Article by Michelle Goldberg
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
The New Yorker - What Is a Woman?
Article by Michelle Goldberg
Monday, July 28, 2014
Another Listicle: Pop Matters
Today’s Active Lifestyles (1993)
Superchunk
Foolish (1994)
Lambchop
I Hope You’re Sitting Down (1994)
East River Pipe
Butterglory
Spent
Neutral Milk Hotel
The Ladybug Transistor
The Rock*A*Teens
The Magnetic Fields
Radar Brothers
The Clean
M. Ward
Arcade Fire
Teenage Fanclub
The Rosebuds
Robert Pollard
Destroyer
Camera Obscura
Spoon
American Music Club
The Clientele
Wild Flag
The Mountain Goats
Mikal Cronin
Friday, July 25, 2014
Good Twitter Account
Joe Sweeney
Do you think that people who were friends with Freddie Mercury ever addressed him as "Fred?"
.@billmaher I've been watching you regularly for years, but after this tweet, I pretty much can't look at you. Goodbye old buddy.
Neutral Milk Hotel was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me
As humans, we possess the unique ability to be able to know immediately when someone is a terrible person by how they order their coffee.
Is there a medical term yet for that thing when you're in a restaurant & you cannot tune out the vocal fry/upspeak of the table next to you?
Joey Sweeney @sweeneyjojo ·
Joey Sweeney @sweeneyjojo ·
Every time a poet reads off their iPhone at a public reading, the motorcycle guy from Raising Arizona stabs the ghost of Allen Ginsberg.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Line & Sinker
"Republicans care deeply about deficits, unless they’re caused by tax cuts. Then they don’t give a damn.” -- Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute
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Footnotes
(*) NY Times: Their Way or No Highway
The Federal Highway Trust Fund is expected to run out of money in August. So, naturally, Congress is debating a temporary fix that involves letting corporations underfund their pension systems.
Washington -- House Republicans, who fervently pound the podium against the deficit, didn't blink Friday (July 11th) at passing a whopping $287 billion business tax cut measure with no effort to pay for or offset that amount.
GOP lawmakers argued the bill helps the economy, but budget-watching organizations outside Congress proclaimed it an irresponsible move.
Members of Congress certainly like to talk the talk, but when it comes to insider trading there seems to be little interest in walking the walk by cooperating with an investigation into a possible leak of confidential information that allowed for lucrative trading
Friday, July 18, 2014
NPR: The Salt
Paul Greenberg, author of the new book American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about what's driving the changes in America's seafood economy.
Interview Excerpts:
On what Greenberg calls "The Great Fish Swap"
What I think we're doing is we're low-grading our seafood supply. In effect what we're doing is we're sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad, and in exchange, we're importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature.
We export millions of tons of wild, mostly Alaska salmon abroad and import mostly farmed salmon from abroad. So salmon for salmon, we're trading wild for farmed. Another great example of this fish swap is the swapping of Alaska pollock for tilapia and pangasius [catfish]. Alaska pollock is the thing in [McDonald's] Filet-O-Fish sandwich; it's the thing in that fake crab that you find in your California roll. We use a lot of pollock ourselves, but we send 600 million pounds of it abroad every year. And in the other direction, we get a similarly white flaky fish — tilapia or pangasius — coming to us mostly from China and Vietnam. They fill a similar fish niche, but they're very different.
On why the U.S. exports the best-quality fish
We only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year per capita. That's half of the global average, so there's that. The other thing is that other countries really are hip to seafood. The Chinese love seafood; the Japanese, the Koreans — they love seafood. They're willing to pay top dollar for it. We just aren't willing to do so. We want our food cheap and easy.
All of this fast-food commodification of seafood protein — because that's kind of what it is at this point — adds to that general preference for cheap stuff. Kind of in tandem and in league with that is the American tendency to avoid taste. ... Foodies [talk] about flavor and texture and the food movement and that kind of thing, and that's true of about 5 percent of Americans, but 95 percent of Americans really are not so into flavor. ... If we don't like the flavorsome fish — like bluefish, mackerel, things like oysters, things that really taste of the sea — if we don't like that, then we're going to go for these generic, homogenized, industrialized products.
On sending American salmon to China and back for cheap labor
A certain amount of Alaska salmon gets caught by Americans in Alaska, sent to China, defrosted, filleted, boned, refrozen and sent back to us. How's that for food miles? We don't want to pay the labor involved in boning fish and more and more of that fish that used to go make that round trip is actually staying in China because the Chinese are realizing how good it is, much to our detriment.
The labor is so much cheaper that it makes the shipping cost-effective. When you ship things via freighter, frozen, the cost per mile is relatively low compared to, say, air freighting or train travel or truck freighting.
On the decline of local fish markets
We don't want fish markets in our view shed. We don't want to smell them. We don't want to look at them. So they really have been banished from the center of our cities and sequestered to a corner of our supermarkets.
This is a process that aids all of the facelessness and commodification of seafood. ... Seafood has been taken out of the hands of the experts and put into the hands of the traders, so people really cannot identify the specificity of fish anymore. Because supermarkets rely on mass distribution systems, often frozen product, it means that the relationship between coastal producers of seafood is broken and so it's much easier for them to deal with the Syscos of the world, or these large purveyors that use these massive shrimp operations in Thailand or China, than it is for them to deal with the kind of knotty nature of local fishermen.
Note: Click Title Link For Complete Interview (Audio - 36min 24sec)
Hat-Tip: Phawker.com
Interview Excerpts:
On what Greenberg calls "The Great Fish Swap"
What I think we're doing is we're low-grading our seafood supply. In effect what we're doing is we're sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad, and in exchange, we're importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature.
We export millions of tons of wild, mostly Alaska salmon abroad and import mostly farmed salmon from abroad. So salmon for salmon, we're trading wild for farmed. Another great example of this fish swap is the swapping of Alaska pollock for tilapia and pangasius [catfish]. Alaska pollock is the thing in [McDonald's] Filet-O-Fish sandwich; it's the thing in that fake crab that you find in your California roll. We use a lot of pollock ourselves, but we send 600 million pounds of it abroad every year. And in the other direction, we get a similarly white flaky fish — tilapia or pangasius — coming to us mostly from China and Vietnam. They fill a similar fish niche, but they're very different.
On why the U.S. exports the best-quality fish
We only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year per capita. That's half of the global average, so there's that. The other thing is that other countries really are hip to seafood. The Chinese love seafood; the Japanese, the Koreans — they love seafood. They're willing to pay top dollar for it. We just aren't willing to do so. We want our food cheap and easy.
All of this fast-food commodification of seafood protein — because that's kind of what it is at this point — adds to that general preference for cheap stuff. Kind of in tandem and in league with that is the American tendency to avoid taste. ... Foodies [talk] about flavor and texture and the food movement and that kind of thing, and that's true of about 5 percent of Americans, but 95 percent of Americans really are not so into flavor. ... If we don't like the flavorsome fish — like bluefish, mackerel, things like oysters, things that really taste of the sea — if we don't like that, then we're going to go for these generic, homogenized, industrialized products.
On sending American salmon to China and back for cheap labor
A certain amount of Alaska salmon gets caught by Americans in Alaska, sent to China, defrosted, filleted, boned, refrozen and sent back to us. How's that for food miles? We don't want to pay the labor involved in boning fish and more and more of that fish that used to go make that round trip is actually staying in China because the Chinese are realizing how good it is, much to our detriment.
On the decline of local fish markets
We don't want fish markets in our view shed. We don't want to smell them. We don't want to look at them. So they really have been banished from the center of our cities and sequestered to a corner of our supermarkets.
This is a process that aids all of the facelessness and commodification of seafood. ... Seafood has been taken out of the hands of the experts and put into the hands of the traders, so people really cannot identify the specificity of fish anymore. Because supermarkets rely on mass distribution systems, often frozen product, it means that the relationship between coastal producers of seafood is broken and so it's much easier for them to deal with the Syscos of the world, or these large purveyors that use these massive shrimp operations in Thailand or China, than it is for them to deal with the kind of knotty nature of local fishermen.
Note: Click Title Link For Complete Interview (Audio - 36min 24sec)
Hat-Tip: Phawker.com
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Who Stole The Water?
It's been a long, dry haul in the southeast quadrant of the state. The majority of Texas has been in a record-busting drought for most of a decade, and the last three years have been especially thirsty ones for most communities in the Lone Star State...
California is in the third year of its worst drought in decades. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how much water the state’s residents and businesses are using. According to a recent state survey, Californians cut the amount of water they used in the first five months of the year by just 5 percent, far short of the 20 percent reduction Gov. Jerry Brown called for in January. In some parts of the state, like the San Diego area, water use has actually increased from 2013.
Without much stronger conservation measures, the state, much of which is arid or semiarid, could face severe water shortages if the drought does not break next year. Los Angeles recently recorded its lowest rainfall for two consecutive years, and climate change will likely make drought a persistent condition, according to the National Climate Assessment report published in May.
Note: Click Link For Complete NY Times Editorial
As residents of California are urged to conserve water and the state considers placing a mandatory restriction on outdoor water usage, Nestlé is trucking away undisclosed amounts of the precious resource in the form of bottled water.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
Two Txts
Summer. It's official. Just installed AC window unit. She's currently humming & cooling apartment. Philly close to 100 degrees today. Same till Mon. Also humid. Bleaah.
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Very cool. Shades drawn. AC working fine. May not leave apartment 'til Sept. Please send food, beer & smokes. THX!
Very cool. Shades drawn. AC working fine. May not leave apartment 'til Sept. Please send food, beer & smokes. THX!
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Holiday Helpings
(*) 2 Hotdogs with sauerkraut & mustard (*) 2 Hamburgers with onion & mustard (*) 2 servings of Potato Salad (*) 3 Deviled Eggs (*) Beer
Monday, July 7, 2014
Noam Chomsky: State Power & Policy
There is much to say, but the historical record demonstrates very clearly that the standard doctrine has little merit. Security in the normal sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.To repeat, in the normal sense. But in evaluating the standard doctrine we have to ask what is actually meant by “security”: security for whom?
One answer is: security for state power. There are many illustrations. Take a current one. In May, the U.S. agreed to support a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel. Or by Washington, though it was really unnecessary to add that last condition. The U.S. is uniquely self-immunized from the international legal system. In fact, there is even congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial — the “Netherlands Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe. That once again illustrates the importance of protecting the security of state power.
But protecting it from whom? There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population. As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine for security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark. And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by the prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington, the professor of the science of government at Harvard University. In his words: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
Friday, July 4, 2014
Interdependence Day: Taliban Peace Pact
Public Citizen analyzed the new Obama 2014 National Trade Estimate Report, in which the US Trade Rep demands that: Japan abolish its privacy rules and its requirement that food be labeled with its ingredients; Canada abolish its rules limited pharmaceutical patents; Malaysia get rid of its tariffs on pork and booze; Mexico nuke its junk food taxes, and more. It's great reading, and leaves little room for doubt about the neoliberal future, in which anything that's bad for corporate profits -- even if it's good for society or reflects national values -- is killed in the name of free trade.
