Cobb

New Meme: BDS Beatdown

Now that I'm thinking of FISA and all that, I would like to introduce a new meme, which is called 'BDS Beatdown'. The very idea of Obama supporting the Bush FISA position which is sending meathead loudmouths like Keith Olbermann into conniptions is just making me giddy. Not for Obama's sake, of course, but to lord over the mindless paranoia that signified BDS all these many years and months. So I will hope something of a cascade occurs as I remind people (slowly), of all the gibberish they were spewing because of their irrational hatred of the Republican president.

Let's start first with this conversation.

OK so let's hear it. Who has GWBush been spying on all these years with his warrantless wiretaps? Which of his political enemies have been destroyed? What political dissent has he squashed? In other words, where's the beef?

The New Triangulation

I always figured that Obama would roll towards the center, but I didn't think he'd roll so dramatically or easily. I'm not sure what to make of the efforts he seems to be making to make policy which is contrary to his rhetoric and stance, other than to suggest it's more political shenanigans that put his integrity into question. In other words, maybe I bought into the idea that Obama had integrity and it turns out that too was an illusion. The following two Changes follow on the heels of dissing Wesley Clark.

1. Obama rolls over on FISA and warrantless wiretaps.
2. Obama takes up the cudgels of faith-based initiatives.

In the first place, I have had a very difficult time, when I was tracking it, putting any credibility into the majority of charges made against GW. I'm astounded to hear it still said that he was eavesdropping to punish political enemies, John C. Dvorak. Basically there was no illegality warranting a.. well, warrant, and the Congress made all the noise they possibly could over AG Gonzales but had NO LEGAL CASE. Basically all the fudging that Bush was doing in prosecution of terror suspects, not political enemies, could simply be overlooked if he had the benefit of the doubt in Congress. Obama must now, in his flip-flop be very nervily calculating that he would have such a benefit. After all, Bush won time after time when it really came down to it. So now that Obama has the nomination, he can use the cover for speaking the truth for once - FISA envelope pushing is actually about fighting  the GWOT. All he has to do now is paper over the bullshit partisan lies of his past.

In the second place, well, who cares? Faith-based initiatives are empty promises coming or going. Any church that does something for the tax incentive isn't worth speaking of, much less campaigning on. This is fluff. Nice fluff that was nice for W and might turn out to be nice for Barry. The point is that little Barry is growing up right before our eyes. Now that he's gotten the Democratic nomination he seems ready put childish things aside, like the entirety of his campaign thus far.

What a punk.

A Couple Political Thoughts

John McCain doesn't have any drama. Obama is throwing people under the bus left and right. Now it's Wesley Clark that Obama is disowning. Is there anybody besides Gov. Richardson that Obama can stand up with and say, we agree on just about everything? At this point in his campaign, we should see Obama's ability to lead the party (sorta) in evidence, but I think to the contrary he is in a rather odd position.

The way I see it is that Obama's campaign has single-handedly crippled everything about the Clintonian triangulation if not dealt it a death blow. MoveOn, the organization started in Bill Clinton's defense has abandoned him. That may not be here or there for real insiders, but it's definitely real. I think Bill Clinton must be looking at Obama like OJ looked at Ron Goldman, driving his wife around in his new car. The Clintons don't run the party any longer, which wouldn't be such a bad idea if somebody else could. But I think the whole Democatic deck was in their hands and now they're playing 52 card pickup. Who are the heavyweights who have got Obama's back?

With regard to military service, Obama shouldn't even go there. That's just crazy. Kerry got his face smeared all over the pillow on that one. McCain has been on the Armed Services Committee and has 21 years in the service. As for the POW thing, well I look at it this way, and comparing it to Kerry's four months of active combat duty. Four months in Vietnam is plenty to make you broke, crippled and crazy. McCain survived all that plus prison. From a black political perspective you cannot ignore the fact that a lot of African Americans hold Mandela, King and X in high esteem because their time behind bars didn't break them, but made them stronger. McCain didn't come out of Vietnam broken, crippled or crazy, but strong. So he's faced down the demons - there is a massive and undeniable character issue plus on McCain's side. Period. Does that make him a better leader? No. Does it make him a better man? No doubt.

Beyond that, it seems to me that there's a simple binary at work here. Either you trust or you don't trust military commanding officers. That is something that must be calculated independent of the politics of war and peace. It has been my experience that independent of the politics of war and peace, middle aged, middle class black men tend to recognize and respect COs, or they ball them up into the whole military-industrial complex tar baby. The former group always includes ex-military and those I call working men, the latter falls into a category probably best summarized by The Police: "poets, priests and politicians", of which the black community has more than a fair share.  From an empowerment perspective, I always make a point to say to my leftist and progressive friends, that military service for blackfolks means instant middle class, and is a damned sight better than living in Compton, where the cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down. The math has been done, even in wartime, it's safer to be a soldier, airman, marine or sailor, than to live in the Fifth Ward of Houston. In the service, there's never any question who has got your back, on the streets of Killadelphia, the answer is not forthcoming.

I wouldn't bother to suggest that black politics needs more than an attitude adjustment on the military service question. All they need do is look to those members in their families with honorable discharges and ask them who handles their business. That's what the presidency is all about, handling business, hopefully without drama. Sounds like McCain to me.

Still, you need more than competence to run the office, you need to win a mandate from the people. It seems to me that fly Obama is more likely to win that popular mandate than boring McCain. I still think that Obama's overexposure and constant "That's not the (fill in the blank) I knew" is an inescapable negative. But I also don't see, absent another Katrina-level media storm, that he will ever get under the press radar long enough for people to come back to him fresh. I intend to come back to the both of them fresh, as soon as we can get some debates scheduled. But this back and forth is driven by media and pundits, not by the policy cred of the candidates.

If I had my druthers, I would (as McCain, or a real journalist), sit down Obama for two hours and go agency by agency. What is wrong with the Department of Agriculture and why would the Obama Administration change it (for America). How, exactly? Most specifically, I want to hear Obama say on record what he would do with the staffing levels of the TSA. I dunno, that's just something I'd want to hear him stick to - say a 20% reduction in force, and say that as President he doesn't see a domestic terror threat and he would actually fire people and save money. The way I think of Obama, I don't envision him saying 'You're fired!' to Federal employees. Rather, you're redeployed or 'we're changing priorities and reorganizing'. It's easy to dismiss the Rev Wrights of the world (not that he did with alacrity), but it's a horse of a different color to layoff a division. Where does Obama show strength in cost-cutting ability? Where's that executive experience?

Obviously, McCain as a commander has had life and death decisions to make over people under his command. Unless of course he was some sort of desk jockey REMF. But I expect that kind of reputation would have emerged by now. And so my prediction is that McCain is not swift-boatable, and when it comes to executive decision-making, the battle is his to win as soon as the service issue comes up. There are rhetorical ways of re-arranging the battlefield so as to avoid that kind of head to head comparison, and my money says Obama will attempt valiantly to do so. Man to man, I don't think he can win.

So here's my other advice to McCain. Get in Obama's face about responsibility for bad decisions that cost people jobs and lives. Ask him point blank, when did he make a life or death decision that was wrong? Leave GWBush out of this, I'm talking about you. Barack Hussein Obama. When did you decide to cut funding and cost 10,000 people their jobs? How did you own up to that? I don't think you can handle the pressure. Hell you can't even shut Bill Clinton up. Well, nobody can do that.

A Nigerian Cab Ride

Last night I had a fairly interesting discussion with my Nigerian cabbie. Summary, we talked about the difference between blacks in LA and those in Atlanta and general differences between the cities. He didn't quite understand, I think, when I told him about the difference in classes and how blacks in Atlanta are a bit more class conscious than out here. It probably didn't square with the fact that he and I agree that LA is a lot less racist town.

The last thing we talked about was how old I was, and I told him that I had a very strong family. He asked if I looked more like my mother or my father. I told him that I actually look a lot more like my grandfather who died at the age of 87. He seemed to be very impressed that I had a good relationship with my grandfather while he was alive.

This evening I just happened to be cruising the Dangerpedia and discovered that the average life expectancy in Nigeria is 47. Aha.

I Love The Discovery Channel

And I really dig this commercial.

(Not) Your Daddy's Hiphop

I just had a strange flash idea, which is like most of mine.. a scene, a vignette that implicates a host of ideas that I attempt to flesh out in text here on the primary blog.

The image is of an old Philco radio, you know the old cathedral style, and a white gloved hand from outside the frame reaches out to turn it on. The radio screeches for a minute and then the hand turns the tuner. The stations warble in and out of tune and then it settles on a beat. It's Rakim's "You Got Soul". The camera pulls back and the owner of the gloved hand is a 70 year old Jimi Izrael reclining in an old wingback chair. He says, "Now that's hiphop!".

It's the future and nobody knows what we know about that thing that made us emotionally detached from the everything that was Bootsy Collins, George Clinton and Cameo. It was hiphop, conceived in rebellion and dedicated to the proposition that all beats are not created equal, and dammit we need more of the right kind. (And Janet screams, Gimme a beat!). Those were the beats that made even Yes kick ass. I gotta bite, appropos:

I can feel no sense of measure
No illusions as we take
Refuge in young man's pleasure
Breaking down the dreams we made
Real

Is it real son? Is it really real? Hard to say what level of reality hiphop needs to be. It's always been my way out. Just take it light. The heavy burden is on the man who wants to make hiphop more than something with a good beat that you can dance to. And I tell you true, I feel for the men and women who assume the position of the hiphop Sysiphus, but I ain't rolling that boulder. It's like a snowball that keeps on picking up more caca every trip down the slope. Now its a Katamari hairball of truly bizarre dimensions. 

So I envision a legion of old men who play dodgeball with hiphop criticism. For every "what about..?", there's a "Not real hiphop" reply. Hiphop keeps growing, and the percentage that old men can stomach gets smaller. We get to the point at which we devolve into debates about whether or not any real hiphop was ever issued on anything but vinyl, let alone iTunes and the distributions of the future mesh. That doesn't stop a bunch of screaming teens on some MTV show calling Flo Rida's "Ayer" an 'instant classic'.

I must confess I have shrinking heartspace for music. I'm giving it up for food, tell you the truth. I appreciate the man who can cut, scratch, transform with finesse (and all that mess), but the man who can cook a pot of gumbo gets invited to my house first.

I have lived to see the elevator music station in my home town (KBIG) get jiggy. Adult contemporary. Heh!

Step

Alpha Phi Alpha
Originally uploaded by cecily7

I found this interesting photo cruising Flickr this evening. I uploaded a few old pictures of my frat and was curious to see what else was up there. This one's interesting on a number of levels. It's an Obama rally in Austin TX from last Feb.

The Other Plasma Burn

Cringley notes that we are on the verge of commercialization of plasma furnaces that can do 100 tons a day. I do like this idea very much:

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Moreover there are other downstream apps for byproducts. Plasma destroys most molecules down to their elemental components except for the heaviest elements which become molten slag. However..

If you were to blow compressed air through a stream of this molten material, you'd end up with rock wool. Rock wool has the appearance of gray cotton candy. It''s light and wispy, and according to Dr. Circeo, it has the potential to revolutionize the plasma waste treatment industry. Rock wool is a very efficient insulation material, twice as effective as fiberglass. It's also lighter than water, but very absorbent. Because of this, it could potentially be used to help contain and clean oil spills in the ocean. Cleanup crews could spread rock wool over and around an oil spill. The rock wool would float on the water while soaking up the oil, making collection a relatively easy process. Hydroponic growing systems can also use rock wool -- farmers can plant seeds in slabs or blocks of it.

Currently rock wool is produced by mining rocks, melting them down and then streaming the molten material onto spinning machines. The spinning machines fling strands of molten material in the air. Today, the price of rock wool is over a dollar a pound. Since rock wool would be a byproduct of the plasma gasification process, it could be sold for as little as 10 cents a pound. The price of insulation would decrease, efficiencies in energy-saving techniques would increase and plasma gasification plants would have another substantial source of income apart from selling electricity back to the grid.

Not bad.

Supermom Cranks It Up A Notch

This morning I am once again in wonderful Cleveland thanks to the safe, but enervating experience of air travel. I took a redeye which was two hours late. But I'm not the only one who is haggard. The Spousal Unit has completed a marathon of momhood, successfully. Again.

The Unit is a supermom. Not just a responsible parent, not just a soccer mom, but one of those backbones of the community. Anybody who watches the TV show 'The Unit' knows Regina Taylor plays Molly Blane who is the wife of Dennis Haysbert's character. That's what kind of woman my wife is, and for the record of those who say there are no strong black women on television - there are at 47 episodes which make all the difference. This time, my Unit got my two daughters through The Wizard of Oz.

Not that I really know, but there must be in Los Angeles, two dozen theatre companies for little kids to cut their dramatic teeth. My brother Deet and his wife are somewhat connected out Pasadena way with such things and have been involved with various professional and amateur productions over the years. This time we were invited to join a production of the Wizard of Oz which culminated in four 2 1/2 hour productions over the weekend. I've seen school plays and talent shows, but this was an extraordinary deal with a live orchestra performed at Pasadena City College. The baby Bowens made a strong representation all around with their cousins, Deet's kids. So we had four in the cast all with multiple roles in two of the casts including the Tin Man.

The Unit, for her part, did extra volunteer work and the kind of gap-filling that makes all the difference in the end. In addition to getting the kids out to rehearsals every week for 12 weeks or so, 80 miles round trip, she managed the whole food thing, as usual. See, the Unit is brilliant when it comes to feeding the masses. As a caterer, half-restaurant owner, and industrial food buyer and cafeteria manager, she's knows it all. It has made her invaluable to the PTA, the soccer league, the baseball teams, the family reunions, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the church, on God only knows how many occasions. People eat, always. She is there always. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars we've spent at Smart & Final waiting for a reimbursement from a fellow caterer or charitable organization. She's not a machine, but the results speak for themselves. She puts everybody else to shame, with her organizational skills and yet charms them to putty. She is clockwork, backbone, and the doer of deeds. She puts on the apron and all the right things happen.

A couple months ago I bought a replacement wedding ring. This one is Tungsten. It's not glamorous, but it's stronger than gold. That's how I think about my marriage. It's made of working metal, not bling. And my daughters know very well that they have a high standard to live up to. That chapter of organized drama is now officially over. We'll get the DVDs and I'll have some stills. The flowers will stand in vases for a while staying fresh as the memories. But the continuum of work that the Spousal Unit has assembled will long be felt, not only by our family but others as well. It's an extraordinary blessing to be married to a woman such as this.

Now if I can only get the airlines to recognize.

A Rant Against Journalism

I'm particularly angry at journalists these days. I think for the first time I am starting to really feel the kind of animosity that must energize certain bloggers. I am angry at journalists because they are leveraged by stupidity, and because they are particularly arrogant.

It's probably not fair that I listen to NPR only on the weekends when this is in evidence most clearly. There is nothing so indicative of the kind of thing that gets under my fingernails as the smarmy cocksure baloney that oozes from Wait Wait Dont Tell Me. But even more, I fell into a portion of a radio drama about the heroics, the heroics mind you, of the journalists breaking the Pentagon Papers story.

Journalists are this and rarely anything more. They are intermediaries who are mass-articulate who are paid to find people who are too busy actually producing work of intrinsic interest to be mass-articulate themselves. Mass-articulation may or may not be a skill. It seems to me that a halfway decent education would obviate the need for such proxies as the overwhelming majority of journalists are. But with any luck they'll all get disintermediated by a panoply of Google-able cloud-bots. If everyone had their own amanuensis and website, we wouldn't need journalists at all. Until that day we are stuck with their effluent. I am part of the transition. The 'sphere is part of the transition. God please let it be quick.

It is only under the influence of great storytelling that one recognizes how much of what passes for useful information is mindless dreck. I don't know what to do with my intolerance but rant today against journalists who haven't the cojones to establish certifications in their industry and yet complain about the information that wants to be free.

I continue to lament this problem of information theory. I am ready to throw up my hands. There is only a very narrow augmented path. The freedom of the press is constantly invoked and the role of the press is forgotten.

Wanted

Wanted is a poor movie. It's Fight Club for people who dig wrestling. It's Chuck meets Office Space meets The Bourne Identity, IQ adjusted for the Grand Theft Auto demographic.

I happen to be in that demographic and I'm not going to pretend at this moment that I'm any better than anybody else. After all I did fork over the dollars for this improbable almost campy rompy stumblebum of an action flick. The interesting thing about it is that now that I've experienced it, I feel like I want to slap a bitch up. I was composing gay poetry in my mind and channeling some woman hating uber-butch. That's the kind of emotional vibe I got. It's not so disturbing to me, I mean, I inherited some fairly mean street wisdom in my life, but I realized that I was listening to NPR before and after the show. The intellectual type of bitch-slapping I usually feel, and felt before the show, was supplanted after the movie by a kind of perverse rage. It was accentuated by some snippets of This American Life in which a drunk dude wants to stay drunk, and it startles the goodie two shoes liberal babe with the sociology degree. I practically wanted to do some damage to her earholes through the radio.

Then Larry Mantle comes on and insinuates more insinuations about how stupid our political and military leadership has been upon the release of a new report from the Pentagon that's bound to be all people talk about this coming week.

The protagonist of Wanted is a nobody who recognizes that his life has left him emasculated.  To give Wanted credit, the film doesn't blame society. I do, like Fight Club did, and I have my reasons, but it occurs to me in this reviewing that a Libertarian is someone who has figured out that they're too smart to care. It seems to be the most arrogant of all politics, because it has no real reason to ask to lead. I cannot tell the difference between Mugabe and Libertarians. The point is that I perceive two political classes of Americans who have no interest in what this kind of movie has to say, liberals and conservatives. But the theatre was packed. This kind of movie has this to say: we are nobodies but we all fantasize about taking control of our lives and fulfilling some kind of destiny and that destiny is fantastically violent because everybody around us are such killer assholes and everything is a lie.

There is no truth in Wanted. There is only ugly fate and convoluted destiny. Finding one's future and one's self out is an ugly business that only involves betrayal. It is a film without hope that only seeks purpose for a violent period. I am waiting to see how many gozillions it makes, and what popular following is to follow. I can tell you that I had to wait in line to see it, and I know I should have seen WallE instead.

But being a conservative and not minding my own uptight business, venturing out into the stinking stew of the masses for this bloody entertainment, I have come face to face with some part of my own pscyhe and of America's as well. And I think it leaves me a touch more anarchist than I want to be - given the conceit that I'm actually learning something from this experience. I am struck by the incredible arrogance of philosophically consistent liberals and conservatives who would dare to call this their nation where such a film can become a blockbuster. I don't know whether to be ashamed or to run and hide.

Distributed Biotech

Here is the relevant extract of the idea from Dyson's Utopia that I see happening sooner rather than later:

That's exactly what I had in mind. There are three items I cover in the new book. First, I didn't know Teledesic was going up, but I knew something like it was always within 10 years anyway. The second is solar energy, which is wonderfully world distributed. It's only a question of a factor of two to five between the cost of solar energy and the cost of oil. In the long run, oil will get more expensive and solar energy will take over. The third item is biotech, which is essential for using solar energy in crop plants designed to do all the industrial processes.

So you're not talking about solar electricity.

That's also part of the deal, but the more important thing is that you'll be able to make your gasoline locally. People will live in the villages and commute to work in the towns, and they'll produce gasoline on the local farms.

This is from biomass that you refine right there?

You don't even have to refine it. The plants produce it.

Isn't this a more complicated process?

True, we don't have the biotech yet. For that I'm talking maybe 50 years - when we really understand how DNA functions. However, there's no reason plants should be limited to 1 percent energy efficiency. We know photovoltaics can reach 10 percent quite easily. Plants are stuck at 1 percent because they use a particularly elegant process involving chlorophyll. But it's wasteful; it involves a long chain of chemical reactions. It's a historical relic that plants got stuck with. If you could design a plant from scratch, you'd probably use silicon films instead of chlorophyll to collect sunlight. Silicon is abundant, and you've simply got to have a plant that will process soil and extract silicon the same way that plants now process carbon dioxide into carbon.

By the way, this was from 1998, and the interviewer was none other than Stewart Brand latent of the Long Now.

End of the Cereal Aisle

Now is the end of the cereal aisle metaphor. I am a couple years late in following up on the work of Michael Pollan. I read 'The Botany of Desire' several years back and was stunned. Pollan talks about the thing we in the information business almost never talk about which is the supply chain of food. He has demystified that which we have been taking for granted and he has stirred up the self-evident controversy which is there. It goes a little something like this.

It turns out that som many farmers grow corn that corn has become so cheap that the ceral aisle is not a good way to judge the efficacy of the market. The processed in processed food is the corn and they are makeing corn into everything because there is too much. So the marketing of food has taken over what determines what we eat and it's not all good. The caepest food is not necesarily the best. Even our poor peopel are fat is because they're on their way to diabetes, not because this is necessarily a land of plenty. Our poor people don't grow cabbages in their own backyards any longer. They are just eating at MCDonalds and it's killing them. The Cheeze Whiz, the Twinkies, the fortified breakfast cereals are all cluprits. Why? Because they are not real food. The selection is there because it's false - it's like the selection of videos on MTV. It doesn't mean we have an excess of talent. In agribusiness ther are various inversions of commonsense economics associated with the markets of foodstuffs. Essentially demand is almost infinitely elastic. Everybody eats up to a point, no matter how expensive. Beyond that point we have to be force fed. So what if you have a crop that's so successful that there's more food than anyone could possibly eat? Thats what we have with corn in the US, and so our friends at Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland force feed us and cows both. It's not expensive oil that's killing us, it's cheap corn.

Cows are not supposed to eat corn, they are supposed to eat grass. But since we in the US have a whole lot of corn and corn is the cheapest way to stuff a steer full of calories, we feed them corn. Corn-fed beef is, simply stated, unnatural. The cows' have rumens, not ordinary stomachs like us. They are supposed to be eating a different kind of stuff because their metabolisms can process such stuffs. Like some people are lactose intolerant, cows are essentially corn intolerant. One result is all that methane you've been hearing about. Cow farts and belches are on the rise and contribute to greenhouse gasses. Fortunately, methane dissipates relatively quickly. Not so, cattle's heartburn. So 'ranchers' stuff them full of antacids. But while the cows rumens turn acidic, they become host to new strains of e Coli which thrive in acidic environments. So 'ranchers' stuff them full of antibiotics. But we're talking millions of head of cattle, and godzillions of bacteria, some of which will eventually become drug resistant. And guess what? Since we humans have naturally acidic stomachs these are the e Coli that can live in us too, and some of them are just deadly. Wonderful. There are technical workarounds to be sure but we're doing a lot of work here just to slaughter beef earlier in their lives. Nature pushes back.

That's the first quarter of the book and once again I am feeling rather stunned and informed. Pollan is on the T50 list and every one of his writings has the clarity and probity of the works of John McPhee. Pollan is the intellectual patron saint of smart eaters, and so I have to get through this disturbing work onto the next. I'll also be feeding it to the Spousal Unit for the good of all of us. What is most surprising in reading Pollan is how we normally smart folks can fall for some hokum because the level of retardation in general is so startlingly high. It's relatively easy to be provident, but danmed hard to be intelligently informed when it comes to our food supply chain. That's my aim. I think it could even swear me off Carl's Jr. That's saying a lot.

Pollan does me the favor of being biased and provocative, because it's very easy to say 'so what'. One's liberal knee (I have those occasionally) jerks to ask whether it is good or bad to eat American beef or corn. Well, there's not much influence you can have except over your own health and meal plan is there? If you monitor your own caloric intake or carbon footprint or sexist thoughts for the day, that's all well and good, but what effect will that have on society? Not bloody much - primarily because any change in popular taste only constitutes a half-ass populist movement. Anyone can change, any million can change. Change does not insure reform, it just funds alternative markets. You'd think 'organic' food is organic. The answer is Clintonesque. That depends upon what the definition of 'organic' is. You can be sure that if you have no idea what lecithin is, then you probably don't have a workable definition of organic. We've got scientific animism at work here, not to mention dueling narratives evoking semiotic myths. Sure, I'll endeavor to become a smart eater. It's not going to change Cargill.

Ever since Pollan piqued me with his story about opium, I've been thinking about red- and blackneck fantasies of off-grid hideouts and organic retirement. I'm coming back around to thinking about such matters again, especially this year since I've begun my gardening again. The Spousal Unit got a rose bush from me for Valentines Day 2008 and the first yellow roses bloomed this past week. They're almost thorny enough to resist the squirrels, but I guard them still. Moreover, in cross-pollination with the ideas of Venter, I am coming to believe that within my lifetime, some form of Dyson's Utopia may become available. That's the homerun. I will certainly revisit these ideas in the Critical Theory category as time rolls forward.

In the meantime, as a mark of American prosperity, the diversity of brands in the Cereal Aisle no longer counts. It is a false indicator of diversity and is hereby retired.
 

Why Bother Being Pissed?

Once again, I have been stranded. Tonight I am sleeping in Cleveland when I could have been sleeping in Atlanta when I should have been sleeping in LA. Why? Why ask why? I've got my Bhudda and money in the bank so this time I am enjoying and deserving the club level. At the airport.