixa and Naima started giving birth to Hurricane Season by connecting the numerous dots of environmental and socio-economic oppression they had observed. One example was the news of mercenaries who were contracted to help patrol New Orleans in the Katrina aftermath - in effect, criminalizing its predominantly black and low-income population. Though Climbing Poetree covered everything from the hurricane to the displacement of Palestinians to the plastic island floating in the Pacific, they managed to avoid information overload and maximize emotional impact with graceful transitions and seamless multimedia layering.

The entire theatrical experience embodied the sacred and tempestuous nature of water: the dimly lit underwater cave-like performance space, the fluid dance movements of the performers, the tidal waves of images, metaphors, poignant quotes and audio collages of survivor stories, ebbing and flowing across a huge screen.

I have only begun to get familiar with their work and am utterly captivated by everything I've seen and heard. Among my favorites so far is this existentialist piece that ponders whether the other elements of nature perhaps experience the same sort of silly angst that we, the human element, put ourselves through over issues of appearance, social role, parenting, mortality. For me, the final line of the poem has already become a touchstone I come back to throughout the day, to regain my center when my mind is spinning out on a trip fueled by worries and fears:

In a historical context, we could call Climbing PoeTree "the wandering minstrels of today," or, "itinerant philosopher shamans." For me personally, though, I see them as brave, shimmering living goddesses of Heart and Truth. Even in a small box of video on my screen, they take me, wake me, and remake me.

Partial change of mind (yup) re OWS

2011-09-30T07:46:00.000-04:00

Last week I reacted with strong criticism of the very white makeup of the crowd that occupied Wall Street. I am not satisfied yet that those assembled there generally understand how many oppressed Americans are left out of the equation and have no voice in a protest when outreach is done almost exclusively on the Internet. I do wish to express, however, my admiration for anyone who makes personal sacrifice and takes personal risk to put their body in the streets in protest. And I'm seeing developments that lend more credence to, and give me more faith in the potential efficacy of, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I continue to watch for specific proposals and ideas coming from this group. Sally Kohn expressed the reasons I feel skeptical better than I ever could in her Tuesday article in the American Prospect, "Follow No Leader":

One of the downsides of anarchists is they tend to oppose most forms of organization—including their own. Rather than the usual “we’re all in this together” sense of purposeful community that propels meaningful protests, Occupy Wall Street felt like the political equivalent of a rave; it made recent uprisings across the globe seem like a trivial fad. Standing in its midst, I was reminded of the uppity kids from my college days who dressed up like punks and protested because it seemed cool.

If you want to see the difference between effective organizing and pantomime, compare Occupy Wall Street with the New Bottom Line coalition, a group of community organizations that have put together protests across the country to demand that big banks put back into our economy what they drained from communities. In San Francisco yesterday, groups of homeowners, community members, students, and clergy went to the offices of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase to demand that their congregations’ money be withdrawn from these financial institutions. It is part of a series of coordinated actions over the next several weeks that not only has a clear message and concrete demands but is organized by accountable community groups that represent millions of Americans—not some well-meaning but isolated and angry kids who met on the Internet.

But now we may be seeing an incipient coalescing between specific groups with specific goals and the OccupyWallStreet movement. Maybe it all did need to start with some form of pure idealism, a seemingly silly gathering of the lesser-oppressed with no plan of action, and then gradually boil down to concrete actions and demands.

In the past week or so there have been instances of groups heading out to protest on behalf of unionized labor. The one that caught my attention this week and had me cheering the effort was the disruption by a crew from OWS of a Sotheby's auction to point out the auction house's disregard for striking art handlers:

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Now this is a meaningful action with a specific target and a clear point being made. Items sold at Sotheby's auction are high-ticket items sometimes running into the millions of dollars. Sotheby's turns a very healthy profit, even in these times. It seems that the rich have lost faith in their own banks and are now investing heavily in objets d'art -- according to L Magazine profits are up 74 percent to $4.8 billion in 2010. Yet, rather than negotiate with their striking workers, they locked them out.

Another development is that the unions are beginning to see Occupy Wall Street as a movement on which they can piggy-back, as a camera-rich location where labor can stage marches and protests. It was great to see the pilots of the merged United Continental Airlines marching by the hundreds downtown (:

When I see OWS find the way to organize and attract into the fold the homeless, and jobless from the outer boroughs, and generally speaking a much more representative cross-section of the ethnicities and classes of people suffering in all kinds of ways under the current cutbacks and austerity measures and mega-topheavy distribution of wealth, I'll eat my last blog post.

#TakeWallStreet is a self-contained belljar of fake populism

2011-09-18T07:18:00.000-04:00

Let's be honest with ourselves. The crowd in this #TakeWallStreet vid from yesterday's launch of the occupation appears to be 99.9% white folks of middle-class backgrounds who never got off their laptops and phones to get serious about organizing the folks who are suffering most under corporate dominance. 99% white event in NYC where whites are the minority?? (numerically speaking, anyhow)

I admire the moxy of the concept for this movement. But something is clearly wrong. There has obviously been a complete failure to join forces with the grassroots of NYC. This looks like a bunch of out of towners who rode in on MetroNorth. Sorry folks, you do NOT represent "the 99%". If my post puts your nose out of joint, why don't you look in the mirror and check what color it is.

Awesome Woman: Diane Wilson

2011-09-18T05:45:00.000-04:00

Today's Awesome Woman is Diane Wilson, a Texas shrimper who has been a long-time, hard-fightin' radical activist against industrial polluters, the war machine, and just about any other Goliath she puts in the sights of her stinging slingshot.

In a July interview on Truthout by Joni Praded, soon after the release of her latest book, "Diary of an Eco-Outlaw: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth," Wilson explains how her first motivation to action -- which to date has resulted in more than 50 civil-disobedience arrests -- became her nonstop pursuit ever since:

I read an Associated Press story about my county being number one toxic polluter in the nation in l989. That information was too horrendous for me to ignore, so I simply called a meeting, and it snowballed for the next 20 years.

That snowball is made up of some admirably outrageous actions such as sinking her own boat to cover a Formosa Plastics drainpipe in order to block its discharge into her bay. This motivated what she terms "the apathetic fishermen" and the outcome was winning zero-discharge agreements from two industrial giants, Formosa and Alcoa. (In 2002, though, Formosa was still listed in the 90th percentile of the worst environmental polluters by Scorecard, a pollution information site.)

In another incident, Wilson attempted to make a citizen's arrest of Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide which had caused 20,000 deaths in the Bhopal disaster.

Diane Wilson's mission broadened from fighting major polluters and industrial criminality to human rights and peace activisism. In the interview when asked to name her "most surprising" action, she cites her visit to Iraq in 2003 with "an early version of CodePink," where "we were really getting tired of a particular American TV station broadcasting cheerful words for invasion. So, we decided to take over the TV station. And we did. I was amazed that we did the action, and even more amazed that we succeeded." She has also stood outside nude in front of the Houston office of BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred.

Each encounter with unjust and evil systems seems to only strengthen Wilson's resolve and broaden her platform:

... being jailed all those times and for such lengths of time in some of the worst jails in the country, didn't depress me - it gave me ideas on how to fight it and change the way things are done. That's how Texas Jail Project got started. It wouldn't have happened unless I had been jailed. For instance, now, instead of just listening to horrendous stories of women in jail going into labor while shackled and tied to their beds, we try to do something about it. During the last Texas legislative session, Texas Jail Project helped make shackling of all pregnant women inmates, whether in prison or county jail, illegal. So, I believe things happen for a reason.

(Photo by ACMEBoston / Flickr )

Same goods, for less

2011-09-12T17:38:00.002-04:00

“Our quality numbers have been very good,” Mr. Walsh said. “And our data doesn’t show any differences per shift or per workstation.”

That's the sound of Detroit bragging about its two-tier wage system, in which new workers do the same work, at the same productivity rate, as longer-term workers earning double their salaries.

Awesome Woman: Laura Moulton

2011-09-04T19:37:00.000-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Laura Moulton, artist, novelist, mother of two young children, and outdoor librarian for the homeless in an effort she founded called Street Books, "a bicycle-powered mobile library for people living outside".

Since June, twice a week Moulton gets on her bike and pedals a wagon full of books to street corners in her city of Portland, Oregon. She loans the books to homeless persons who cannot get a library card for lack of an address. She stores donated paperbacks in her basement and glues the familiar school library due-date pocket inside each one. However, there are no due dates in the outside library -- her customers simply return the book when they are done reading.

A recent Christian Science Monitor article about Moulton reports that "her patrons show a high-level of accountability in returning books, which contradicts some assumptions about homeless people." Also defying stereotypes, she says, is the range of reading material her patrons are interested in. She holds much respect for the "people living outside" and enjoys discussing books and other topics with them:

“If someone can just have a conversation … then I think so much of the other stuff goes away,” Moulton suggests. The “other stuff,” she says, includes perceptions, stereotypes, and judgments.

Moulton also photographs the people who borrow books and maintains a blog with the images and stories. The blog gives her homeless clientele faces and names, and most often shows them with the books they have selected to read.

Moulton received a grant for her idea from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Now that the grant period has ended, she plans to continue her effort and to experiment with models of sustainability. For example, recently a patron of Street Books became a guest librarian.

I chose Laura Moulton for today's AWOD not because she is famous. Not because she is a head of state. Not because she has given her life completely over to some cause. I chose her because her project proves that in the microcosm of a community, in the course of a regular workaday life, we can find manageable ways to be agents of cheer, humanity and change. The scope of Moulton's project might be local, but her impact runs deep on the men and women she loans books to, and on the attitudes towards the homeless of the people who hear about her work or follow the Street Books blog.

Do you have books you'd like to unload? Also, any old reading glasses? Put them in your car or bag and open your eyes for someone living on the street who might like them. And maybe stop for a few minutes to say Hello, ask How are you doing today? and maybe even get to hear a bit of the person's story. Don't have books to give? Just give a smile and have a conversation then! It's free and takes 5 minutes!

Here's a really touching video about Street Books, guaranteed to dispel any stereotypes you may be subject to regarding the intelligence and spirit of homeless persons:

Awesome Woman: Anne Hutchinson

2011-08-28T20:12:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), a Puritan living in New England who defied the male church and secular authorities by evolving a belief system according to her own conscience and by leading a Bible discussion group for women. Hutchinson stood by her beliefs, and represented herself bravely at two trials by men who considered her a Jezebel and heretic. In addition to holding and spreading theological beliefs contrary to what men were preaching, Hutchinson and her husband were also deeply opposed to the slavery and brutality being practiced against the Native Americans, for whom they expressed love and appreciation.

Anne also challenged notions that women were intellectually or spiritually inferior, that they ought not think for themselves, and that they were in a childlike relationship to their husbands, governors and religious leaders. Banished from the Massachusetts colony where she had sought religious freedom, and then banished again from the Rhode Island colony where she and like-minded friends had fled, she and all but one of her children were massacred by the very Natives she loved -- who did not know who she was and were in violent rebellion against the cruelty and greed of the white people who lived in the area.

In southern New York, the Hutchinson River is her namesake. It was while driving up the Hutchinson River Parkway with my young daughter years back that I noticed a bronze plaque on a stone bridge that mentioned the origin of the river's name. We looked up Anne Hutchinson when we got home and my daughter wrote a paper about her for an elementary school project. Anne Hutchinson not only served as an early role model for my daughter, her story has ever since inspired me immensely and her belief in the primacy of one's conscience in the search for truth and for a connection to a God sparked my first interest in learning more about Christian philosophy.

"As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway." --Anne Hutchinson

Anne Marbury was born in England and lived there until she was 43 years old, almost all her life. In her early years she was influenced by her father, a clergyman who did time in jail for protesting what he considered to be a nepotistic system of selecting church clergy, most of whom he considered to be unqualified. Anne was home-schooled and read from her father's libary. She clearly admired her father's assertiveness and ideals, learning to question church authority, to defend the right to live according to one's conscience and to speak out against corruption. She married William Hutchinson at the age of 21 and took on the role of wife and mother, but remained deeply interested in questions of theology. She and her family began attending the services of the Reformationist Reverend Joseph Cotton, a minister in the new Puritan movement that decried the corruption of the Catholic church.

In the year 1634, the Hutchinsons, and the 15 children Anne had borne, followed Joseph Cotton to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the new Puritan stronghold in the New World. While the notion is commonly held that New England colonies were established according to the principle of religious freedom, the only "freedom" was for colony founders to establish and enforce their own preferred flavor of Christianity. Alternate beliefs were not tolerated. The stifling rules and religious interpretations laid down by colonial governors and their clerical cohorts were imposed on the entire colony. Further, the only acceptable role for women was to serve as child-bearers and submissive subjects of their husbands. Given the stultifying atmosphere vis-à-vis Anne's independent mind, she was destined to be in the role of agitator, dissenter, and branded woman throughout the tumultuous nine years that she lived in America.

When Hutchinson arrived in Massachusetts, there were religious discussion groups for men at which women were not welcome. So she started a discussion group of her own, for women. Rather than repeating the theology as preached and written down by men, she relied on her own deep study of the Bible and the resulting revelations to her own heart and mind, and brought those revelations into the discussion.

Some of her religious tenets were revolutionary for the times, going beyond the reforms the Puritans had built into their new religion. Whereas the leaders of the Massachusetts colony preached a "covenant of works," which laid out very specific actions and behaviors a person must adhere to in order to find salvation, Hutchinson believed in a "covenant of grace," in which humans are saved merely through their faith. These were beliefs she had learned from Rev. Cotton. But she was even more radical, and believed that faith was not about accepting Christ but rather was about recognizing that Christ had been in one's heart all along. And she stepped even further outside of accepted teachings, in that she believed in a personal closeness to God that did not require interpretation by, and was not a legitimate subject of judgement by, self-appointed church authorities. In her way of seeing it, God revealed himself to individuals without the aid of clergy.

Hutchinson's discussion groups were very popular. Soon men began to attend, too, and as many as 80 people were showing up to study with her. Her fearless independence of mind was a major challenge to the status-quo of the colony's leaders, as was her breaking of the strict Puritan mores that prohibited men and women meeting together, and the fact that so many women were stepping away from their families briefly in order to attend her meetings. This led to her being brought up on charges of heresy and she stood trial twice, while in an advanced pregnancy once again, 50 years before the Puritan misogyny reached its peak with the Salem witch trials.

Hutchinson represented herself at both her civil and church trials, never wavering, never showing fear, and responding to charges with rejoinders that showed shrewd understanding of the law, astute insight into the hypocrisy of the patriarchal control of women's lives, and incredible allegiance to her own truth. The key charge against her in the civil trial was that she had violated the Fifth Commandment, in an argument that cast the "fathers of the colony" as parents. Thus, in a classic use of church doctrine as a means for the powerful to maintain the status quo, she was branded as a heretical dissenter and banished from the colony -- but not before she also had to stand a religious trial in which she was accused of "lewd and lascivious conduct" for holding meetings whose attendees were both men and women. The result of this trial was excommunication.

Anne, William and their children fled to the colony of Rhode Island which at first was a haven for people who had stepped outside of Puritanical rule, yet quickly became yet another example of a powerful man instituting harsh theocratic policies. By this time Anne was led by her experience, logic and meditations on Scripture to a philosophy of individualist anarchism, in which individuals are free to evolve their own morality, ideology, and religious beliefs. (Note that William Gibson, born more than a hundred years later, is credited with being one of the early influences on the school of individualist anarchism, whereas Anne Hutchinson had arrived at a similar set of socio-religious-political beliefs on her own under the most contrary circumstances possible.)

William died in 1642 and Anne decided to move once again, this time to the Dutch-held colony of Eastchester Bay (now in the Bronx). Some of her friends and family moved with her, which attests to her strength as a thought-leader. In 1643 she, her servants, and all but one of the five children who had moved with her were massacred by Mahican Indians who were in rebellion against the local Dutch colonists.

In 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned Anne Hutchinson, revoking the order of banishment by Governor Winthrop 350 years earlier.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson
http://www.annehutchinson.com (this site includes partial transcript of her trial, worth a look!)
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Anne_Hutchinson.aspx

Awesome Women: Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen

2011-08-21T18:44:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Women for today are Hege Dalen and her spouse, Toril Hansen, two Norwegian women who risked gunfire to save 40 children from the madman who murdered so many innocents recently at a camp on Utoya Island.

The two women were dining nearby when they heard gunfire and saw people running desperately. They started up their boat's engine and rushed across the water to rescue people from the shore. Even after they noticed bullet holes in the side of their boat they returned again, going in four times in all.

This story did not surface for at least a week after the whole incident, and one has to wonder why. For their selfless and courageous actions, apparently ignored by the mainstream media, they are Very Awesome indeed!

for more info:
www.ibtimes.com/articles/190990/20110802/norway-massacre-oslo-shooting-utoya-anders-breivik-lesbian-couple-rescue-youth-camp.htm

If you don't follow Betty Fokker, you're an asshat

2011-08-14T16:46:00.001-04:00

From "When does self-delusion cross into mental illness?"

Something horrible happened in Mississippi. A couple of white teens, John A. Rice, 18, and Deryl Dedmon, also 18, went hunting for a black person to “mess with” and found a 49-year-old auto worker named James Craig Anderson – who just happened to be black. Because he was black, and for no other reason, the goat fuckers John A. Rice and Deryl Dedmon murdered him. Mr. Anderson was beaten savagely by both of the festering anuses, and then Deryl Dedmon ran him over with a truck, deliberately and with vile malice. It was murder. Pure and simple a racially motivated hate-crime and murder. They caught it on TAPE. It is beyond contestation.

But, of course, the motivation for the killing is being contested. Deryl Dedmon’s lawyer, Lee Agnew, “said in an early hearing that he had not seen evidence to support the accusations that the episode was racially motivated.” Yes, I am sure the racist scum Deryl Dedmon and John A. Rice, who announced they were looking for someone black to attack, mistook James Craig Anderson for a Swede and were just boisterously roughhousing! It wasn’t racially motivated at all!

The full post and everything Betty pumps out are always worth reading.

Awesome Woman: Suraya Pakzad

2011-08-14T14:57:00.002-04:00

The AWESOME woman of the day is SURAYA PAKZAD (born ca. 1970), an Afghan woman deeply committed to women's rights to education, safety, and opportunity. Pakzad founded the "Voice of women Organization" (VWO) NGO in 1998 and began to teach girls how to read in groups across Afghanistan. Since 2001, when Afghani women to some extent could operate to pursue their aspirations in a rigid society, VWO began to function openly. Her work to protect women and girls at risk as well as advocacy for women’s right puts her in constant danger in a traditional society in Afghanistan.

In 2009, when she was one of the first four women to receive a "Power and Peace Award" (one of several high honors she has earned), the Washington Post explained the kind of violence Pakzad witnessed in her youth, that led her to follow her mission of working for women:

Suraya Pakzad was 12 when she saw a gunman kill the headmistress of her Afghan school because the woman taught girls and refused to wear a headscarf. A few weeks later, a rocket smashed into the school and killed a student sitting near her, another warning for girls not to learn.

In addition to her open efforts towards educating women and teaching them skills and trades (she is the only woman in Afghanistan who has ever trained other women to run a restaurant, for example), she also runs a system of secret shelters for child brides and other victims of Taliban-style abuse of women, providing housing and medical, legal and job-training services.

Pakzad was named in 2009 by Time magazine as one of the "Time 100" most influential people in the world. A mother of six children, she lives with unimaginable daily risk. She has been the victim of many death threats and conservative influences within the government have worked against her good efforts. Funding is also a constant challenge.

The write-up of Pakzad in Time 100 noted:

It is difficult to name a more committed advocate for women's rights in Afghanistan.... Pakzad knows that any future success for Afghanistan depends greatly on the full, unimpeded participation of its women as contributing, productive members of society. In 1926, then Queen Soraya said famously, "Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation." This is what Pakzad believes. This is what she fights for. And it is — and this, however unpleasant, must be said — what she may die for.

Awesome Woman: Kathryn Bolkovac

2011-08-07T00:53:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is KATHRYN BOLKOVAC, a law enforcement professional who blew the whistle on DynCorp, a contractor paid by the U.S. Military to assist in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the late 1990s, for failing to take action against their own task-force trainees who were patronizing Bosnian establishments that trafficked in very young sex slaves. (A movie called The Whistleblower, based on this true story, was released on Friday, August 5.)

Bolkovac was working as a police officer in her native Nebraska when she saw a recruiting poster for the mission. A mother of three, with two of her children in college, she signed up to be one of 2,000 police officers from 45 countries to work as peacekeepers. During her training session in the States, she learned that at least one man in her group was aware of the use of very young girls for sex in Bosnia, a fact that was borne out once she was deployed. Bolkovac discovered restaurants and night clubs in Bosnia that were fronts for sex-trafficking operations that rented out girls aged 12-15 to international clientele, including her fellow U.N. peacekeepers. The Bosnian police were no help; they apparently were being paid to ignore the awful situation.

The treatment of these young girls was truly atrocious. Bolkovac uncovered evidence of girls who, when they refused to have sex, were beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid $700 to a bar owner for an underage girl he kept captive in his apartment.

[Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, believes trafficking in little girls started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.]

Bolkovac reported her findings to her DynCorp, which at the time had a $15 million contract to recruit and train police officers for the Bosnian operation, and she was immediately demoted. Six months later she was fired, and was warned by fellow workers that her life was in danger. After a two-year lawsuit she waged against DynCorp, in 2002, an employment tribunal ruled that Bolkovac was unfairly dismissed by DynCorp.

In 2002, Salon did a two-part investigation into the participation of DynCorp employees in the Bosnian sex-slave trade, and determined that t least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia -- and at least seven of them fired -- for purchasing women or participating in other prostitution-related activities. But despite large amounts of evidence in some cases, none of the DynCorp employees sent home have faced criminal prosecution.

In January, a book co-authored by Bolkovac about her experience, The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice, was published

Awesome Woman: Faith Bandler

2011-07-31T10:17:00.003-04:00

Today's Awesome Woman is FAITH BANDLER, an Australian activist who has lived an iconoclastic life and has been a lifelong civil- and women's-rights leader.

In a review of Marilyn Lake’s biography of Faith Bandler, Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, Lyndall Ryan writes:

...the subject is full of contradictions. She is not Aboriginal, but as a woman of colour she has devoted most of her adult life to removing legal discrimination against Aboriginal people. She is not a white woman, but she has led a middle-class life as the wife of an engineer on Sydney’s North Shore. She is not a member of a political party but she has been a political activist for over fifty years. She is Australian born and bred, but has always felt an outsider in mainstream Australia. She is not a historian but she has published four books about her family’s origins and about the struggle to win a ‘Yes’ vote in 1967.

Bandler was born on September 27, 1918 on a banana farm in New South Wales, to a father who had been "blackbirded" (kidnapped and forced into slave labor) in 1883 from his native island in what was known as the New Hebrides, and an Australian-born mother of Indian and Scottish descent. During the Depression she left high school and went to work as a milliner. But when World War II brought the opportunity for women to serve in the Women's Land Army, she gained a consciousness of the inequities dealt to the Aboriginal people, particularly Aboriginal women who earned a fraction of what other women were paid.

Ryan continues to list Bandler's very unusual (for a woman of color in Australia) relationships, travels and pursuits:

After the War, she lived a cosmopolitan life in Kings Cross, where she had a long affair with a Finnish sailor, took music lessons to improve her fine singing voice and learn the importance of a public presence on the stage, and studied at WEA classes to overcome her lack of education. Her political involvement with the Left enabled her to travel to Europe in 1951 to attend a major cultural youth festival. In this formative period of adulthood, she gained a very sophisticated understanding of herself sexually and politically. In 1952 she married Hans Bandler, a Jewish refugee engineer from Vienna. It proved an enduring partnership, based on shared political beliefs and a great love of classical music and gardening.

In 1956, when their daughter was two years old, Faith used her middle-class security to become a fulltime political activist, determined to eradicate discriminatory laws and practices against Aboriginal peoples.

From 1956 to the early 1970s, Bandler was a major influence, spokesperson and figurehead in the fight to gain full citizenship rights for the Aboriginal people. As general secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders , Bandler led the campaign for a constitutional referendum to remove discriminatory provisions from the Constitution of Australia. In 1967, after the federal government had agreed to hold a referendum on the Aboriginal question, Bandler was appointed New South Wales campaign director, a position she fulfilled with energy, skill and enthusiasm. By the time the Referendum was won in May 1967, Faith Bandler had become a major public figure.

As the Black Power movement developed into the early 70s, being black but not Aboriginal was now a disadvantage, and Bandler "retired" from the Aboriginal struggle to begin researching, writing about and campaigning for the rights of South Sea Islander Australians. This was an even more challenging political feat, since she not only was fighting to overturn the false historians who claimed that "blackbirded" Islanders were in fact voluntary indentured servants, but she was also ostracized by the Aboriginal Rights community who had become influenced by a separatist Black Power ideology. Finally, in the year 2000, the Queensland government offered a measure of official recognition to the South Sea Islanders when it conducted a ‘recognition ceremony’ at Parliament House in Brisbane -- largely due to Bandler's research, writing and publicizing of the cause.

Bandler has also written and co-authored many books, including two histories of the 1967 referendum, an account of her brother's life in New South Wales, and a novel about her father's experience of blackbirding in Queensland.

In 1975, she traveled to Ambryn Island, the land of her father's birth from which he had been kidnapped 92 years prior. In 2009, she was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia (a sort of Australian "knighthood").

In interviews about her personal evolution as a political activist, Faith Bandler expresses a deep gratitude and strong consciousness of the influence of other women who served as her mentors and motivators.

Sources:

National Museum of Australia http://www.indigenousrights.net.au/person.asp?pID=954

Australian Humanities Review (Lyndall Ryan's review of Marilyn Lake's book) http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2003/ryan.html

Australian Biography (Australian government site) http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/bandler/

Further links available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Bandler

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

He did not act alone

2011-07-25T04:51:00.002-04:00

"In the face of inhumanity, we have to be more human. Because there is only this one world, brutal and beautiful, and we only have one fragile life to make our difference in the world we all share as home." ~~ Erik Abild, coordinator for Myanmar and the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the Norwegian Refugee Council, in Al Jazeera.

Photo by Jens Rost

My thoughts:

(1) The terrorist was not Muslim.

(2) The terrorist's mental illness and hatred was fueled by anti-Muslim rhetoric and right-wing extremism that cast anyone involved with the Labor party as some kind of devils.

(3) If you go around spewing rhetoric and hatred against any group of people, if you go around calling any group names or blame any group for your condition or for the local, national or global state of affairs - based only on their nationality, religion, gender, sexual preference, age, race, etc. - I consider you guilty by association. I do. You are guilty. You stoke the fire that sets guys like this one off. Do not let yourself off the hook, this person did NOT "act alone".

Multi-generational homelessness

2011-07-25T02:57:00.003-04:00

This man has been sitting in the same spot for a few days on East 4th Street near First Avenue in Manhattan's East Village, my neighborhood. He asks for nothing but I noticed him scraping the sides of a jar of something dark, chocolate spread perhaps, with a spoon.

He does not ask passersby for anything, does not initiate interaction. Yet when I asked him if I could take his photo he engaged with me quite readily. He was clearly not a wino or addict, and does not show overt signs of any mental illness. I gave him the change from my pocket (and would have given more if I could). I told him he is beautiful, because he is.

The next morning on my way to the supermarket, with my two dogs in tow, he was still there. Still scraping the same jar. I picked up a jar of "Vitamin Water," an apple and a pear, with him in mind. On the way back I said, "I have some things for you." Again, in his absolutely accepting and gentle manner, he simply smiled and said, "Oh, good!" I asked him how his teeth are doing, are they strong.

"I don't have too many left," he said.

"OK, then, the apple is out, but can you eat a pear?"

"If it's soft," he answered, "but I have a grater in my bag, I can grate it up!"

I gave him the pear, the drink and some slices of bread from the bag I had just bought for my daughter and me, thinking how organized and skillful a homeless person he is to have a grater in his bag.

"So what are you doing out here?" I asked.

He shrugged slightly. "I'm homeless."

"Where do you stay in the winter?"

"I stay outside. I have warm blankets in my bag." (In New York City winter temperatures are at or below freezing for months.) Again I thought, "What a skillful man."

"No family? Where do you come from?" I expected to hear that he has drifted here from elsewhere.

"From Inwood."

"Uptown?"

Yes, he answered, he comes from that neighborhood, on the northernmost end of Manhattan.

"Well," he clarified, "I was raised in Inwood but my family was homeless, too."

My sweet new friend petted my dogs for a bit. I had to move along. "You take care out here," I said.

"Oh, I will! I do!"

Awesome Woman: Nadia Al-Sakkaf

2011-07-24T11:50:00.002-04:00

Today's Awesome Woman is Nadia Al-Sakkaf, a Yemeni woman who, in 2005 after her father was murdered, took over as editor and publisher of the Yemen Times, the country's first and most widely read independent English-language newspaper. As painfully demonstrated by her father's fate, this position in the ongoing political protest in Yemen -- protest that was first started by a woman -- entails extreme risk. But Al-Sakkaf does not stop at publishing a newspaper that dares to report on government oppression and violence, she also actively initiates and supports efforts aimed at improving the lives of Yemeni women. And she uses her newspaper as a platform for activism.

Al-Sakkaf travels out of country on the conference and speaker circuit and, while she could easily obtain residency in any number of Western countries, she returns to her homeland to continue upholding the principles of free speech and to advocate for women and others. While she was in Washington, D.C. in March, 2011 she was interviewed by Judy Woodruff of PBS.

Yemen today is in a very unique situation. The process was started by a woman and a number of women. And, alongside with men, they managed to lobby the students in the streets.

And the women are also part of the support group of these protesters. They bring them food and blankets. And they -- I have seen a woman throwing hot water on soldiers when they were trying to attack the protesters from her window.

So, we need not forget the role of women in this magnificent time of Yemen.

Al-Sakkaf was the very first recipient of the Gibran Tueni award bestowed annually by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) for, "attachment to freedom of the press, courage, leadership, ambition, and high managerial and professional standards." Indeed, she has become a strong voice in the call for the Arab media to mind its own store rather than merely complain about the international press, to balance its coverage, to play the critical role that no one but the press can play in a fair-minded society, and to improve its pitiful record at reporting on the many human rights abuses -- both political oppression and the traditional practices that victimize women.

From the WAN page where Al-Sakkaf's 2006 award is documented:

She considers the Yemen Times to be a newspaper with a mission: it should not only criticise the government but also furnish solutions. Editorially, she focuses on raising the newspaper's general standards, with a strong focus on human rights, gender issues and women's rights....

Ms Al-Saqqaf has made it a priority to raise the professional standards of the journalists working at the newspaper and to improve the competence of female journalists in Yemen. Legal education is among upcoming projects for the staff, as well as training in how to report on scientific developments.

In her biting article, "Arab media: To lead or to follow?" posted on the Arab Media Community web site in 2008, Al-Sakkaf wonders why her newspaper was the only one in Yemen to take up the case of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old girl who fought her way out of a marriage to a man more than three times her age, until it became a huge story in the Western media. And she never misses a chance to encourage women to become full partners in Yemeni public life, and to exercise their voices via the media. When she received the Tueni award she said, "This is recognition of Yemeni journalists generally and especially Yemeni women working in the media. This should encourage them to grow and not give up."

This month, Al-Sakkaf spoke at TEDGlobal. "How did you, then, make the decision and assume the responsibility of running a newspaper -- especially in such times of conflict?" asks the interviewer.

"Well, let me first warn you that I am not the traditional Yemeni girl."

Nadia, you can say that again. You are not the "traditional girl" anywhere!

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

Awesome Women: Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan

2011-07-17T08:33:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Women of the Day are Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan, who together are working to improve the lot of women in Mogadishu, Somalia, which was "recently named one of the five worst places to be female" and is a place where few on this earth would choose to visit, never mind work. They are being honored today for risking their lives and giving up Western comfort in order to advocate for the human rights, health, safety, opportunity, education, and well-being of women in one of the hardest hit places on the planet.

Lisa Shannon, center and in black, and Fartun Abdisalaan Adan, in blue directly behind her,
surrounded by participants in the new organization Sister Somalia,
which helps Somali victims of gender-based violence.

In an article penned by Shannon, "In Mogadishu: A Lifeline For Somali Rape Victims"
in The New York Times this week, she leads off:

“Why did you come here when no one else does?” The African Union communications director asked us over dinner at its compound in Mogadishu. Good question. We were warned against it, especially by war-zone regulars. It’s been called the most dangerous city—or place—on earth. In fact, we had to delay our trip for two weeks due to multiple suicide bombings and riots inside the area controlled by Mogadishu’s transitional government (TFG). So, why go? I gave the short answer, “We’re supporting a local social entrepreneur in launching a sexual violence hotline.”

But the real answer was more complicated. Somalia bothers me. The 1993 Black Hawk Down incident was tragic not only for the loss of United States servicemen, but because many experts credit this loss with a shift in American public sentiment and policy toward mass atrocity in Africa. In effect, we collectively flipped off our empathy switch, approaching African crises like Rwanda, Congo and Darfur as “Operation Not Worth It.” But no country has been more written off than Somalia. And in Somalia, no group has been more written off than women.

Abdisalaan's husband, Elman, was a human rights worker who was murdered in 1996. After escaping to Canada to raise her children there, she returned to Mogadishu in 2007 to continue his work and is the founder of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center. Counseling and other services are provided to the survivors of gender violence, the nearly universal female genital mutilation practiced in Somalia, and all sorts of struggles the women endure due to the chaos and conflicts in their country.

And then there is Al-Shabab. The radical, militant Islamic group linked to Al-Qaeda rules 90% of central and south Somalia with utter impunity. Not only do they abduct and imprison through forced marriage, terrorize and gang rape. If women complain, they are often accused of adultery and speaking against the brotherhood, punishable by death. The execution methods of choice: Stoning or beheading.

Abdisalaan founded Sister Somalia, a program in collaboration with Shannons' new organization, A Thousand Sisters, which offers the only sexual violence hotline in Mogadishu, provides counseling, business startup advice, and also works to move survivors and their children away from their attackers. "Each woman who walks through the door will also receive a letter from a 'sister' abroad," writes Shannon. "We hope to raise $120,000 per year to make it happen. How is a broke activist like me planning to pull this off? Just like every stage of my journey with Congo, I don’t know exactly. But I’m betting we can find at least 1,000 Americans who would welcome the opportunity to show up for women in Somalia, through writing a letter or giving at least $10 per month."

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

Awesome Woman: Christiane Amanpour

2011-07-11T06:49:00.002-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Christiane Amanpour (born January 12, 1958), a broadcast journalist well known around the world for her coverage of major conflicts and world events since 1990, as international correspondent at CNN for years and currently as anchor of ABC's This Week. Amanpour has navigated war zones, built an unparalleled network of worldwide connections, excelled in a hugely male-dominated profession, and gone face-to-face with world leaders fearlessly asking the hard questions. And she has also on many occasions taken the risk of breaking the "neutral journalist" mold by reporting from her own point of view and expressing her own conscience, in defiance of the old meme that if a reporter has a personal opinion on a situation they must keep it to themselves. She is brassy, outspoken, and brave.

Amanpour was born in London (or, by some accounts, in Tehran) to an Iranian father and British mother. She spent her early years in Iran, receiving an elite education as her family was among the privileged class under the Shah's regime. Her family emigrated to England on the eve of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In England, Amanpour attended the New Hall School, the country's oldest Catholic school that has educated girls since the year 1642. She then traveled to the United States to study at the University of Rhode Island, and graduated summa cum laude in 1983 with a degree in journalism.

Very soon after graduating, she was hired as an entry-level desk assistant on CNN's foreign desk in Atlanta, Georgia (1983) and gained rapid recognition and major opportunities early on. After an assignment covering the Iran-Iraq war, by 1986 she was transferred to Eastern Europe to cover the fall of Soviet Communism, and she remained in Europe into 1989 reporting on the democratic revolutions on that continent. Her achievements landed her a role as a correspondent for CNN's New York bureau, and very soon afterward she was shipped out again to serve as CNN's foreign correspondent covering the Gulf War as it commenced in Iraq.

Amanpour quickly gained recognition and notoriety for her gutsy style of journalism, for her bravery in the field (even parachuting into conflicts), for her poise and incisiveness when interviewing officials and leaders, and for allowing herself to occasionally report quite emotionally on difficult events. After the Gulf War she was promoted to the position of being CNN's chief international correspondent (a position she held until she departed CNN in 2010), and she was sent to cover the Bosnian War.

Deftly moving between the field and arranged interview, on worldwide live TV in perhaps her most famous moment she challenged President Clinton (on his own "Global Forum" show) regarding U.S. policy on the Bosnian war. Locking eyes with him across the satellite signal, she asked one of the most ballsy questions in the history of broadcast journalism:

Mr. President, my question is, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia? Why, in the absence of a policy have you allowed the US and the West to be held hostage to those who do have a policy - the Bosnian Serbs - and do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent and would lead people such as [North Korean president] Kim II Sung or other strong people to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken?"

An angered Clinton responded coldly, "No, but speeches like that may make them take me less seriously than I'd like to be taken. There have been no constant flip-flops, madam." This exchange is worth watching -- Amanpour has it posted to her Facebook page. To cut Clinton a break, he did pretty well at recovering from her unsettling challenge. Also, near the end of the program Clinton returned to what she had said. "That poor woman has seen the horrors of this war, and she has had to report on them... She's been fabulous. She's done a great service to the whole world on that. I do not blame her for being mad at me. But I'm doing the best I can on this problem from my perspective."

Amanpour fell under some pretty strong criticism after this broadcast, and was accused of lack of objectivity -- many felt she was reporting too emotionally and that she had an agenda in favor of the Bosnian Muslims and was biased against the Serbs. Amanpour explained in a 1996 article in Quill that the Serbs denied CNN and other Western media better access to the territory they controlled, and she believed the Serbs did themselves an "incredible disservice."

Also in that article, Amanpour answers in response to the charges of bias: "The very notion of objectivity in war becomes immensely important... I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case such as Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short step toward being neutral... So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality."

Since that time, Christiane Amanpour has covered wars, conflicts, genocides, strife, political upheavals, and other heavy aspects of the human story around the globe, before settling in to anchor studio-based work towards the end of her time at CNN and now at ABC. She has scooped some of the hottest political interviews in recent history. But whether working in the field with bombs exploding all around her, or sitting at a desk in the United States, she gets to the heart of the matter, engages people, and does not shy from the most important job in journalism -- holding politicians' feet to the fire while demanding answers to the uncomfortable questions.

---

Personal footnote: I met Christiane Amanpour, who was friends with an Iranian co-worker of mine, for a brief moment in 1990 when she was about to depart to cover the Gulf War. She had come to say goodbye to my co-worker. I was introduced, and was bowled over by the woman's aura without even knowing who she was. Then she and my friend continued a private conversation in hushed tones in the doorway of the office. After she left I learned some private details that I will not share here, but I can say that in order for Amanpour to accept her first war zone assignment, she was braving not only the potential dangers of the gig, but also huge personal changes were also involved. She was truly stepping off a cliff, and doing so with her characteristic (but not callous) moxie, which explained for me the energy that shimmered all around this awesome woman.

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

Awesome Woman: Wilma Mankiller

2011-07-09T11:08:00.000-04:00

Today's AWESOME WOMAN is Wilma Mankiller (November 18, 1945 – April 6, 2010), American Indian activist and chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995. Mankiller grew up with her 10 siblings on a land allotment in Oklahoma, in squalid poverty.

In the 1960s Mankiller lived in Oakland, California, with her husband, had two daughters, and attended college. In 1969 she joined the Native American activist movement and participated in the 19-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island. The stated intention of the Occupation was to gain Indian control over the island for the purpose of building a center for Native American Studies, an American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center, and an American Indian Museum. After the occupation was forcibly ended by the U.S. Government, Mankiller volunteered for five years for the Pit River Tribe.

In 1977, Mankiller divorced her husband and moved back to Oklahoma with her daughters, in hopes of helping her own people and began an entry-level job for the Cherokee Nation. By 1983, she was elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation, and when the chief took a position in Washington D.C. in 1985, she became the first woman to assume the role of Chief of the Cherokees.

Contrary to the traditional inclusion of women in tribal leadership, the Cherokee nation at the time was a very male-dominated power structure. Wilma Mankiller worked within that structure to achieve great progress for the tribe. She spearheaded community development projects such as tribally owned horticultural operations, plants that got defense department contracts, and building a hydroelectric facility. She leveraged U.S. policies to gain every possible advantage for her tribe, and paved the way for the government-to-government relationship the Cherokee Nation has with the U.S. Federal government. During her 10-year stint as Chief, she created reasons for Cherokee people to rejoin their Nation, and increased the population from 55,000 to 156,000.

Mankiller lived through a near-fatal car accident and multiple grave health problems. Largely due to health reasons she resigned as Chief in 1995 and became a teacher at Dartmouth College. Upon her passing in April, 2010 from pancreatic cancer, President Obama said:

"I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Wilma Mankiller today. As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief, she transformed the Nation-to-Nation relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the Federal Government, and served as an inspiration to women in Indian Country and across America. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, she was recognized for her vision and commitment to a brighter future for all Americans. Her legacy will continue to encourage and motivate all who carry on her work. Michelle and I offer our condolences to Wilma’s family, especially her husband Charlie and two daughters, Gina and Felicia, as well as the Cherokee Nation and all those who knew her and were touched by her good works."

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Woman: Annie Oakley

2011-07-04T22:44:00.003-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Annie Oakley (1860 - 1926). She was an American sharpshooter whose talent in this traditionally male sport led her to become a long-time star in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. She was the first coast-to-coast famous American woman, famous of her own accord and not via marriage or birth circumstances.

Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in Pennsylvania to Quaker parents - her mother was 18 and her father was 49 - Oakley was put into a "poor farm," where she was taught to sew and decorate, after her mother was twice widowed and could no longer care for all of her children. But she was not to remain confined to this classic female employment for very long!

Annie had begun hunting at age 6 and sold the game to help support her mother and siblings, and by age 15 had paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm. She had a natural gift for marksmanship, and by the age of 21 had won serious props for her shooting talent, helped a hotelier win a high-stakes bet, and met her soon-to-be husband, the man who lost the bet, all in one day. From Wikipedia:

During the spring of 1881, the Baughman and Butler shooting act was being performed in Cincinnati. Traveling show marksman and former dog trainer Francis E. Butler (1850–1926), an Irish immigrant, placed a $100 bet per side (roughly equivalent to modern US$2,000) with Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost, that he, Butler, could beat any local fancy shooter.

The hotelier arranged a shooting match between Butler and the 21-year-old Oakley, to be held in ten days in a small town near Greenville, Ohio....

After missing on his 25th shot, Butler lost the match and the bet. He began courting Oakley, and they married on June 20, 1882.

Annie Oakley, for all the stature and respect she earned during her many years touring and becoming increasingly famous, stood only five feet tall. She had a long and very successful career as a performer, traveling abroad to many countries and even performing for the Queen Victoria. She was truly an almost super-human sharpshooter. Her most famous trick was to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet.

In 1894 Oakley's fame led her to star in one of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope films, The "Little Sure Shot" of the "Wild West," an exhibition of rifle shooting at glass balls, etc. that can be viewed on this Wikipedia page. In 1901 Oakley was injured seriously in a train wreck, and endured temporary paralysis and five spinal operations. She tamed her career down for a bit, left Buffalo Bill's traveling show and began starring in a play that was written especially for her, The Western Girl. Oakley played the role of Nancy Berry and used a pistol, rifle and rope to outsmart a group of outlaws.

Oakley set a new kind of role model for American woman and did her share of work to promote self-respect and equal recognition in society for the country's females.

Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught upwards of 15,000 women how to use a gun. Oakley believed strongly that it was crucial for women to learn how to use a gun, as not only a form of physical and mental exercise, but also to defend themselves.

She also had written to President McKinley when the war with Spain was on the horizon, "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain." Oakley continued to perform here and there, and to set records, into her 60s, but she also was known for her philanthropy and support for women's rights. At age 62 she hit a hundred clay targets in a row from 15 yards. After a bad car accident soon thereafter, which forced her to wear a brace on one leg and to spend a year and a half in recovery, she again set records at age 64 in 1924.

In 1925, Annie Oakley died of pernicious anemia. It is said that her husband (Butler still!) was so crushed by her death that he stopped eating. He died 18 days later. It is also said that it was discovered after her death that she had given her entire fortune away to her family and to charities.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Woman: Flor Molina

2011-06-27T20:25:00.002-04:00

Flor Molina is a survivor of forced labor in the garment industry in Los Angeles, California. She was forced to work 14 or more hours per day, was told she owed her trafficker thousands of dollars, and was even required to live within the garment factory and was not allowed to go out without escort. Sadly, this is all typical in the world of human trafficking. What is unusual about Molina is that within 40 days of her arrival at the Los Angeles factory in 2001 she found a way to escape, immediately placed a phone call to a (non-enslaved) co-worker, and blew the whistle in spite of threats that her three children and mother back home would be harmed. Her phone call initiated a process that ended with the conviction of the human trafficker who had brought her to the United States and kept her enslaved.

Molina's coworker picked her up, took her to a restaurant, and contacted the FBI who were already investigating the trafficker. The FBI connected her to the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), who helped her find shelter and get back on her feet. She then became a member of the CAST Survivor Advisory Caucus, one of the groups that worked hard to pass a bill in California (that will go into effect in 2012) that requires manufacturers and retailers in the state to disclose their efforts at making sure their supply chains are free of slavery.

Molina offered the final testimony in the California legislature while Governor Schwarzenegger's pen was poised over the bill:

I and other members of the caucus speak up against slavery not because we are not afraid but because we want to make sure that what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone else.

The CAST Survivor Advisory Caucus fought hard for this bill to pass. We testified at hearings, we wrote letters and got signatures for our petition. Our voices were heard and action was taken, action that will, hopefully, protect others from falling prey to traffickers like we once did. I am proud to stand here, not as a victim of slavery but as a powerful agent of change.

Please, Governor Schwarzenegger, will you please sign the legislation?

There was applause, and the Governor signed.

http://www.szone.us/f76/governor-highlights-legislation-combat-human-trafficking-51387/

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/05/i-was-enslaved-for-40-days/

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Kudos: Stonyfield Farm (kinda sorta)

2011-06-19T06:54:00.000-04:00

Due to my rapidly deepening anti-plastics obsession and my recycling OCD, I check the bottom of every plastic container I need to dispose. While #1 and #2 bottles are the only plastics collected by New York City's municipal recycling program, #5 plastics can be dropped off at Whole Foods customer service desk to be recycled by Preserve's Gimme 5 program.

So yesterday I bought some organic Stonyfield yogurt for my daughter who needs some probiotics after running a high fever for a couple of days.

I turn over the cup and see the welcome news that it is not #anything plastic, it is "Made from plants":

My initial reaction was, I am thrilled, thinking that someone finally invented an enviro-friendly degradable bio-plastic food container that can hold liquids. I guess that was a bit illogical, huh, since liquids ought to degrade anything that is truly degradable ...

I headed off to Stonyfield's site and read their PR about these containers. The plant-based plastic they are using is called PLA (Polylactic Acid). Turns out that ...

PLA is used only for their small multi-pack cups. Their larger containers use #5 polypropylene plastic (see link at top of post for how to recycle these)
While Stonyfield claims to have examined various options for yogurt packaging including glass, poly-coated paper, they then go on to explain why they decided against glass and in favor of lightweight #5 or plant-based plastics. They do not explain why they do not just use coated paper. For so many years all yogurt or sourcream etc. containers were made from waxed or otherwise coated paper and there was no problem I ever noticed with this material!
Their PLA is not really compostable. Further, there is some kind of double-speak going on about why composting is not a good idea:
While PLA itself can be composted, the particular blend used in our multipack cups is too thick to be considered compostable under American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) international standards. And, surprisingly, the independent review of PLA’s environmental impact found that composting is not the best option for disposing of the cups. Why? Because composting would release the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the plant-based plastic (CO₂ absorbed by the corn when it was growing) back into the atmosphere where it would contribute to global warming.
The PLA is "recyclable" but only in our dreams:
The good news is that PLA is recyclable. The bad news is that, right now, the recycling infrastructure for PLA is in its infancy, so this technology is available in only two places, Wisconsin and Belgium, and these facilities aren’t equipped to separate paper labels, adhesives or lidding from our PLA multipack cups to enable recycling.
The PLA can contain GMO corn! Actually, they sort of get a pass on this. Cargill, the container manufactuer, is working via an offset program to ensure that -- while their procured corn may include GMO kernels -- an equivalent amount of non-GMO corn is grown (somewhere, by somebody, if we trust this).

Still, all in all, kudos to Stonyfield Farm for reducing their carbon footprint, "by 1,875 metric tons of CO₂ a year. That’s equal to the CO₂ emissions from 4,360 barrels of oil, or the greenhouse gases from the energy used in 160 homes for an entire year." And, of course, the elimination of toxins leaching into ground water when the containers end up in landfills is huge, too.

Awesome Woman: Chef Anne Cooper

2011-06-13T03:57:00.002-04:00

Todays very Awesome Woman is Chef Ann Cooper, a.k.a. The Renegade Lunch Lady.

Cooper is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and was among the first 50 women to be certified as an Executive Chef by the educational arm of the American Culinary Federation. She had a strong career going as a noted chef, having held positions with Holland America Cruises, Radisson Hotels, the Telluride Bluegrass and Film Festivals and the Telluride Ski Resort where she catered parties of up to 20,000. She has been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines, radio show, and television shows, has given seminars at Smithsonian Institute ... the list of honors is long.

But rather than pursue this path to a pinnacle of riches, Cooper's focus shifted to the need to feed our children properly, and to care for our planet wisely. No longer could the environmental and health facts be ignored when it came to producing food in this country. Cooper’s career shifted from primarily cooking to a path of cooking, writing, and public speaking – all advocacy work for a healthier food system.

Cooper uses her skills and background to create a sustainable model for schools nationwide to transition any processed food based K-12 school meal program to a whole foods environment where food is procured regionally and prepared from scratch. In 2009, Ann founded Food Family Farming Foundation (F3) as a nonprofit focusing on solutions to the school food crisis. F3's pivotal project is The Lunch Box - a web portal that provides free and accessible tools, recipes and community connections to support school food reform.

In adidition to writing books about food, cooking, health and sustainable practices, Cooper has also penned "A Woman's Place Is in the Kitchen," in which she discusses both traditional and current vantage points of women involved in the food service industry. Some of the historical issues discussed include: the influences of sociological change emanating from the transfer of power from matriarchal to patriarchal emphasis and the effects of the implementation of the brigade system which was developed from all-male military institutions.

A database of 6500 women and the compilation of 500 surveys provide statistics for the contemporary discussion. Women culinary professionals of today express passion for food while having to balance choices between professional and family obligations; what are the ramifications of these choices and how do they effect the culinary industry and the decisions made by colleagues, mentors and staff?

This is the first book that has been written exclusively about women chefs and restaurateurs; A Woman's Place is in the Kitchen provides an informative, insightful and objective portrait of the role of women working in the multi-faceted culinary field.

A TED Talk by Ann Cooper is available here, given in 2007 when she was the Director of Nutrition for Berkeley Unified School District, heading up an operation that provided 7100 meals a day to schoolchildren, and successfully introduced healthy, safe food into the system.

Ann Cooper's web site is at http://www.chefann.com/

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Women: Bel Kaufman

2011-06-11T04:01:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Woman of the Day is *Bel Kaufman* (born May 10, 1911) who at 100 years old is still an active and teaching a course in Jewish Humor at Hunter College, her alma mater (in the City University of New York system).

Bel Kaufman is the granddaughter of the famous Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, described in a recent New York Times article about Kaufman as "a writer who was able to squeeze heartbreaking humor out of the most threadbare deprivation and wove the bittersweet Tevye stories that became the source for 'Fiddler on the Roof.'"

Kaufman emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States at the age of 12 and was forced to start school in the first grade. Only 11 years later she had graduated from Hunter, and then pursued a master's at Columbia University. She began to teach in New York City Schools, and worked part-time as a writer for Esquire and other publications.
In 1965 her book Up the Down Staircase was published, a novel that deals with the experience of a new teacher's experience dealing with both the other teachers and the educational system, and the students. The book was based upon Kaufman's own teaching experiences.

Kaufman has carried on the tradition of distinctly Jewish humor her grandfather was known for. The Times article opens with this example:

When Bel Kaufman sits you down on her sofa and asks, “Are you comfortable?” the right answer, she reminds you, requires a Yiddish inflection, a shrug and the words, “I make a living.”

In explaining the origins and particular flavor of Yiddish humor, Kaufman explained to the Times reporter:

“It goes back to immigration from the shtetl, from that poverty, and because the Jew was the object of so much opprobrium and hatred,” she said. “The jokes were a defense mechanism: ‘We’re going to talk about ourselves in a more damaging way than you could.’ ”

When asked about the secret to her longevity in a New York Post article earlier this year, Kaufman answered, "I'm too busy to grow old."

There are beautiful pictures of her at Sholem Alecheim's 150th birthday celebration In the blog of Joan L. Roth, a photographer and writer who has done much documentary work about Jewish Women. See http://joanlroth.blogspot.com/2009/03/bel-kaufman-theodore-bikel.html

Other links:
NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/nyregion/bel-kaufman-at-100-still-a-teacher-and-a-jokester.html

NY Post: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/prof_shticks_to_her_guns_18F6lFUm9wG983kyjevRgP

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Kaufman

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Sitting is Killing You

2011-06-10T17:32:00.000-04:00

This excellent infographic originated on the Medical Billing and Coding website. The researcher(s) and artist(s) are not named there.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

Awesome Women: The Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa

2011-05-30T04:02:00.001-04:00

The Awesome Women of the Day are the "Barefoot Solar Engineers", women who left their African villages to spend six months at Barefoot University in India learning to create solar energy installations to power their villages. They brought their skills home, electrified their villages, and share their knowledge with others.

From the video narration:

This is about simple women in Africa who have made an extraordinary difference to their own communities, from Ethiopia to the Gambi, from Mauritania to Tanzania, a quiet revolution is taking place. Illiterate & semi-literate women, most of them grandmothers who have never left their villages in their lives, let alone going to another country several thousand miles away, they are making the impossible possible. They are baffling high-powered engineers, universities, donors, development planners and qualified experts by demonstrating incredible sophisticated skills and exposing the fundamental inadequacies of the formal educational system.

And a special shout-out to the woman who birthed and raised Sanjit “Bunker” Roy -- a man who recognizes that the best candidates for his project are women because of their superior patience and natural motivation to share what they have learned with their communities. Roy's Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for jobs in a bottom-up, social entrepreneurship approach to fight poverty and deprivation.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Women: Phyllis Rodriguez & Aicha el-Wafi

2011-05-08T04:36:00.002-04:00

It is Mother's Day many countries around the world. Today I honor TWO AWESOME WOMEN OF THE DAY, Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused, tried and convicted by the United States of being the missing "20th hijacker".

Women can bridge vast rifts. Women can heal the world. Only women. Happy Mother's Day to all of you. Regardless of how many children you do or don't have, your powers of love and care and action and courage are what the world needs now. ♥

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Quote of the Day: Suggested signs for Tea Partiers

2011-04-16T12:27:00.001-04:00

Andrew Kimbralls excellent piece "The Empty Pulpit: The Obama Problem" in Tikkun criticizes the lack of ballsy action taken on the very issues Obama all us progressive types fired up about during his campaign. The piece is a stand-out because it illustrates ways in which the opinions and slogans of the reactionary right can be countered with common-sense points that might actually change some hearts and minds (rather than capitulation to the right and rather than dissembling in the name of political realism, as has been the case).

In his point about countering the "Government is the problem" meme, Kimbrall suggests:

To be true to their “anti-big government” message, Tea Party rallies should have been festooned with signs such as “Fire the Fireman,” “No More Police,” “Bite the Postman,” “We Support Fewer Teachers and Overcrowded Classrooms,” “Collapse our Bridges — No More Infrastructure,” “We’ll Pave and Build Our Own Roads,” “Citizens for Salmonella,” “Unsafe Drugs for Everyone,” “Americans for a Weak Defense,” “Senior Citizens Against Medicaid and Medicare.” These signs were missing, of course, and instead we have the endless brow furrowing over “big government” in both parties as the discussion remains conveniently abstract.

OK, you rugged individualists out there. Get out your steamrollers and line-painting equipment. Self-sufficiency, right?

Awesome Woman: Limor Fried

2011-04-09T04:42:00.001-04:00

Today's AWOD is Limor Fried. She is an engineer, artist & hacker ("Ladyada"). She received her M.Eng in EECS from MIT where she developed and built subversive electronic devices, including a pair of glasses that darken whenever television is in view and a jamming device that disables people's annoying cell phone conversations at the press of a button. (see http://www.ladyada.net/portfolio/2004/index.html )

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

of the corporations, by the corporations ...

2011-03-29T12:18:00.000-04:00

Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage ordered a large mural depicting the illustrious history of unions in this country to be removed from the state's Department of Labor's premises.

"The mural has been removed and is in storage awaiting relocation to a more appropriate venue," said LePage press secretary Adrienne Bennett in a prepared statement. "We understand that not everyone agrees with this decision, but the Maine Department of Labor has to be focused on the job at hand."

... Administration officials said the change was needed to reflect a new image for the department, one not tilted toward organized labor. They said visitors to the lobby had complained that the mural is anti-business.

OK, then, so the new image for Maine's Department of Labor has been laid on the table in plain view: It is NOT there to encourage fair wages and safe working conditions. Seems like Maine is laying the groundwork to become the next state to attack public worker unions.

Some panels in the mural that LePage wants removed.

The Commissioner of Labor has also announced a contest to rename conference rooms that are currently dedicated to Labor heros such as Cesar Chavez and Frances Perkins. Hmmm. I can just see conference rooms in the Department of Labor named for Sam Walton and David Koch.

Awesome Women: Geraldine Ferraro

2011-03-26T04:43:00.001-04:00

The Woman of the Day is Geraldine Ferraro, born in 1935 and died today. A savvy New York Democrat, she was an attorney, a Democratic Party notable, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (New York/Queens). In 1984 she was embraced as a symbol of women's equality when she became the first Italian-American and first woman to be a major-party Vice Presidential nominee, selected by Walter Mondale who tried to unseat Ronald Reagan.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Billboard Liberation

2011-03-19T11:36:00.000-04:00

We at the BLF have been assisting fatigued advertising copywriters to strengthen their corporate messages for over thirty years. Advertising is the language of our Culture, as BLF CEO Jack Napier noted almost as many years ago. And the primary use of language is to to communicate ideas. The most efficient and direct communication of an idea comes through the most elegant use of the least amount of words to communicate that idea. It’s quite clear from the image in this Stella Artois billboard ad what the message IS. The BLF merely wishes to assist this campaign by paring down the words in order to match that message most perfectly. - BLF Education Officer, R.O. Thornhill.
The improvement can be seen at 38th St and 8th Ave in midtown New York.
The BLF (www.billboardliberation.com) has been improving outdoor advertising since 1977. Prior campaigns have included work for Exxon, R.J. Reynolds, and Apple Computers.

See more examples of liberated billboards on BLF's "clients" page.

Comment of the Day: Lethal Ejaculation

2011-03-05T12:17:00.002-05:00

Commenting on the below video on YouTube, MultiChrisjb says:

Every time I ejaculate, I kill millions of potential humans. So I should be in Jail! This makes every man a mass murderer. I'll turn myself in tomorrow....

Comment of the Day: The Poor Koch Brothers

2011-03-03T15:36:00.000-05:00

All the people in this "ad" are socialists, communists, nazis, subversives, and "tera-ists".The real PATRIOTS are the persons who stand up for the Koch brothers. Last time I heard, the poor bros were down to their last 18 billion. This is not acceptable. These greedy teachers should give it up now, for the good of the Koch bros.

-- YouTube comment on this well-done ad by Bold Progressives and Democracy for America by "Gallagherfreak100"

Parsifal, Women, and the future of Iran (and everywhere)

2011-02-21T10:29:00.004-05:00

PBS/WGBH have published a really lovely piece of writing by an anonymous "Arts Correspondent" via Tehran Bureau. The writer ruminates on Iranian society and the role of women, how things stay the same, how they are shifting, all painted in words on a multilayered canvas spanning cultures and eras (as per the headline: "Iranian Women and Wagner's Parsifal"), and moving with supreme grace from intimate personal perspectives, both first- and third-person, to the broader social picture.

The conclusion:

...beyond the reach of government oppression, women work to transform the many cultural contradictions of contemporary Iran into generosity and tolerance. The future of this country will have women at its heart and this is a fact.

The "Iran" Facebook "public profile" page is worth following for the superior mix of material coming out of Tehran Bureau. I only wish more of their authors could post with a by-line instead of anonymously.

Every Time ... that you put bleach in your washing machine

2011-02-20T11:06:00.001-05:00

... consider capturing some of the water that drains from the first rinse cycle and using it to wash your kitchen and bathroom floors and fixtures.

The first rinse contains very little dirt, and enough soap and bleach to clean and disinfect. Why send all those harmful chemicals down the drain, only to fill a bucket with more to clean floors, tiles, sinks, toilet?

(... and PLEASE use as little bleach as possible. It's deadly stuff to us and to marine life (all life, in fact). In our apartment we have a mold condition that I have never been able to clean up other than using chlorine bleach. And we do not purchase disposable sponges, but instead use squares ripped from old bathtowels to wash dishes, wipe down food prep surfaces, etc. Killing bacteria on these cloths is important. I have tried boiling them to disinfect but they just look so dirty and dingy with coffee & grease stains that anyone besides me would think I'm using filthy rags to wash dishes and wipe the cutting board. So I use perhaps 1/4 cup of bleach per week and then reuse some of it for surface cleaning)

D'oh of the Day

2011-02-18T18:15:00.002-05:00

Survey of online access finds digital divide: "A first-of-its-kind federal survey of online access found that Americans in lower-income and rural areas often have slower Internet connections than users in wealthier communities."

Minorities as majority

2011-02-10T09:24:00.000-05:00

Minorities are majority population in Montgomery County, reports WashPo in today's Metro section.

As recently as 1990, seven out of 10 Maryland residents were white. Now, they are barely a majority, at 55 percent of the population.

Y'know, in a world that is what, 10 or 15 percent white, given that apart from the pitifully few who have chosen to retain identity as Native Americans everyone else in this country is an immigrant "from the rest of the world", 55 percent white population in any area of this country is still hugely disproportionate.

We may not be headed for a country full of Chocolate Cities so much as salt-n-peppa-and-spice-and-everything-nice. Watch out for the White Fear Backlash but the optimist in me believes that is temporary, once people have the chance to live closer together with "others" and just, well, get over it.

What about Jordan?

2011-02-09T11:17:00.003-05:00

Is al Jazeera's English-language site going the way of the U.S. MSM?

I've seen plenty of complaints, and have made them myself, on Facebook walls and in Diaspora aspects regarding the heavy focus on Egypt in the MSM when there is in fact very widespread regional dissatisfaction, upheaval and revolt going on in the Middle East. The understandable interpretation of that tight Egyptian lens is that it stems from U.S.-centricism. Egypt is, of course, the States' "second most important ally in the region" and also receives the second-highest amount of foreign aid from the U.S.

This morning I notice a news feed somewhere pointing to a Reuters blurb that follows up on recent protests in Jordan and recent promises made by King Abudullah II to make immediate changes to the government. Yesterday Abdullah swore in a new government. This is an important bit of news, the first instance in the region of an incumbent making immediate changes without huge upheaval, but only more like "vocal unrest", sparking the event.

But what we should want to know is, Did Abdulllah make good choices? Are the people satisfied? Is he also perhaps making good on his old "soft promise" of moving power away from his own monarchy and into the hands of Jordanians? It looks like Abdullah's choices for replaced officials have little to do with any democratic process, and it looks like the newly instated officials are not likely candidates for supporting a truly fresh and democratic future for Jordan:

U.S. ally Abdullah appointed Marouf Bakhit, a conservative former premier drawn from the ranks of the powerful security establishment, last week to replace Samir Rifai, who was dismissed after just over a year in the job.

But it sure is hard to tell from this tiny blip of a Reuters item. It's one thing for the New York Times and Washington Post to have written nothing yet on this event. But nothing on Al Jazeera?

Which really leaves me to wonder if at least the English version of aljazeera.net is now catering to what they think U.S. readers want to hear about. Or is this news organization (for which on most days I actually have a good measure of respect) in general, in any language, giving Jordan scant coverage? Jordan, the country that is housing millions of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees? The country that attacked Israel and thus lost the West Bank years back, but has since cultivated (and perhaps earned) a reputation as being a fairly rational and moderate state? No coverage?

Here is al Jazeera's English home page this morning. Note the choice of articles highlighted in the bullet points below the top story:

Let's summarize those bullet points:

Egypt
Turkey (another strong U.S. ally)
Israel
Egypt
Obama
Egypt
Egypt

A search for Jordan on the site turns up only stale and slim news.

(I will try to remember to search again later and update as necessary if al Jazeera has added any fresh coverage of Jordan)

tanks, bowties and banking standstill - Jon Snow in Cairo

2011-02-02T10:18:00.000-05:00

UK's Channel 4 News is in Egypt, with International Editor Lindsey Hilsum reporting from Alexandria and others from Cairo.

Jon Snow writes from Cairo:

I have had the surreal experience of entering Egypt’s Finance Ministry. A grand white marble structure ringed with palm trees. Drawn up outside are not only tanks but rows and rows of bulletproof security trucks that are usually used to cart cash around the country. But there is no cash. The banks are closed. Shutting down the internet and mobile phones has not only disrupted the protesters’ communication it has bought banking to a complete standstill. Egypt is now not only in political crisis, but financial crisis too.

I went up to the 16th floor in the Finance Ministry to interview the new Minister of Finance Samir Radwan. We were greeted by men in bowties and dinner jackets. The elegant secretary in the outer office was clad in Gucci black. The minister himself is a delightful intellectual with no previous political experience. He is in fact Egypt’s leading academic on unemployment, poverty and regeneration. He is perhaps Mubarak’s only appointment who actually knows how to handle his portfolio.

Channel 4 is also providing live video and a liveblog feed at http://www.channel4.com/news/live-blog-egypt-protests-a-million-march-against-mubarak and, true to the embedded info in that link, it does look like a million people in the streets.

Obama skirts the legalization question

2011-01-30T21:48:00.002-05:00

cross-posted on Workhorse Politics

About 26 minutes into the YouTube interview with President Obama, the top-voted question about legalizing (or at least decriminalizing) drugs was played.

Obama answers the public's video questions in
an interview with Steve Grove of YouTube.

The main point of legalization is to pull the rug out from under the foreign cartels and local gangs who control the illegal trade. The most common reason children get killed by stray bullets in the crossfire on our urban street corners is because of turf wars revolving around drugs. And the thrust of Officer Mackenzie Allen’s question was to do away with the violent market and international terrorism, but Obama did a quick two-step, describing drug use as a public health problem and the need to curtail demand. He did not actually answer the question.

Here’s my transcription of Obama’s answer to Allen:

Well, I think this is an entirely legitimate topic for debate. I am not in favor of legalization. I am a strong believer that we have to think more about drugs as a public health problem. When you think about other damaging activities in our society — smoking, drunk driving, making sure you’re wearing seat belts — typically we’ve made huge strides over the past 20 or 30 years by changing people’s attitudes. And on drugs, I think that a lot of times we’ve been so focused on arrests, incarceration, interdiction, that we don’t spend as much time thinking about how do we shrink demand. And this is something that, within the White House, we are looking at very carefully.

Some of this requires shifting resources, being strategic, where does it make sense for us to really focus on interdiction? We have to go after drug cartels that not only are selling drugs but also creating havoc … for example, along the U.S.-Mexican border. But are there ways that we can also shrink demand and … in some cities, for example, it may take six months for you to get into a drug treatment program. Well, if you’re trying to kick a habit and somebody says to you, Well, come back in six months, that’s pretty discouraging. So we’ve gotta do more in figuring out how we can get some more resources on that end of it, and also look at what we’re doing when we have first-time nonviolent drug offenders — are there ways that we can make sure that we’re steering them into the straight-and-narrow without automatically resorting to incareceration, drug courts, mechanisms like that. These are issues that are worth exploring and worth a serious debate.

Paris Catacombs - National Geographic Magazine

2011-01-30T14:42:00.002-05:00

From a series of photos by Stephen Alvarez
-- see slideshow on the Nat'l Geo article

National Geo writes up the Paris Catacombs, a 180-mile quarry under the city, from which limestone was mined to build major structures such as the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Not only is the history of this underground world fascinating, but also the illicit current-day exploring, gatherings and art happening down there.

Pass the dutchie, Barack

2011-01-27T10:32:00.004-05:00

cross-posted on Workhorse Politics

As part of a two-day campaign to talk directly to Americans following Tuesday’s State of the Union address, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time today, President Obama will answer questions via live streaming on the World View YouTube channel. Up through midnight World View invited the public to upload their video questions and to vote the most popular questions to the top of the list.

U.S. Marines battle poppies in Afghanistan

This morning, if you visit the page and filter the questions by choosing “All Questions” and “Sorted by popularity” the most popular questions at least through position number 30 (where I got tired of counting) ask about legalizing marijuana or all drugs, or about allowing growth of industrial hemp in the United States as a green initiative (we currently import our hemp from China and Canada), and similar questions.

To ignore these questions would certainly turn the effort to respond directly to Americans’ concerns into a sham. One might think that Obama is in a bit of a spot here, but in actuality the sentiment that drug prohibition should be ended in the United States plays out on both ends of the political spectrum — Liberals and many Conservatives (or, at least, the Libertarian if not Christian Right flavor of Conservative) alike believing that we waste billions on the so-called War on Drugs, that it is not effective, that it in fact supports gang activity and causes violence, and many other reasons (supported by research, by example in other countries that have relaxed or removed prohibitions, and by the opinion of a growing body of current and former law-enforcement officials).

The question at the very top of the list, having earned far more votes than any other question, comes from a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (“LEAP”). This seasoned Officer Mackenzie Allen packs many solid reasons for repeal into his 32-second vid, and asks only whether the President thinks it is time to discuss repealing drug prohibition.

How can Obama possibly ignore answering the most popular question by far, coming from a police officer? We shall see.

Tom DeLay gets a lesson in Conservative values!

2011-01-11T12:43:00.000-05:00

Workhorse Politics » Tom DeLay Sentenced to 3 Years

How are economists jerks? Let me count the ways …

2011-01-08T16:54:00.000-05:00

...undisclosed conflicts of interest when economists are called upon to testify or otherwise help make critically important national policy decisions -- read the post on Workhorse Politics

Hero of the Day: Rep. Lynn Woolsey

2011-01-07T02:05:00.000-05:00

... for having the unswerving moxie to reintroduce her public option bill in the face of a slew of new Republican bills in the works aimed at eviscerating or eliminating the new health care laws.

Weather Almanac 2011: Major snow job preserves the stupefaction of Americans » Workhorse Politics

2011-01-02T09:06:00.000-05:00

Weather Almanac 2011: Major snow job preserves the stupefaction of Americans » Workhorse Politics:

The biggest problem in this country right now is not the politicians. It is not the corporate barons. It is not the oil industry. It is not the generations stuck in poverty. It is not the rich. It is not the lefties. It is not the conservatives. The problem is not “Them” but, rather, You and Me

Bottom-Up Change: Garbage sorter fights wage theft » Workhorse Politics

2011-01-02T08:58:00.000-05:00

Bottom-Up Change: Garbage sorter fights wage theft » Workhorse Politics

Quote of the Day: AFL-CIO champions equality for gays

2010-10-02T08:55:00.001-04:00

Commenting on today's One Nation rally, Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, said: "It's about jobs and the fact that we need jobs now. At the same time, we do not ever back away from being a part of a broader coalition that supports the rights of all people, no matter their race or sex or gender or sexual orientation, to be treated fairly."

Awesome Woman: Gerda Lerner

2010-09-30T07:04:00.010-04:00

Today's AWESOME WOMAN is GERDA LERNER (b. 1920), a founding pioneer of the fields of Women's History and African-American History. She is currently a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University. She wrote the screenplay for Carl Lerner’s film Black Like Me in 1966.

Prior to her work, women figured in history books and courses only for their ritual status as defined by a patriarchal society (wives of Presidents), as spoilers (witches of Salem), or for their sacrifices and caregiving (Florence Nightingale). Even when portraying women who had contributed tremendously to society's advancement and consciousness-raising (Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt), the radical substance of their work was routinely ignored.

At graduate school at Columbia University in 1963, Lerner defied her mentor's objections and chose to write her dissertation on the Grimké sisters, 19-century Quaker educators and social activists. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course at the New School for Social Research in 1963, and helped to develop Women's History programs at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and other institutes of higher learning.

Beyond developing the critically important fields of study of Women's and African-American History, Lerner also contributed a new, rich paradigm for researching history by organizing her work around principles that would illuminate the lives of her subjects, focussing on the experience of people as opposed to using the patriarchal historical framework of military actions, alliances, wars, and territorial domination. For example, for her 1972 book "Black Women in White America," Lerner traveled throughout the South, visiting churches, schools and families.

Gerda Lerner was born in Vienna, Austria and was forced by the Nazis to leave her country of birth for the United States. She had to learn English and held a series of "typical women's jobs" before moving along into her life of political and intellectual trail-blazing, and also of creativity. She married Carl Lerner, a Communist theater director, and in addition to her activism and scholarship she also collaborate with Eve Merriam a musical called "Singing of Women", and she wrote the screenplay for the important film "Black Like Me".

Lerner not only made an immediate difference in communities and politics, and not only established and legitimized the study of women's and blacks' experience, but she improved forever the way we look at history and raised the bar for authors and teachers who have come after her.

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

D'oh of the Day

2010-09-25T07:27:00.001-04:00

Foreign profits of U.S. firms could help at home, economists say: "As policymakers desperately search for ways to give the sputtering economy a jolt without deepening the nation's budget deficit, some economists say an answer lies with the more than $1 trillion in U.S. corporate profits that reside overseas."

Feel-Good Friday: The Dog and the Orangutan

2010-09-17T06:18:00.000-04:00

[Thanks to my friend Nina who shared this vid on her FB Wall!]

I'm hoping to start a tradition of finding something to warm my heart every Friday morning ... apologies in advance if this idea, like so many, gets swept away in the headlong rush of life.

NY Republican Lemmings

2010-09-15T09:08:00.001-04:00

I understand disgust with Albany, I really do. But my biggest issue is with voters who are impressed by multi-millionaires who come on with lots of fiery rhetoric but who, if one takes even two minutes to research (and — gosh — THINK) for oneself, are clearly despicable candidates.

So you vote for someone because you heard them say they will take a baseball bat to Albany. I can see how this violent allegorical threat to shake up the entrenched legislature has its appeal. But you make zero effort to really look into the guy.

Well, this is who you just nominated, NYS Republicans:

[Carl P. Paladino's win over Rick Lazio] was a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans. It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”

Paladino's victory speech is one of the funniest things I've ever read. He poured his own money into his campaign, outspending Lazio 3 to 2. Yet this guy who had a cool $3 million with which to buy this election portrays himself as someone ready to lead the "people" against "the ruling class."

“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.”

Congratulations, 'Pubs. I cannot wait to fill in the little dot next to Cuomo's name, knowing that I will get my wish while you all follow Paladino off the cliff.

Has the G.O.P. gone socialist?!

2010-09-13T05:02:00.001-04:00

No, but it looks like that boner Boehner has finally seen that the vast majority of Americans are on the lower fringes of what we still call the "middle" class and seriously need money more than the folks who take bonuses (paid for with bailout money) while everyone else eats white rice and beans six nights a week. Maybe someone finally explained to him that the median income in this country is only 29% of his own $174,000 per annum Congressional salary.

Or, more likely, his new willingness to allow the tax cuts for the rich to expire is more about the self-interest of Republican Congressional reps to hang onto their power. I can just see Boehner slapping his forehead. "Oh, right. We're elected by majority vote, and the huge majority will never make $200,000. D'oh." Thanks to Obama for bringing this up now that we're fast approaching midterm elections. On the other hand, now it becomes harder to paint the GOP as the obstructionists and elitists that they are. But, then again, Obama finally gets some cred as someone who can achieve results across the chasm we call "the aisle."

Dog Training

2010-09-12T08:48:00.001-04:00

In his new NYT column "Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back" Frank Rich recommends that Obama forcefully illustrate the class warfare that has been waged for decades in the U.S. You know, the redistribution of wealth that has resulted in the decimation of the middle class and the concentration of 25% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

Word.

All forms of terrorism, some thoughts on 9/11/2010

2010-09-11T06:55:00.003-04:00

On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 people died in the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on five hijacked airplanes. This was a horrible, shocking display of the hatred of one group of humans for another. And many thousands of family members of the victims continue to suffer under the memory of what happened.
On September 11, 2001, about 24,000 children died on our planet, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths and vaccine-preventable disease causing another 14% of those deaths.
In 2001 there were 6.13 billion persons in the world. The United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 arrived at an average of 1 person in 1,000 -- or 613,000 -- being raped each year. This would indicate that on September 11, 2001 around 1,700 persons were raped on the planet, most of them women.

I find research into unfair deaths and egregious injustice and personal crime statistics to be spiritually exhausting, so I need to stop now. Therefore I will not be providing handy little statistics re the number of children and women sold as sex slaves within their own countries or shipped in containers around the globe, the number of women beaten each day by their husbands, the number of people who did not have clean water to drink, the number of girls denied an education, the number of children and teens forced to make our rugs, sneakers and other commodities, the number of women who are genitally mutilated and/or forced to marry ...

There are all kinds of terrorism. Human beings can be very twisted in their actions towards others, and in their inactions as well. 9/11 was ONE day. Every single day on this planet the above statistics replay themselves, except for the first one covering 9/11. Every day 24,000 children die of preventable causes and every day 1.7 million people are raped.

If you are one of those who get all riled up by what Al-Qaeda did on 9/11, do you get equally fired up about all the other horrible fates imposed by humans upon their fellow man? Upon children? Did you take even one small action this year to help a victim? Give five bucks to a homeless person? Did you help serve even one meal in a shelter for battered women and their children? Did you even give a small scared child a loving smile?

A Jew Speaks Out Against Islamophobia

2010-09-07T09:32:00.000-04:00

Finally there is a line of thought getting put out there drawing the all-important parallels between the climate that led up to the Nazi Holocaust and the anti-Muslim screaming (and actions) going on right now. Anya Cordell speaks out in Tikkun Magazine in her article Lighting the Anti-Muslim Fuse:

When I hear the presumptions about all Muslims these days, I, a Jewish woman, silently substitute “all Jews” and then I know how terrifying and incendiary this language is, because we’ve already seen how these scenes play out, in all too horrific reality. Will those who are screaming the stereotypes the loudest take responsibility when people accept their cues and assume they have license from society to target innocent Muslims in hate-crimes, or worse?

Mandatory Clusterfuck Analysis

2010-09-07T08:13:00.001-04:00

Nobody breaks it down like James Howard Kunstler.

The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury. The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs, viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.
One of these characters, Ms. Christina Romer, at a luncheon celebrating her departure as chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (i.e. readers of spilled goat innards) even blurted out that she had no idea what's been going on in banking and business and how come America can't be more like it was in 1999. Don't cry for Christina. A cushy chair awaits her at the Hogwarts Berkeley outpost where she can repose in a trance of unknowing until California slides into its own tar pit of default and disintegration....

Opposition to the Synagogue Mosque

2010-09-06T05:47:00.001-04:00

Brandeis Professor Jonathan D. Sarna draws the same comparison that has been on my mind between the opposition to the Cordoba Center at 51 Park Place and the shameful history of synagogues being banned in our country despite the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Mayor Bloomberg likely had some of this history in mind when he asked “should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?” In distancing himself from Peter Stuyvesant and the many others who have defined American religious liberty in narrowly restrictive terms, he reminds us that if today’s target is the mosque, yesterday’s was most assuredly the synagogue.

Even in the original 13 purportedly freedom-loving states, "religious freedom" was interpreted to apply only to Christian denominations, with Connecticut maintaining its ban on Jewish places of worship as late as 1856.

Why is the weekly Jewish Forward, a publication of relatively minor reach in this country, the only place I have noticed the parallel drawn?

Quote of the Day: Matt Taibi on Tea Party primary wins

2010-08-31T06:07:00.000-04:00

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com: "Everyone involved with politics understands the current dynamic. It’s not hard to grasp. You take very tough economic times, add them to a heavy dose of political opportunism, and multiply both by the aggravating factor of a nihilistic commercial media, and what you get is ethnic scapegoating on a massive scale."

I think he left out one important ingredient here. The resigned ignorance of the general population.

Islamophobes Butt Out of NYC's Business

2010-08-29T04:17:00.002-04:00

I actually feel like throwing up. I cannot add a comment about this pastor's opinions and hateful behavior as leader of a spiritual community, I'll just let his actions speak for him. I am so sad. That is my reaction on a personal level.

But let's look at this from a legal standpoint. After all, Law is what sets civilized countries apart from barbaric or totalitarian states, right?

I'm tired of the debate with regard to Park51 centering on the Constitution. Don't get me wrong, I love the Constitution. But people who do not live here have adopted this question of the Park51 community center and made it into a national issue to be scrutinized somehow in the light of Constituional Law.

Well let me help you all out with a *fact*. The Constitution has absolutely no governance over activities in a building in New York City. The only applicable laws would be New York City zoning code. And Park51 is not in violation of anything in New York City zoning code. Therefore ... THERE IS NO LEGAL BASIS FOR PROHIBITING THE PARK51 COMMUNITY CENTER FROM BEING DEVELOPED. Period! End of story! Shut up already!

What's really getting to me is that people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away from Ground Zero, people who have no idea of what works and does not work in New York City, people who would likely refuse to ride the subways here for fear of the density, diversity, creativity, and especially of the racial and ethnic composition of New Yorkers, people who actually couldn't give a flying fadoodle about New York City and think that it is an evil town full of sinners and criminals ... these same people are the ones opining loudly that "the Ground Zero Mosque" does not belong where it is planned and is "insensitive".

Islamophobes, Butt The Hell Out Of NYC's Business. Your opinion doesn't count for anything here. It might seem strange to you, but the closer the polled population lives to Ground Zero, the MORE people think the community center and mosque should just move forward as planned.

This is our home, 9/11 and the aftermath is something we went through first-hand while you watched your TV commentators, and you just have no clue that what makes NYC great and what keeps us all getting along here is that we live and shop and commute and work and pray-or-don't and send our kids to school right alongside of each other here. All types of us, all colors, all economic classes, all countries of origin, all races, all religions.

Hero for today: Cadet Katherine A. Miller

2010-08-15T11:01:00.001-04:00

Katherine A. Miller is leaving West Point to attend Yale University because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, a discriminatory policy affecting LGBT people. "I can't be closeted anymore. I need to be open with myself and open with others about who I am."

She was in the top 1% of her class at West Point. DADT has resulted in the discharge of 13,500 service members, and now the discriminatory policy is causing young people in whom the military has invested to leave before doing service.

Wake up, America.
(Facebook friends click through to the original to view the vid)

Obama Signs Act To Empower Native Americans to Fight Rape : Ms Magazine Blog

2010-08-15T10:57:00.000-04:00

Obama Signs Act To Empower Native Americans to Fight Rape : Ms Magazine Blog

scribi liberati *

2010-08-15T10:48:00.002-04:00

Author Ray Connolly explains how to "do the Dickens" in the age of electronic self-publication and syndication.

Why wait for a publisher in an era when an advance can only be obtained for a piece of work considered a "sure thing" by persons who fear taking any risk? Connolly's economic business model is to give away a whole bunch of chapters, published one at a time, for free. Then to read the ending one pays (less than the cost of a paperback) to download the whole book. Then the free chapters come down and the book moves to Amazon's product list.

I hope this works. It sure is a strong impetus to "just write" without worrying about the submission/rejection cycles, editors who might impose unwanted revisions, recouping an advance, and so on. Therefore authors are liberated to simply create and to bring their work directly to market, much as musicians (and not just indie bands anymore) can do by releasing free mp3's.

Publishing houses beware. Adapt or die.

* never did take Latin, is this correct?

Quote of the day: Against DADT discharges

2010-08-12T11:18:00.000-04:00

Why and how the hell do we end up firing our best and brightest when we’re fighting in two wars? If Secretary Donley does not step in, this nation will lose a service member worth $25 million in training whose skill sets are desperately needed today.

-- Aubrey Sarvis (in washpost, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, commenting on the case of Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach who filed for a restraining order barring his discharge from the Air Force on DADT grounds.

Cases like this one, though, do have their value. To those who believe a gay man cannot be manly enough to serve with valor, Lt. Col Fehrenbach's 90 flight missions in three conflict zones defy that particular myth. And for those who believe that any gay person in a shower is obsessed with homosexual desires and will start playing games with soap, towels and strap-ons ... GUESS WHAT, you have been showering with gay comrades all along, you just didn't know it!

Journalist of the Day: Robert Barnes

2010-07-26T10:01:00.000-04:00

Even before I have read the article, this award is for the first sentence of As Stevens retires from court, one final duel with Scalia:

It is fitting that the last duel between the old ink-slingers at the Marble Palace was over guns.

Interlude: Bjork and PJ Get It On

2010-07-24T23:48:00.003-04:00

Thanks to FB friend Amy for turning me on to this... it instantly became my fave version of this tune, beating out the Stones, Devo, certainly trumping Britney, and even the love of my life Otis Redding. Sorry Otis, this version has your guts but adds The Tension Of Getting No Satisfaction.

Single-Payer was the only decent idea

2010-07-18T11:44:00.002-04:00

With all due respect to my friends who have urged me to relax my objections to the upcoming changes in health insurance "because we need to change things, and this is a start," ... the new plan sucks.

There is no incentive whatsoever for the insurers to reduce premium costs by any means other than minimizing the bang for the buck. So unless you can afford the high deductible and co-payments that will be assessed if you leave your insurance network, the list of covered doctors and hospitals is very likely to be reduced. Meaning:

you may have to leave a doctor you have been seeing for some time and whom you trust.
you might be in trouble if you have a medical emergency in a location where there are no nearby hospitals in your network and you are admitted to a bed for more than ER care.
the insurers have not been asked to absorb a single dollar's worth of impact in our attempt to create a more fair system.
the Conservatives are right. This bill sucks and should be repealed. LET'S START OVER indeed.

Of course, Conservatives would rather see a more free-market idea. I would rather see the health-insurance industry eviscerated and destroyed.

Let the Market Regulate Itself, Except When We Want To Impose Our Morals on The Rest of You?

2010-07-15T08:13:00.000-04:00

Over the years we've all seen examples of Conservatives opposing industry regulation. The industry should be self-policing. The government should not be spending our money to inspect meat, or children's toys. If a company makes defective products, consumers will not purchase from them, so the problem will just take care of itself.

I would love to hear a Right-winger explain to me why the same market forces should not be allowed to regulate media content. Why moral standards of some of us must be imposed on all of us. Why it is OK to show someone getting shot to death, but not to show people making love, on television. These are the same people who whine about Government getting too deeply into our personal lives and choices. About "the nanny state."

I'm glad to see the FCC is finally reevaluating the arbitrary and unAmerican "decency" rules that control our media content. I hope they end up throwing all such imposed rules out the window for good.

If you don't like it, don't watch it. If you think it will corrupt your children, exercise your responsibility as a parent, use the parental controls available on your cable box and/or stay on top of what shows your kids are consuming.

Quote and Hero for Today: Rabbi Arik Ascherman

2010-07-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

In the type of wonderful portrayal of people and places that Nick Kristoff knocks out "on the regular", he quotes Rabbi Ascherman who heads up the Israeli organization Rabbis for Human Rights:

In the long run, we’re going to live here together, he says, “or we’re going to die here together.

Ascherman himself has served as a human shield between West-bank settlers or Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.

This is the first combo Hero and Quote for Today post, Rabbi Ascherman is a real mensch. A deep bow to Kristoff as well for making his readers better people, not just better educated, by reporting to us so many great stories of human strength and spiritual beauty.

Today's Hero: Jim Keady, obscure goalie, real mensch

2010-07-04T08:29:00.000-04:00

LA Times:

For years, the former professional goalie has waged a one-man campaign to highlight Nike's labor practices, complaining that the company pays Indonesian workers low wages to stitch together the uniforms that have made the company the world's most successful sports garment manufacturer.

Sitting at an outdoor coffeehouse here, Keady produced several Nike jerseys in Cup team colors. "These jerseys are real wealth you can touch," he said. "They're making Nike and the players rich while the workers who make them continue to grind out lives of abject poverty."

Keady's campaign goes back to 1997 when, as a soccer coach for St. John's University in New York, he questioned the school's plans to sign a $3.5-million endorsement deal with Nike.

The devout Catholic insisted that the contract would be hypocritical for a Christian university. "I was told to drop the issue or get out," he said. "So I resigned in protest."

...In 2000, the towering, redheaded Keady moved to Indonesia and lived on the same salary as a Nike worker, which at the time was about $1.25 a day, staying in a 9-by-9-foot home in a community where 10 families share bathroom and kitchen facilities.

Interlude: cinder blocks and slide guitar

2010-06-19T00:10:00.000-04:00

Of all the world's music, and I love (almost) all of it, I love the South African I'm-gonna-act-happy-in-your-face defiant love, and the rhythmic mash-up of it, and the melodic lilt of it. This woman in her 5th-hand clothes and her hard-tack life, just made my Western day.

Today's Hero: Hamis Ngomera

2010-06-18T23:38:00.000-04:00

News is spreading about recent murderous attacks on albinos in Tanzania because of the price fetched by their body parts:

According to the Albino Association of Tanzania, the price for a complete set of albino body parts – comprising limbs, genitals, ears, tongue, hair and blood – has gone up from 75,000 US dollars to 200,000 US dollars.

Hamis Ngomera is a chapter chairman of the Albino Association of Tanzania and a Red Cross volunteer.
He travels to and through communities helping albino victims of violence and hoping to quench the superstitious beliefs that fuel this awful trade.

Hamis is himself albino.

Every Time ... that you purchase body soap -- or toothpaste, or shampoo!!

2010-06-18T13:44:00.002-04:00

Every time you choose a product for your shower or bath or aprés-bain, consider whether it contains petroleum-derived ingredients (such as "mineral" oil, paraffin, petrolatum), and whether it is contained in a plastic jar or tube (also a product of the oil industry). Consider that liquid products such as "body wash" cost much more in carbon fuel emissions to ship, because of the weight of the water that is included, than do solid or powdered dry products.

In my quest to consume as few plastics as possible, in (of all places) my local Rite Aid drug store, I recently made a very happy discovery in "South of France" French-milled bar soap. (They also make glycerine soaps, and I will try one soon.) The soap is packaged in unprinted recyclable cardboard, and is olive oil and plant-derived glycerin based. No animal testing involved. The brand was almost sold out (not surprising at four bucks and change for two bars) so between the two scents left on the shelves I chose Lavender.

When I unwrapped the soap I remembered a hint about soap products that was taught to me by a facialist many years ago. Soaps have an alkline pH factor -- some stronger and some more neutral. To test whether the alkalinity of a soap is tolerable to your skin, give it a little lick -- if it "bites" it is too alkaline.

My South of France lavendar soap has NO bite. It is a lovely, gentle cleanser. So I decided to try it as toothpaste. And shampoo. It works great as a tooth and hair cleanser as well as a body and face wash. Just rub your toothbrush on the bar, or rub the bar itself on your wet hair (then splash on a little more water and lather up).

"South of France" soap is made not in France but in Greensboro, North Carolina. Check out their product line, but Every Time consider whether you really need to buy any of the stuff that comes in plastic bottles made from evil oil.

Follow-up on December 8, 2011:

Another great brand, though twice as expensive, is Dr. Bronner's bar soaps in great natural scents. The "plus" of Dr. Bronner's is that it is (1) organic and (2) most ingredients are Fair Trade.

Cornell Quotes Code and Cuts Clits

2010-06-17T15:34:00.004-04:00

If you visit Cornell University Law School's web site today you can read U.S. Code Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 7, § 116 which says:

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), whoever knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both

The exclusions in subsection (b) number only two: necessary to the health of that other person, or for medical purposes in connection with labor or birth.

If you now cruise over to The Bioethics Forum, you will learn that pediatric urologist Dix Poppas is operating on little girls, and I mean little girls, whose clitorises are deemed to be too large -- by surgically removing a portion of the shaft and reattaching the glans. Then to prove that the young beneficiaries of his "medical care" still have normal nerve response, in follow-up exams a vibrator is applied to the clitoris of patients as young as six years old while they are conscious. Where is this taking place? Cornell!

In my time I have met two or three men whose penises were too large. I mean, really too large. Would anyone contemplate treating little boys by removing a section of their penile shaft at age 6 or 8 or 10? Especially since a large clit hardly interferes with a female's enjoyment, whereas a too-large penis, as explained to me by the bearers of these members, does interfere with a guy's?

Kudos to Profs. Dreger and Feder for bringing this to light, not just on this Hastings Center-hosted blog but Dreger mainstreamed it as well and it's already all over the b'sphere.

Quote of the Day: Emman Mbong, Nigerian Official, re the Gulf Gusher

2010-06-17T10:50:00.002-04:00

"We’re sorry for them, but it’s what’s been happening to us for 50 years."

I Guess She Is Not Happy About Being Raped and Plundered

2010-06-16T07:42:00.000-04:00

Tears of Mother Earth Illusion | Mighty Optical Illusions

The Fury of Jilted Citizens

2010-06-15T05:50:00.002-04:00

Philosophy professor J.M. Bernstein breaks down for us what he identifies as being the root cause of virulent Tea Party anger. He explores the underlying belief -- a prevalent myth in our culture of minimized, granular social units -- in the notion that the Individual is autonomous and owes nothing to our collective existence.

Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.

Bernstein makes a strong analogy between Tea Party anger and that of jilted lovers, drawing on Hegel's philosophy that:

... all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing.

This is the first piece I've come across that seems paint a valid Big Picture. The angry jilted lovers are denying the interconnectedness that actually defines us and validates us as a society. It's worth a good, slow read.

Interlude: Playing. Life. Change. Ah, AfReeCahhh

2010-06-15T05:28:00.000-04:00

"The Playing For Change Foundation is building a new music school in the Village of Kirina, Mali. Kirina is a village of musicians, some of whom can trace their musical ancestry back over 75 generations! In this very special episode West African music legend Baaba Maal and friends perform for the village elders in honor of the new "Playing For Life" music school that is just beginning construction."

Comment of the Day: assessment of the nationalism of our species

2010-06-12T08:23:00.002-04:00

It's sad that today there are still people running their lives (and ruining others) according to primitive fairy tales.

As a species we are dumber than dirt.

by "Dom" re the concept of a "Greater Israel" that incorporates the "God-given" Samaria and Judea.

Idea of the Day: from America Speaks Out

2010-05-27T18:54:00.000-04:00

Dana Milbanks has written up the GOP's lame new effort at providing a speak-out platform. Apparently they are hoping the common muck might help them figure out what the hell their party is supposed to stand for these days. Milbanks chooses a few funny samplers, but the actual site is even better. Democrats (or, at least, anti-Republicans) are out in legion posting such stuff as ...

The Republicans need to get as far away from Socialism as possible. Therefor, they need to shed associations with one of the most socialist figures in our country: Jesus Christ! Yes, this man took from the rich and gave to the poor. He aided people who were in dire needs, instead of letting private enterprises do it. This man is Pure Evil and we will not tolerate the association of Republicans and Jesus Christ! Republicans may want to burn an effegy on a cross to send a signal to all of us American-loving, conservative voters of how they are now with us instead of against us!

Completely Forgettable London 2012 Logo

2010-05-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

I am not a graphic designer, not even a good amateur designer, but maybe I serve as a valid critic here because my eyeballs are Average Josephines that like or dislike a visual element the same as any other member of the common muck.

The London 2012 Olympics, to my eyes, is horrible. A series of disjointed shapes that do not, for me, ring a bell. What the hell are they supposed to be? Is this a map of the fairgrounds? A representation of the continents? Not only do I not "get it", but it does not even make a lasting impression on the brain, it is too complex. Too many shapes, with edges too serrated to leave an imprint. Show someone the logo for 10 seconds. Wait a few days and show it to them again -- just the shapes with the words removed this time. I'd bet that person would not be able to tell you what they're looking at.

Besides. It's just FUGLY:

A Spark of Hope

2010-05-19T07:22:00.003-04:00

I don't know that I could survive if I did not encounter the occasional news story that re-inspires hope that the human race has merit and can join together to reinvent our world.

Worldpress.org posted a piece, A Palestinian Village that Started a Movement, that started my day off right:

A new feature documentary film Budrus, produced by the Washington, DC and Jerusalem-based organization Just Vision, documents nonviolent Israeli and Palestinian civilian efforts to resolve the conflict. It tells the story of Budrus, the village where this movement was born....

The movement aims to stage nonviolent protests to change the route of the separation wall off of Palestinian-owned lands....

The film captures images of Palestinians weeping over lost olive trees, Israeli border police struggling over whether to use violence against Israeli peace activists, and Palestinian youth being chastised because their rock throwing at Israeli soldiers threatens to turn a peaceful movement into a violent confrontation.

Some of the most moving scenes show Palestinian women jumping away from bulldozers and a female Israeli soldier establishing a rapport with Palestinian women in Budrus. While this film captures the story of this village in particular, its larger goal is to show that change can be accomplished in the Middle East through peaceful means."

Just Vision has posted a trailer:

I will try to "stay tuned" and will post when the movie becomes available in theaters or online.

UPDATE 2010-05-19 08:02 -0400 --

Budrus was shown on Apr 28 at the Tribeca Film Festival (an event I swear to myself each year I will attend "next year" ... I'm such a stick in the mud!). I hope it returns to New York soon...

There is an official Budrus site that lists screenings here.

What He Said

2010-05-17T19:35:00.000-04:00

My Country, Tis of Me - Magazine - The Atlantic ... Michael Kinsley's standout passage:

... the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

This kind of talk is doubly self-indulgent. First, it’s just not true. Second, it’s obviously untrue. The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies.

Tweet of the Day: Adobe p(r)opoganda

2010-05-15T05:12:00.000-04:00

adamwilcox: "Dear Adobe, when the name of your 'open' product contains two uses of ® then it isn't open."

Short-Sighted in 3D

2010-05-14T18:36:00.002-04:00

Washington Post reports in James Cameron: 3-D will become standard format:

"Avatar" director James Cameron said Thursday that 3-D will replace 2-D as the standard, mainstream format for film, television and online content in less than 25 years.

Viewers will soon not only enjoy films in 3-D theaters but all forms of entertainment, including sports and music shows on TVs and laptops, Cameron said at a technology forum in Seoul.

I personally actually prefer 2-D viewing, because for me the abstraction of human experience into the 2-D format transports me in such a way that I can "lose myself" in what's happening on the screen (on a good day, with a good flick). 3-D does not allow me to lose myself; instead it puts me into the picture.

Take that for whatever it's worth (or not), since I also love B&W movies, and to this day I still miss the hiss and pop of a needle on vinyl and the acoustic sound of musicians all sitting in one recording studio playing together in a room at the same time.

However, looking at the idea of a mass market for 3-D viewing as a practical matter, I just don't see this happening ... because of the glasses that one must wear to watch a 3-D movie or video. And for those who already wear glasses, the glasses-over-the-glasses.

Sorry, I just cannot see that millions of us would be keeping multiple pairs of 3D glasses in a home entertainment center drawer, passing them out to our guest, all of us sitting around in silly specs to watch every TV show or movie we rent.

I'll post back on this in 25 years :-)

Quote of the Day: Obama’s Remarks on Oil Spill Response

2010-05-14T18:27:00.000-04:00

Text - Obama’s Remarks on Oil Spill Response - NYTimes.com:

Let me also say, by the way, a word here about BP and the other companies involved in this mess. I know BP has committed to pay for the response effort, and we will hold them to their obligation. I have to say, though, I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't.

Donor Strike: Rich Progressives Pledge To Withhold Cash

2010-05-12T09:05:00.001-04:00

So the Stinkin' Rich may save the American political system from special interests. The irony of it all.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost