Even before he took office, John Kasich declared that Ohio didn’t need none of that high-speed rail funding from the feds, no sirree. Florida’s Governor Rick Scott has been just as short-sighted on rail, so Kasich is in great company. Both of them made Keith Balmer’s list (at Alternet) of the 8 Worst Governors – no small feat in such a fiercely competitive field.
Shame, shame. Even Mad Men’s Pete Campbell – best known for his tight society connections and his loose ethics – sees the future of high-speed rail. Well, he does mix it with a big dollop of casual sexism.
Harry Crane: “America always makes the best investment.” We believed that, back in 1965. Silly us. We had such pie-in-the-sky ideas for the future. We believed there’d be picture phones someday, and look what came of … why, actually, we were right about that one! Too bad we’ve missed every boat (and train) since, when it comes to smarter energy policy.
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Better enjoy this clip (courtesy of Funny or Die) because it’s as close as we’re likely to come to a new episode before 2012. I got my Season 4 DVDs this week. (My attempt to record it went sour due to some unknown mix of tech failure and manipulation by the kiddos.) I am hoping to savor the new episodes, as opposed to gobbling them in an orgy of Jon Hamm gluttony. Guess which outcome is more likely.
Just to cleanse your mind of the the Jon Kasich reference, here’s a picture of Jon Hamm with magic powers to calm and arouse all at once! At least, it works for me.
I continue to be transfixed by the situation in Japan, where technology has shown its best and worst face in the past few days. “Best,” I say, because the terrible human losses would have been greater yet, had builders not prepared for violent earthquakes. There were certainly gaps in planning for the tsunami, in particular, but overall Japan’s construction technology saved untold lives – tens of thousands.
The nuclear plants partly had bad luck, but then again, the chain of power failures that’s now leading to overheated radioactive fuel rods was fairly predictable. I don’t know enough about the technology to give an explainer. Rachel Maddow continues to have good coverage. But essentially, you don’t have to be a nuclear engineer to know that highly radioactive spent fuel presents a problem for decades at a minimum, even under controlled circumstances. How many civilizations have survived for tens of thousands of years - long enough to keep ploutonium contained? And yes, some of the fuel rods (about 6%) at the Daiichi plant contain some plutonium.
This use for estrogen gained popularity about 50 years ago after researchers found it might limit the growth of girls who were much taller than their peers in adolescence. According to one estimate, up to 5,000 girls in the U.S. were treated with estrogen, and many more in Europe.
At that time, “women were basically supposed to get married and have children, and that would be harder if you were a very tall woman, everybody believed,” Christine Cosgrove, co-author of Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height, told Reuters Health.
“There were so many parents, mostly mothers probably, who just feared that their daughters’ lives would be ruined if they ended up being six feet tall, because they’d never have a husband and a family,” she said.
Some tall girls are still treated with estrogen today — more in Europe than in the United States — and estrogen is currently given to these girls in about the same dose that is in a birth control pill, Cosgrove said. In the past, it might have been given at 100 times that dose before doctors realized the potential dangers, she said.
[Cosgrove is co-author of Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height, speaking here to Reuters.]
Two very different scenarios – one a matter of life-and-death, the other “merely” a matter of life foregone through infertility. Yet both reflect the foolhardiness of humans when it comes to technology. I’m no Luddite (my laptop is a cyborg extension of my brain), but could we just cut it out with the human experimentation? Because that’s what nuclear plants are, at bottom, too – an uncontrolled experiment with far too many uncontrollable variables. Also, perhaps friend-of-the-blog Hydraargyrum will chime in on this: humanity will never win against CORROSION, which is basically what I understand to be happening at lightning speed in those uncooled fuel rods.
Can’t we humans please learn for once, and put an end to the techno-hubris?
The heat spell grinds on. The German Rail company now blames global warming for its massive breakdown of high-speed trains. They were built to a “Norm” (standard) of functioning that went all the way up to 32 C (90 F), so all must be well! In the early 90s, no one could imagine such high temps (although I experienced the mid-90s and beyond in those years). So everything and everyone followed the rules!
This is the sort of head-in-sand reasoning that also ensures you can’t buy a simple fan when the mercury rises. Germany never gets really hot. Therefore stores don’t carry fans. The few fans in stock sell out immediately. An email list I run for scholars in Berlin is bubbling with desperate queries on how to locate a fan without having to mail order it. My family and I own three, which seems positively immoral – as though we’re hoarders in wartime.
If it weren’t so darned uncomfortable, I’d feel gleeful about the U.S. not being the only country that struggles with being “reality based.”
By now, though, I’m begging for mercy. The city smells nastier by the day. The collection of municipal compost – so laudable under ordinary conditions – creates walls of stench that sucker-punch passers-by. Things die, and their remains grow ever more pungent. My sweet children stink unless washed thoroughly each day. As for myself? Be grateful this blog has no scratch-n-sniff function.
The heat wave is supposed to break today, with rain and thunderstorms and more rain. Otherwise, expect me to resemble this kitteh (from ICHC, as usual).
Scene 1: I spend most of the year freezing. I’m usually the first person to complain about air conditioning running too cold. I can hardly function in an office that’s cooled to 60 F, as our university consistently does to the Women’s and Gender Studies offices. I don’t think well when I’m cold, and (rather inconveniently), thinking is in my job description. We’ve taken to running space heaters when it gets really bad, since the university seems incapable of fixing its HVAC system.
At the same time, the university regularly sends out emails exhorting us to save energy.
I began my day in Porter Hall at 9 a.m., measuring a comfortable 72 degrees. I had class from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Clippinger measuring 83 degrees, and immediately following a different room in Clip from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. measuring 85 degrees. Thinking that the worst of my overly warm classes were over and that the last would surely be comfortable, I entered Bentley and climbed to the second floor to find a room that was 98 degrees.
As our professor teased that class would end if she passed out, and I watched the sweat of my neighbor form a puddle on our desk, I found that what little focus I had for history was quickly diminishing in the unbearable heat. I began to wonder instead how, even in light of necessary budget cuts, Ohio University could think that students could actively learn in such an uncomfortable environment. Having soaked through my shirt I found myself racing outside to “cool down” in the 80 degree weather outside after class (well cool down in the sense that at least there was moving air).
Yep, I was that professor in the 98-degree room. And no, I didn’t pass out, but my students weren’t the only ones who struggled to stay focused.
Scene 3: The temperature in Berlin is 99F, as I write this. No one has AC in their homes. Not even all movie theaters have it. Lots of people don’t even own fans, and in fact, many Germans believe that any moving air constitutes a draft. When the city gets this hot, the apartment houses stay cool for a day or two, but then the cement and stone start to heat up, and they retain the heat instead. We’ve been opening windows whenever it’s cooler outside, closing them when it’s not, pulling drapes, and running fans. It’s not enough to live with any comfort. Last night the low was in the upper ’70s. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in a sauna. Or not sleeping, more likely.
But I think we need to look at it is as a fail-safe mechanism and recognize that a lot of the health problems that we need A.C. to solve, it may have contributed to in the first place. We need to look at the conditions under which people die in heat waves, the harsh life conditions that they’re enduring more generally. That’s the real root of the problem.
No. It’s not just a matter of harsh life conditions, though poverty, old age, and isolation are huge risk factors for dying in a heat wave. There’s no mystery to it. But if there’s nowhere cool to escape, people will die. In Europe’s 2006 heat wave, at least 20 died in Germany and at least 40 in France, even though both are wealthy countries with excellent social welfare safety nets. These are preventable deaths.
Basically, our systems are poorly designed, with too much cooling delivered to lots of places, and none to others. My university offers some prime examples of this. Here’s another. My sister- and brother-in-law traveled from Frankfurt to Berlin on Friday in a train where the AC failed. The windows are hermetically sealed because it’s a high-speed train whose name, ironically, is abbreviated “ICE.” Yesterday, three similar trains had to be evacuated after their AC failed. (Sorry, the linked article is in German.) It seems the system is not designed to function in high temperatures! On one of the ICE trains, 27 teenagers on a school trip collapsed from the heat, and some required IV infusions right on the platform once they were evacuated. The desperate mother of a young boy tried to break a window with an emergency hammer. Temperatures topped 120 F.
So yes, by all means, let’s talk about AC. But I agree with Amanda that urging people to go cold turkey – as Cox does – vastly oversimplifies the matter. Complex societies cannot simply ditch AC, unless we abandon any notion of productivity and give up travel by mass conveyance. (I’ve recently been on an airplane and a city bus whose temperatures rivaled those of the ICE trains.) In other words, late capitalism depends on AC, and unless you think we can topple capitalism, we’re not likely to abolish AC. Nor should we, because it really does save people’s lives in a heat wave. But we can and should discuss where it’s used profligately and stupidly. We should think about where we really need it, and where it’s optional. We can adopt other strategies, like using a whole-house fan at night, running ceiling fans, or (in dry climates) installing a swamp cooler. We can drop dress codes that require pants and ties in July. Why not wear shorts to the office?
Oh, and when it’s really hot, we might be wise not to cuddle up to our laptops. I’m off to grab a cold drink and a good old-fashioned, paper-based book.
… Or about any other aspect of the BP oiltastrophy, from the eleven men who died to the thousands whose lives are wrecked.
I haven’t written about it because all I’ve got is a rant and a howl. The administration has bungled the response. If you’re inclined to defend Obama, you might first pay a visit to Erniebufflo’s post detailing the how, when, when, and who of said bungling. I agree with every conclusion she draws, including making BP pay in financial and criminal terms, and passing a comprehensive energy/climate bill that would start weaning us off our oil addiction.
So yeah, there’s nothing to laugh at. And yet, sometimes humor and satire offer the fiercest critiques. You might, for instance, find it enlightening to see what happens when BP spills coffee:
The charity Rethink Breast Cancer, which just produced a moronic video to “raise awareness” of breast cancer? Or LA Times reporter Dan Neil, who thinks this ad, entitled “Save the Boobs,” is a swell idea? (I think something may be rising and swelling, but I highly doubt it’s awareness.)
I can think of a few more gripes. The ad implies that the breasts are worth our sympathy are big, bold, and bodacious. Those of us who have A and B cups, or who don’t choose to wear skimpy bikinis, or whose sexuality is just more private – well, our breasts just don’t command that sort of “awareness.”
The breasts that deserve care are obviously young. They haven’t nourished babies. They haven’t drooped due to the changes of pregnancy, nursing, or just plain old gravity and time.
I’m trying to imagine how I’d feel if I’d undergone a mastectomy or lumpectomy and then seen this ad. I had a breast cancer scare that went on for about a year. I had lots of time to wonder if a lumpectomy would leave my left breast completely misshapen; indeed, if anything whatsoever would be left of it. Peggy Orenstein has written of the scars left by just lumpectomy and radiation, and her experience sounds to be fairly common among us small-breasted women. Maybe I’d be self-confident enough not to care. More likely, I’d already feel insecure about my scars, and an ad flaunting “perfect” breasts in the context of breast cancer would feel like another blow.
Does raising awareness really require an ad that might lower breast cancer survivors’ self-esteem?
For that matter, is there any sentient adult in American who’s not already “aware” of breast cancer? Even my young sons know about it. They comment on the pink Yoplait lids and worry about the Bear’s teacher, who’s undergoing treatment.
I’m not sure we need more “awareness.” What we need is research targeting more effective, less harsh treatments that go beyond the “slash, burn, and poison” paradigm that we’ve had for the past half-century. We need a better understanding of breast cancer’s pathogenesis, including the role of toxins and other environmental factors. We need to hear the stories of women undergoing treatment. We need to unveil the brutality of treatment, not just so patients know what to expect, but also to light a fire under the asses of the legislators and other government officials who can choose to fund research, or not. And we need this not just for breast cancer, but for cancer in each of its ugly guises.
If this were a Budweiser commercial, the bluestockings, psalm singers and family focusers would be going completely mental, but in this case the morals police have no grounds to object unless they want to come off as somehow pro-breast cancer.
In recent years, the increasing frankness of breast cancer PSAs has been a bright spot of adult sensibility in what is Americans’ generally neurotic relationship to the female anatomy. Bear in mind that our national dialogue was brought to an inane standstill when Janet Jackson’s breast was briefly exposed during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. Compared to the “Save the Boobs” spot, Jackson might as well have been wearing a burqa.
Also, this ad — and a couple more like it — represent one of the few occasions when the male tendency to objectify the female body is put to good use, as opposed to selling beer and premium football cable packages. They seem to answer a question that must have nagged breast-cancer-awareness advocates: How to get men to care? With rare exceptions, men don’t suffer from breast cancer. The earnest, sad-violins spots invoking moms and grand-moms of the past probably haven’t gained much traction among men.
Feminist film theory has a name for the camera’s eye here: The “male gaze,” which is to say, the camera’s view is that of the male spectator and unseen protagonist regarding the female as an object (cf. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). This is the camera’s-eye of pornography and it’s inherently misogynistic. The “Save the Boobs” spot spoofs the male gaze and turns it into something positive.
This isn’t awareness; this is objectification. Dan Neil has some nerve, using feminist film theory as cover! Did anyone see the male gaze being “spoofed” in this ad? Nope, me neither. I’m confident Laura Mulvey wouldn’t, either; she’d just see scopophilia: erotic pleasure derived from a controlling, objectifying gaze, which is male or at least male-identified. And by the way, Janet Jackson got flak because she exposed a nipple, which this ad never does. Women have been showing this much flesh ever since Baywatch, at the latest; it’s the nipple that remains taboo. A niggling point, maybe, but also further evidence that Neil’s critical faculties shut down while watching that ad. Oh, and objecting to this ad on feminist grounds has nothing to do with moralism or neurosis. For me, part of being “sex positive” is insisting that women can be agents of their own desire and not mere objects of men’s lust.
Making breast cancer sexy won’t solve a damn thing. Any of us who’ve lived with cancer, first-hand or in our immediate family, knows that it’s the diametric opposite of sexy. Cancer does its best to replace life with death, vigor with fatigue, comfort with nausea and pain. The pleasures of the body are undermined by alienation from one’s own flesh, which is now treacherous and unreliable.
Indeed, the sexualization of breasts has never helped Americans deal more intelligently with breast cancer. In the bad old days before the late 1970s, the stigma of breast cancer wasn’t just a consequence of cancer generally being hush-hush. It also stemmed from the fact that breasts meant sex, and sex wasn’t often openly discussed before the 1970s.
Titillation won’t bring back the old taboos, but it still trivializes the problem. I don’t think such ads need to be tearjerkers. When cancer takes up residence in your family, black humor can be a saving grace. But this ad isn’t particularly funny, nor is a joke between people who’ve been there. It’s using a deadly disease to justify objectifying women one more time – and if that seems too simpleminded, well, it worked with Dan Neil.
If you’re still inclined to give Neil the benefit of the doubt, here’s one last bon mot from him:
The only people who could object to such ads are advocates for other kinds of cancer awareness. Women don’t gossip behind their hands about the largeness of a man’s prostate as if it’s a good thing. These breast cancer ads are tapping into a built-in constituency that doesn’t exist for other organs. Unfair but true.
Um, no, women don’t chat about prostate size, but most of us know that our male partners’ sexual health depends on a healthy prostate. Damage or remove the prostate, and erectile function will almost always suffer. And dude, if you think there’s not a bipartisan and pan-gender constituency for erections, I’ve got news for you!
But I doubt we’ll see an equivalent ad for prostate cancer awareness in my lifetime. A tanned, muscular young man striding shirtless around a pool … the camera zooms in on his Speedo … women gape at him as his man-parts jiggle … and begin to bulge and rise … the screen fades to white with stark black lettering: “Save the Boners.”
That’s not an ad I’d especially want to see, either. But Neil’s implication that women don’t care about their partners’ sexual health – including erectile function – isn’t just stupid, it’s sexist. It’s also heterosexist, because some of the women who appreciate “boobs” are other women – duh! And apart from sexual politics, it’s plain heartless to focus so much on individual organs, because as much as we might appreciate our partners’ parts, we love them as whole people. When cancer strikes, we want them to survive as whole people. That might be a little hard to capture in a 60-second ad, but ads could at least refrain from sabotaging it. Or am I asking too much?
At Alternet, Tara Geneva reports that Jonah Goldberg says we can stop planning for global warming and start readying ourselves for a far more likely catastrophe: a big old asteroid striking the earth! (By the way, wasn’t Reagan’s Star Wars program supposed to cover that threat? Yikes, we’re back to the future!)
The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind’s heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.
But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers’ brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.
But there’s little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die. Dust and debris blot out the sun and will chill the planet for years. Crops fail, billions starve. The heat of impact releases torrents of nitrous and nitric acid rain.
So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.
Alas, there’s no time to defrost Al Gore’s frozen head to ask his opinion.
(More here; may the Ceiling Cat forgive me for linking to Jonah Goldberg. I promise not to do it often.)
But I worry about yet a third cosmic catastrophe. What’ll happen if the black hole in the heads of Goldberg and other climate-change denialists continue to suck up all light and reason? The whole earth could be drawn in by its extreme gravity. But hey, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about those pesky asteroids.
We’re trying to declutter the storage space in our Berlin apartment. My husband hauled out an old plastic crate where he’d stashed an old bath mat – and discovered the silly thing had liquidified.
We just spent the last half hour removing apparent oil drips from the linoleum. I’d provide a picture but I’m still feeling so greasy, I’d rather not touch my camera.
Don’t you think it’s a little freaky that in less than a decade, a petroleum-based rug can start decomposing and actually go all the way back to its origins? I’m not sure if this is heartening or alarming when it comes to the plastics in our landfills.
Ashes to ashes; oil to oil.
And man, am I glad my husband is so adept at climing ladders (this crate and other equally valuable items were stored on a platform above the entryway; they are all headed for the landfill tomorrow). It’s the best argument for marriage I can think of at the moment: I don’t care how sexes and genders combine, it’s just awfully useful if one of them isn’t a total klutz on a ladder. I’ll admit to being hopelessly girly, that way.
Oh, and if posting is light (both intellectually and numerically) over the next couple of days, it’s because I’m in transit back to Ohio. Tomorrow’s the packapalooza, and Thursday we fly home (Berlin-Frankfurt-Washington/Dulles-Columbus, if you’re the sort who likes to fret along with my mama until all the planes have safely landed).
A few days ago, Amanda Marcotte posted at Pandagon on the trend toward urban gardening/farming – a trend that she diagnosed through similar trend pieces in Salon. So I’m not sure if she’s right about this being an actual trend, or if we’re just seeing the media flurry around Michelle Obama’s veggie patch. But I’m glad to see any rise in gardening, if only because everything you grow makes you more conscious of the origins of your food, and thus more skeptical toward the agri-industrial complex.
What’s interesting about the trend is that it’s not really certain that growing your own garden is necessarily going to save people money, as Amy Benfer notes. In the 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt’s push for people to start victory gardens was incredibly effective—up to 40% of all produce grown in the country was in victory gardens. Numbers like that would make one think that this resurgence would have similar results, but I think a lot fewer people (particularly the political foodie types that generally live in urban centers) have as much space to garden, and collectively, we have a lot less know-how. Of course, if people stick with it for a few years, they’ll learn what works and what doesn’t, and it will start to save them money. Of course, that requires staying put for long periods of time, which is also not so easy for modern urbanites.
I can’t create a sea change in how we see our food supply, but I can offer a few tips on the economics of small-space gardening. People shouldn’t have to reinvent the plow to discover gardening’s rewards. Giving authoritative advice feels funny to me, because I’m still a relative newcomer to gardening myself, but these few things I know. Any excellent tips in comments will be boosted into the main post, because I know I have reader who are much more accomplished gardeners than I.
First, grow what you love to eat, but bear in mind that certain veggies offer much more in return for your time and your precious garden space. Tomatoes top the list. Good quality fresh tomatoes will run you a few dollars a pound, maybe more for heirlooms. Most heirlooms are fussier and won’t bear as prolifically as hybrids, but they offer wonderful variety and flavor, so I grow them anyway. But I have some favorite hybrids, too, notably Sungold and Brandy Boy. If I bought as many Sungolds as I harvest, I’d probably spend as much as I lay out for all my vegetable garden supplies (and I tend to go all out on tomato seeds, because I’m greedy for variety).
Edible pod peas – shelling peas give you a lot less to chew on, so look for sugar snap varieties
Onion storage bulbs
Beans (pole, bush) – but pole beans will keep going
Beets – don’t forget the greens are yummy
Carrots
Cucumbers
Peppers
Broccoli
Head lettuce
Swiss chard
I personally am a big fan of chard, as are my resident rabbits. And I just as passionately don’t care how economical turnips are; they’d only be used for lawn bowling around my house. The list doesn’t mention radish, and I don’t either because I dislike it, but you can interplant it among your lettuce. Also, I want to put in a plug for leaf lettuce which, like chard, is cut and come again. Arugula grows like a weed and is pricey in stores but dirt cheap from your garden (pardon another bad pun). If you’re short on sunny patches, virtually all greens can tolerate some shade, whereas fruiting veggies like tomatoes really need at least six hours of sunlight, preferably more.
Grow these plants if space isn’t much of an issue, or if you’ve got kids who really, really want to see a pumpkin grow:
Corn
Melons
Squash
Pumpkins
Note that the good extension agents must mean sprawling winter squash, because zucchini and other summer squash give you oodles of produce for the space they take. I planted winter squash this year despite my better judgment, and now I have to worry about it becoming the Godzilla of vegetables, tearing down the rest of my garden while I’m out of town.
While they’re not on either list, herbs don’t take much space. You can put them in a planter or window box. If you like to cook (or eat!), they’re really rewarding to grow. Yum basil!
My second tip for keeping things economical is to grow from seed whenever possible. If you don’t have a very well-lit space for seedlings indoors, you might want to buy tomato, pepper, and eggplant starts. (Assuming you can do anything with eggplant, which has always been an utter failure for me.) But it’s just folly to buy starts for melons, squash, pumpkins, or cukes. These seeds germinate easily and it’s fun to watch their big seed leaves unfold. Ditto for beans and peas, which actually resent transplanting. Among the herbs, basil and sage grow easily from seed. Other herbs tend to have tiny seeds, though mint is easy to grow anyway.
And finally, my third bit of advice is to read up a bit on intensive gardening techniques. They let you use the space you have (instead of squandering much of it for paths between rows). Also, by planting closely, you’ll shade out the weeds, though you will still save yourself lots of work if you lay down a good layer of mulch. For more info on intensive techniques, check out square foot gardening (which is useful for deciding how to space plants even if you don’t have all the raised beds, etc.) and that Virginia Tech site.
No, sorry, here’s my real final point: Do as much or as little in your garden as you enjoy. The point is to connect with the earth, get dirty, and enjoy delicious food in the end. If gardening turns into an endless chore, that won’t happen. I thought that the recent article in Alternet arguing that gardeners make better lovers was a bit overblown, but not entirely wrong: Gardening is like sex in that you should get messy, feed your senses, and enjoy it, even if you’re a bit sore the next day.
There’s a long tradition of naming flu pandemics after their presumptive geographical ground zero. The Hong Kong flu. Asian flu. Fujian flu. And the dreadful Spanish flu (which almost certainly didn’t start in Spain).
So why not the Mexico flu? Because – as Renee at Womanist Musings and nojojojo at Alas amply show – you can’t invoke Mexico in this country without dragging in a truckload of racist, anti-immigration baggage.
While I like nojojo’s suggestions of “Colonialism Cough” and “Greedy Gringo Fever,” I’m sort of attached to the historical naming patterns. So, staying in that grand geographical tradition, I vote for “Factory Farm Flu.” Srsly. Evidence is mounting that this virus mutated in a literal and figurative epidemiological pigsty: the Smithfield factory farm, which Amanda Marcotte describes as “absolutely swimming in pig shit and carcasses.” And Factory Farm Flu is nicely alliterative, too!
We do need a name change, because “swine flu” is misleading in more ways than one. For instance, Russia has banned pork imports from Ohio to try to keep the disease at bay. They’d do far better to ban imports of Ohio’s live humans instead of our dead pigs, which are completely incapable of infecting consumers in Russia or anywhere.
Of course, Factory Farm Flu might not help hog futures, either, but that’s all right by me. (Daisy Deadhead has a fine post on why this ought to be putting all of us off meat.) Swine flu wouldn’t be able to mutate so easily if it weren’t endemic in certain pig populations. The crowding of factory farms promotes viral transmission. The only effect of those buckets of antibiotics fed to hogs is to halt bacterial superinfections. Meanwhile, the flu virus merrily reproduces and mutates.
And then there are the echoes of the 1976 swine flu panic. At Salon, Patrick Di Justo has a nuanced account of the events in ’76, which I remember pretty well (I was 12 at the time). In short, a panel of world-famous virologists all agreed that President Ford had better fast-track a vaccine. By the time the vaccine was ready, public health authorities already realized that the epidemic wasn’t materializing. The government went ahead and vaccinated people anyway. Death and paralysis from Guillain-Barre were ascribed to the vaccine, though Di Justo questions that link. Even a single death due to the vaccine would have been one too many, because by then the government’s motivations were purely political.
While Di Justo’s airtight analysis sticks entirely to the events of 1976, an uncritical reader could easily infer wrong lessons for the present: Swine flu is inherently benign, and so we’re overreacting. Gawker is doing just that, sneering at the current concern – hey, all swine flu is the same, isn’t it?
No, actually it’s not. “Swine flu” just means that the viruses were hosted by pigs while they scrambled their sloppy RNA into new mutations. This particular H1N1 strain shows signs of human, bird, and swine origins. The pigs just served as big, pink, grunting petri dishes for all that RNA to mix, mingle, and mutate.
This disease resulted from college students going to Mexico on spring break, who couldn’t come up with the cash for the local prostitutes. You don’t need to go to flying saucer theories to find any other way pig DNA could combine with human DNA.
Eeeew. At first I thought this referred to Mexican girls, but I guess not. Just one more reason to vote for “Factory Farm Flu.” And one less reason to hang out with the aging frat boys in Salon’s comment section. (Why do I ever go there?)
I’m not going to pontificate on what we all need to do to preserve our Earth. Others can do that far more intelligently. I’ll just offer one very personal reason why we can’t continue to wreck it. Today’s guest artist, the Tiger, requires a habitat. So does his brother, the Bear. So do all the small people in their generation.
Here’s the artist’s rendering of our planet, Erf. (Yes, that’s how it’s pronounced, too.)
If we can’t live here anymore, here’s a getaway rocket …
… which will take us to Mars. I’m not sure sure it’s habitable, either, despite Dick Cheney’s fascination with it. I have to wonder how a planet sporting eyes, ears, and chicken feet can support human life.
If Mars (aka Mrs) is capable of sustaining life after all, it might look a little like these aliens (aka alens):
Myself? Looking at those aliens, I’m really hoping we can stay right here on Erf.
I’m sure you’ve all been hearing about the wildfires blazing in California – some 1400 of them, last I heard.
Here’s what I didn’t realize until I arrived: The smoke is unruly. It wafts all over the state. You can be hundreds of miles from the actual fires but if the wind blows the wrong way, you’ll still be smoked out.
Last week, the air was miserable even where I’m vacationing in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, though nary a fire burned nearby. The mountains apparently trapped the smoke. It was so thick that my nephew’s day camp had to keep the kids inside. You can imagine how much they loved that. But particulate levels were two or three times the maximum compatible with health, so the kids stayed locked up.
Here’s what the smoke looked like, hanging over the hills as we drove west from Sacramento yesterday on I-80. My sister snapped these photos through the windshield:
That’s not a second line of hills behind the first. That’s the smoke.
Today the whole family is blinking and tearing a lot, having spent yesterday inside that brown cloud during our trip to Discovery Kingdom. It seems that unless your lungs are seriously impaired, your eyes serve as a warning system.
I know there’s not really a political solution to this. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has dispatched the National Guard to help fight the fires. There’s not much more to be done (though arguably the Guard should have been deployed sooner). The fires result from a combo of dry conditions and hundreds of lightning strikes. For once, this is a problem that has little to do with human stupidity.
And yet, I can’t help thinking of the Governator’s immortal words: “Vere zere’s smoke, zere’s fire.” Oh, wait – Ahnold was talking about the sexual harassment allegations leveled at him during his gubernatorial campaign back in 2003. In fact, even though he then ‘fessed up to groping numerous women, that particular smokestorm blew over. Maybe he could repeat the trick?
This is mostly a PSA for the benefit of my local readers, though the rest of you might check it out if you’d like to see what a pretty little town I’m lucky to call home.
A pseudonymous but obviously very, very bright fellow resident of Athens has started a blog called The Attention-Getting Device devoted to discussing local issues. It’s thoughtful, smart, and worth visiting if you live here, too.
So far its author, the Watchdog, is dissecting the retirement community planned to be built at the end of my street along the banks of the Hocking River. The original development was to be a continuing care facility, which the community actually needs, albeit in a less stupid location. But the original plans have been scaled back because the state won’t approve more nursing care beds. Now the plans foresee a relatively upscale project that will gobble up the last open green space in our neighborhood, continue the trend of paving over the river’s banks, and create a traffic hazard along routes that kids use to walk to the elementary school. It will also constitute a major evacuation problem the next time Athens experiences major flooding, which will be sooner rather than later if we keep destroying the floodway.
But the Watchdog says this all way better than me, so check out his/her blog.
I will just say that when we had relatively minor flooding last March, this was the view from the site of the proposed development. That concrete strip leading into the river is part of the bike path. The project would be built next to that path, slightly behind where I was standing as I snapped this shot. ‘Nuff said.
I should be working on my tax return, but dang it, I haven’t filed away any paperwork since last June, so I first have to sort through a foot-tall pile of paper. True to form, I’m procrastinating. Which is just how I got into this pickle in the first place.
One of the other annoyances of tax season is how it coincides with planting season. This morning I said to heck with the taxes and planted some sweet pea seeds. Then I came inside and read about a nifty proposal that would give tax breaks for gardening! Well, not necessarily for planting sweet peas (they’re poisonous) but for growing food in our yards, similar to the Victory Gardens in WWI, except this time with a little tax incentive.
I am proposing that home growers finally catch a break. Not from bugs, weather, or clunky garden shoes, but from taxes. It’s not as silly an idea as it may sound. We give tax breaks to people to encourage them to put hybrid cars in their garages and solar panels on their roofs, so why not offer incentives for solar-powered, healthy food production in their backyard? …
More home gardens would offer us victory not only over rising food and health care costs, but also foreign oil dependency and climate change. Researcher estimate that locally-grown foods use up to 17 times less climate-warming, fossil fuels than foods from away. And when it comes to local foods, it doesn’t get any “localer” than one’s own yard.
Doiron would have the government waive taxes on gardening supplies and – more significantly – offer an income tax deduction for a kitchen garden (or for rental of a community garden plot) similar to the break for a home office, based on square footage.
This is such a cool and clever idea. It won’t save the earth all on its own. But as the price of oil climbs ever higher, it might help ease the transition to the more local world that we’ll all be forced to inhabit in the future. Less lofty – but no less important – more people might discover the pleasures of perfectly fresh vegetables: tender-crisp baby lettuce, sun-warmed tomatoes, sweet buttery purple-podded beans.
By that way, that sweet feline pansy pictured above, taunting those of you who are still digging out from winter? It survived from last fall, along with most of its companions, under layers of snow and discouragement. And since it’s a pansy, it’s edible – though this particular specimen probably has too much dirt-and-oil grime from the street in front of my house.
Anyone who grew up in North Dakota perks up when their home state makes national headlines. So this week, when I saw that there may be massive oil fields in the wild western half of the state, I got excited even though I haven’t lived there in nearly three decades.
According to Andrew Leonard at Salon, earlier estimates ranged as high as 500 billion barrels in the Bakken shale formation, which extends from North Dakota into Montana and Canada. (I hope this doesn’t mean we’ll have to invade Canada.) Even if that figure were correct, no more than half would be recoverable in the best-case scenario.
Now, with the release of a United States Geological Survey report on Thursday, the amount of technically recoverable oil there has been estimated between 3.0 and 4.3 billion barrels, as Leonard reported. (See his post for links to the actual report.) Note that this is technically recoverable, which still doesn’t tell us if or when it’ll make economic sense. As Leonard further notes, the extraction process for shale oil usually involves pulverizing mountains. Here, companies would likely use “horizontal drilling,” which the AP described as follows:
Oil companies began sharing technology about two years ago on how to recover the oil. The technology involves drilling vertically to about 10,000 feet, then “kicking out” for as many feet horizontally, while fracturing the rock to release the oil trapped in microscopic pores in the area known as the “middle” Bakken.
If it seems like there ought to be a better way, I’ve got a fine idea. North Dakota has another major resource that’s never been a secret to its sons and daughters: wind.
Together, South Dakota, North Dakota and Texas have sufficient wind resources to provide electricity for the entire United States, according to studies cited by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
Being a good North Dakotan, I read that piece. And then I saw dollar signs. My dad still owns six quarter sections of land. It’s not prime farmland, but wind? Boy, have we got it!
What we don’t have is transmission capacity to move all that electricity out of the Dakotas and into the rest of this energy-greedy country. We also don’t have clever ways of storing really massive amounts of electricity. Those are the the two things that would lay the groundwork for large-scale exploitation of wind power.
Of course, revamping our transmission grid and reinventing the battery would require huge investments. It’d take a major public initiative. But it might still be cheaper than pulverizing or drilling under the western half of North Dakota. It would certainly be cheaper than invading any more countries for their oil – yes, even cheaper than attacking Canada, never mind Iran. Photo of the North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user zanzibar, used under a Creative Commons license.
Today we had the cheap thrill of being disaster tourists here in my little town in Southeast Ohio, which like much of the state is watching the water rise. Our local flooding has been pretty harmless thus far. So my family and I are enjoying the excitement of watching a slow-mo disaster that – fortunately – isn’t one.
Here’s where the bike path merges with the Hocking River. A developer, National Church Residences, wants to build a retirement center just a few feet away from here. We hope they’re prepared to supply a fleet of lifeboats for the residents.
This is the bike path diving into the Hocking again, here right next to the sewage treatment plant. (Too bad there’s no scratch-and-sniff feature on the Web.)
The marker shows the water level next to the sewage plant at 11 a.m. …
… and again at 7 p.m. Note that the volleyball net is now low enough even for a klutz like me.
That’s not a puddle, folks. That’s the Hocking River. When our Wal-Mart moved in a few years ago, part of the local opposition centered on its location in the floodplain. And now, here’s what happens when you pave over the area where nature intended the river to naturally escape its banks. If you drive through this little tributary fast enough, you provide fabulous entertainment for the children in the backseat. As a bonus you get what a friend of mine called an “Appalachian car wash.” Which in our case actually left the car cleaner.
The Tiger likes to play here when it’s not threatening to become a new water park. (The city pool is conveniently located just a few feet to the right of the photo.)
Here’s why one of the elementary schools closed down yesterday and today.
This is actually not a lake, no matter what your eyes tell you. It’s not even a river. It’s just a creek. Or it was, anyway.
And here’s how you get to work if you live next to that creek, assuming you’re prepared for this sort of thing, as these folks evidently did.
We’re grateful that everyone’s safe here, so far. Any basement flooding is coming from our oversaturated soil, not from the river. The Hocking River was expected to crest this evening, though more rain is in the forecast; we’re hoping it passes us by. At the risk of sounding preachy: I hope developers might take this as a reminder that we need to preserve the precious remnants of our floodplain, and not just pave paradise, put up a parking lot.
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Rolling the pig dice – image by Flickr user 
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
