Comes now the news that the federal nanny state wants to stick its probing tentacles into Alabama yet again. First it was the stimulus money, what with trying to help solve our crippling financial problems. And now they want to mess with our food products.

I’m talking oysters here people. I’m talking regional traditions of wholesome goodness being thwarted by fat cats in D.C. who know nothing of the slimy delight of a raw oyster. From the New York Times:

Two-thirds of the nation’s oysters are harvested from the Gulf Coast and about 40 percent of them are harvested during warm months. Half of Gulf Coast oysters are eaten raw, but they are largely eaten in the South. Many upscale seafood restaurants north of the Mason-Dixon line refuse to carry Gulf Coast oysters.

What’s the problem?

Eating shellfish raw is risky since they can be infected with both viral and bacterial contaminants. The bacteria Vibrio vulnificus is commonly present in oysters, but warm water can lead the bacteria to grow rapidly, so the riskiest oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

Well la-de-freaking-da. How many people die of this? Answer? 15 people a year. Are the deaths horrible? Yes. The description of the guy in the NYT article with his blackened and blistered skin made me want to puke. But there’s a reason why we don’t make social policy with our queasy stomachs. We prefer to use rational risk assessments. And we don’t kill an entire industry and hundreds of years of “how to eat tasty food” just because a tiny handful of people out there have some kind of wacked out body chemistry.

5,700 Americans died last year from food-related illnesses. Do you see us banning peanuts or meat? Compared to 15 people dying from oysters, that’s practically a food Holocaust.

There are already warnings about oysters. If you have AIDS or your immune system doesn’t work, maybe you shouldn’t eat them. Also, if you are blind, you shouldn’t drive a motorcycle. Those things don’t mean that the government should come in and regulate with a sledgehammer, putting people out of business and confining the rest of us to eat rubbery pieces of shit while wearing our federally-mandated safety helmets and rubber teeth protectors (for those out there who might have a hidden dental stress fracture but don’t know it).

More articles about the freakout in Alabama’s seafood industry can be found here and here (Landrieu and Sessions together at last!). But my concern isn’t even the economic one, or the fact that you can take any side of any debate and still call yourself a “scientist.” It’s merely that a simple (marginally risky) pleasure is soon to be forbidden to all of us simply because a few people died. I’m not taking a stand against any and all food regulations, nor is this a Libertarian rant about why the guv’mint ought not to be paying for roads and nuclear weapons. But when 15 corpses a year merit gutting an entire culinary tradition (and fundamentally unique experience) for the rest of us, it makes you want to wade into the debate about skateboarding and seat belts and gun control. We deserve beauty queens slurping oysters, damn it.

Just chalk it up as a continuation of our nation’s slide towards weakness and nanny state governance, where it’s fine to dump toxic chemicals in the water and invade multiple overseas nations, but God forbid a fraction of the few of us out there who still care about living might want to taste a raw oyster or go hang gliding or any number of other “dangerous recreations.” Thank goodness the government is here to keep us safe from ourselves.

On Saturday morning we woke up and bounced into the living room excited to watch, of all things, the House health care debate on CSPAN. It was a good spectacle at first, as women lined up on the Democratic side for unanimous consent to revise & extend their remarks, or some such parliamentary procedure thing.

It was hard to miss the messaging on the Democratic side – the idea seemed to be to get a bunch of women up to talk about how the bill would support the health of women in a variety of ways. It’s no single-payer by a long shot, but the bill will increase access to health care for a lot of people (men and women), and go a long way to helping people with treatable and preventable conditions as well as reducing medical cost-related bankruptcies.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are now saying that the bill passed the House only by selling out the health of women, or at least their reproductive freedom. And probably they’re right – that is what the bill did. The Stupak-Pitts amendment means that insurance plans receiving new federal subsidies to keep costs down (for families making less that $88,000 per year) will also not be able to cover abortions. So those plans can continue at a higher cost to their customers, or they can drop abortion coverage to be eligible to participate in the health case exchange.

The result will likely be (if the plan passes with the Stupak amendment, something that’s now questionable in the Senate) a decrease in access to abortions among middle class women. William Saletan has a good explanation over at Slate, and he asks the provocative question: If this is the cost of health care reform, are we willing to pay it?

Abortion’s been a hollow right for many, many women for a long time – at least since the passage of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions and ensured that poor women would have a good chance of staying that way as long as they kept getting pregnant. Abortions are expensive, after all. Combine the financial barriers and geographic and social barriers (if you live in some states, odds are you won’t be able to get an abortion simply because the clinic will be too far away from you, and if you’re poor you might not be able to reach it anyway because of the lack of public transportation), and we’re left with a right without access for millions of American women.

This is not a reason to decrease access even further – just an observation about the long decline in reproductive freedom that we’ve been experiencing in this country ever since Roe tried to carve abortion rights, MacGyver-like, out of a handful of Amendments and some rubber cement.

There are a lot of people that want to see an end to the current bill on the grounds that it restricts access to abortion. I think there’s a lot to hate about this bill, including reduced access to abortion. But at the same time it’s worth considering whether it will do more harm than good if the bill passes. Lack of health insurance kills people. Lots of them. Others lives are ruined, sometimes forever, because of medical bankruptcies or preventable illnesses – all things that will be reduced after passage of the bill. Lack of access to abortion also ruins lives, but there are a lot more people whose lives will be improved with access to health care here than whose lives will be hurt by lack of access to abortion. And again, this bill only bans health plans for paying for abortions if they want to compete in the exchanges. Rich women who can pay for their own abortions will still be able to do so.

It would be great if the Stupak Amendment galvanized people interested in maintaining reproductive freedoms. If these rights were so easy to sell out, that’s a failure of the movement and a failure of advocates who haven’t been able to sell reproductive freedom as essential. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many pro-life Democrats acting as swing votes on critical health care legislation. We’ve been willing to roll far too long on rights without access, which are of course not rights at all, but privileges for the few. Just like health care. It should also be considered a matter of right in this country rather than a privilege that comes, for example, with working a certain kind of job or having a certain amount of money.

The danger is that reproductive rights will trump expanded health care access because health care is not seen as a right. This is a classic divide and conquer type strategy that the left should avoid at all costs.

The deal is objectionable, but so is the failure to expand health care.

Because work has been work lately, I feel like I have been a bit slack on the blogging front. As such, you, the reader, now get a reward that involves minimal effort on my part. A burst of random!

1. Fort Hood killings:

Fort Hood is in Killen, which is represented in the Texas House by the delightfully-Texan-named Jimmie Don Aycock, who replaced Suzanna Hupp, who, as a result of surviving the infamous Luby’s massacre, became one of nation’s leading gun enthusiasts and defender of concealed weapons law. Guns!

Also, how insane is it that the dude who did the shooting was the dude who talked to other troubled service members about their problems? Wow. Would have liked to have heard some of those sessions.

2. On the military theme, get your military debate on! Might just save some lives.

3. And as far as that goes, you know I can’t help but link to any article with the headline, “Armageddon in Alabama.” Good national piece on the crisis in Birmingham (written before the mayor was convicted on 60 felony counts).

4. If that’s all too heavy and bumming you out, might I suggest that you begin watching (or re-watching for some of you nerds out there), the Disney Medfield College movies. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about starting here and working your way through the variety of movies that feature this fictional school.

Afterwards, you can order yourself a custom-made bobblehead of you or a favorite stalking victim loved one.

I grew up in a house where Chicago sports were on the television often. Baseball was the first religion, north side only. But second to the Cubs were probably the Bulls. Sure, the Bears were good. We certainly owned a copy of the original Super Bowl Shuffle on VHS. But the Bulls were on the TV pretty often. Dynasty and all. My brother and I grew up liking Jordan and Pippen, just as so many did.

But as I got older, I started to look back on the career of Jordan: “The Greatest to Have Ever Played.”

I learned about his famous comment about why he doesn’t get involved in politics, when his endorsement could have cost Jesse Helms an election: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

I learned about how Nike shoes are made. I learned about Jordan’s image construction, the giant machine of global mega-capitalism, branding. I learned back stories about Jordan on the Dream Team and his affinity for gambling — essentially, all of the things that kids didn’t learn about their sports idols back in previous generations before there were billions of dollars at stake and round-the-clock news cycles.

We learned about his divorce from Juanita and how he was terrible as a front office GM. And most recently, there was the uproar over his cringe-worthy Hall of Fame induction speech, which was not gracious and was, in fact, was described by Bill Simmons as “an off-the-cuff, uncomfortable, petty, biting, rambling, vindictive, score-settling speech during what’s meant to be nothing more than a celebration.”

But what prompted me to post about Jordan was not any of this. It was news about one of his children, to whom he pointed during the aforementioned atrocity of a speech and said, “I wouldn’t want to be you.”

No, not Jeffrey Jordan, who quit hoops at U of Illinois and now is coming back to the team (just like Dad did in the pros!).

Jordan’s other son, Marcus, is a freshman in college at the University of Central Florida. And he also plays hoops. And since his dad sells Nike shoes, Marcus has refused to abide by the school’s contract with Adidas. He wore his dad’s brand onto the court, causing Adidas to cancel a lucrative contract with the school. So much for what the rest of the team was wearing. So much for the best interests of the program or the school. It’s all about the brand. It’s all about corporate loyalty.

True Jordan.

I’m sure only the most naive among us believe that there’s such a thing as “truth in advertising.” There are, of course, many truths in advertising, including all the ones we construct to explain our relationships to products and the reasons we buy them or not. But advertising is about persuasion, and persuasion has a complicated relationship to truth, at least as conventionally understood. Who among us really believes that tiny animated bubbles with personalities (and, one assumes, hopes and dreams) are among the “Scrubbing Bubbles”? And if we did, why would we feel comfortable putting them into a can or down the drain rather than, say, releasing them into the wild or studying them for Science?

There’s a whole strand of advertising that purports to get asymptotically closer to the truth – Burger King is a good example, with their Whopper Virgins campaign and that silly lie detector ad they did recently. What makes those ads work is an open admission that most ads lie – they try to get beyond that by saying to the consumer: “Yes, yes, but this is really real.”

Product naming skates around this strand. You want to convey the idea of the thing and its aspirational brand-type qualities, but don’t want to get into a situation where you can be sued for making claims you can’t deliver on. But if the FTC doesn’t push back, the sky is the limit. I’ve always thought that the people behind the highly misleading Freecreditreport dot com campaign should have gotten some heat from the FTC. The name (and the evilly invasive commercials with the slacker band guys) makes it seem that you’re getting a free credit report. Which credit report you are, in fact, legally entitled to receive once a year from the big three credit vampires monitoring agencies. The site actually tries to sell you a “credit reporting” package that is expensive and unnecessary. Only now is the FTC moving to try and force some more regulations on that site. We’ll see how that goes.

Sometimes names are designed to produce trust by trading on another established brand. This is how we got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Most people think that Good Housekeeping has an evaluation process to get the seal. But actually any product that advertises in the magazine gets the seal (as long as it passes tests in this lab,  the magazine will give you a refund within two years if a product proves defective – many exceptions, typically, apply). It’s nothing like the vetting process over at Consumer Reports. In September, Paul Smalera wrote a great article about a new Good Housekeeping venture called the “Green Seal” that is even more troubling. The new seal will still be pay to play, like the old one. And there is no word on the standards of sustainability that will be used. Will it be enough to be “natural?” How about “nontoxic” or “organic”? None of these words has anything necessarily to do with the relative environmental goodness of a product. Bottled water can be all three of these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for the environment than tap water.

T. S. Eliot was right – the naming of things is a difficult matter.

So only now has ICANN decided to allow Internet addresses that use scripts other than Latin. It’s pointless to ask what took them so long, since the answer is obviously some combination of tech-topian faith in the irrelevancy of the culturally specific and the inertial drag of the lingua franca (no, not this Lingua Franca. Or this one, which I still miss.). I’ve been thinking about the early days of the Internets a lot recently, spurred partially by the recent death of Geocities and a friend’s link to this wonderful archive of “Page Under Construction” graphics (and then I found the “Please Mail Me” page – wow)

I think it’s sad that Geocities is gone. I know that blogs (especially standardized platforms like this here WordPress thing) have largely replaced the DIY websites that Geocities represented, and I know that Geocities sites were basically crap, but I hate so much the loss of those musings and webrings, oversharing and overanimation. The idea that this whole outpouring of humanness would just be deleted is too much to bear – it’s certainly not burning the Library of Alexandria, but is certainly worse than burning the downtown Montgomery library. At least the stuff there is replaceable and catalogued somewhere.

Enter the Archive Team, who staged an amazing initiative to store Geocities (Also check out their Deathwatch list.). You can read about the details of the project here, but I think the best part is that they took seriously the imperative of saving cat graphics and flashing Jesuses without regard to their cultural contribution. As if that were the purpose of archiving. Archiving is not the same as choosing a personal art collection. We don’t need archivists to be gatekeepers for the remainder of human history; we need archivists to help us store as much as possible so future minds can make different senses of our weird history.

In commemoration, then, this graphic of Ralph eating paste will live forever here until WordPress closes down, or we get a C&D from the copyright holder. Either way.

Crappy American economy got you down? Recession turning into depression?

Well mope no more, because the hot new growth industry of the next decade is here for you. Step into the fast-paced and exciting world of Passion Parties, where women help women investigate sensual aides while improving their erotic lives. As a side benefit, you (the coordinator of said parties) make a hefty profit in this classic pyramid scheme. Move over Madoff! The lack of sexual fulfillment of women is at an all time high (er, not that I would have any reason to think that or anything … cough). That creates a steady boom market for that batch of ladies who can’t get on the Internets and buy their own vibrators and sex ointments.

If you’ll just send$149 to Las Vegas-based privately held company, Passion Parties, Inc., you’ll get a Holiday Party-to-Go Passion Pac.

Includes: Bullet, Jelly Osaki, Velvet Curve, Progressor, Blossom Bliss, G-Spot Creme, Soft & Silky Shaving Creme-Plumeria, Alluring Body Lotion-Green Tea, Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel, Revelation Lubricant, Spice Lubricating Massage Lotion, Tasty Temptation Strawberry Massage Candle, Gigi, Pure Instinct Roll-on, Tickling Trio, Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry, Love Is In The Air Catalogs (25), Let’s Play Catalogs (25), It’s the Most Passionate Time of the Year Brochures (25), Tote Bag, Hostess Rewards Brochures (25), Customer Order Forms (50), You Can Have It All Brochures (25), New Passion Consultant Training Collection.

That’s right. Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel. Hawt.

But what’s great here is how this is being promoted as feminist capitalism:

You will feel proud that at Passion Parties, we believe that each and every woman can reach her individual potential, and that is why we support the philosophy of “women helping women.”

Well, only within certain limits:

Our products assist loving couples to enhance their sexual relationship, thus making “Every Day Valentine’s Day.” We stress monogamy, safe sex and the importance of keeping a relationship exciting.

It’s kind of depressing to see that people you went to high school with are getting sucked into these sorts of things as their “business.” Another friend has gotten into this weirdness, which wonderfully blends hilarious and depressing. I guess it’s better than going overseas to kill strangers for the government, but you hate to think that there are all these women out there who are likely losing money by buying into this “business plan.” Then again, maybe these folks are making plenty of money and helping women break out of sexual and social prisons by forming gender-based ties of solidarity and discussing topics that still in many places are rather taboo (even if selling crap ultimately lies at the heart of the gathering).

Maybe those Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry are worth a second look. Anybody want to come over?

Please?

Noun. Pronounced \ˈshä-d^ən-ˌfroi-də\, meaning enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Lisa Simpson teaches us the word in the episode “When Flanders Failed“:

Lisa: Dad, do you know what schadenfreude is?
Homer: No, I do not know what shaden-frawde is. Please tell me, because I’m dying to know.
Lisa: It’s a German term for “shameful joy,” taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
Homer: Oh, come on, Lisa. I’m just glad to see him fall flat on his butt. He’s usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel. … What’s the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?
Lisa: Sour grapes.
Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.

Here at Toxic Culture, schadenfreude’s not just a noun. It’s also a pastime. We’ve been reveling in it recently what with Birmingham Mayor Larry “Do Something” Langford’s conviction on 60 bribery counts (he’s not the Mayor anymore, and awaiting a sentence that could be as long as 805 years), and the sad-but-hilarious exchanges between Sarah Palin and soon-to-be-Playgirl-model Levi Johnston.

Since we love Halloween and recently went to the best haunted house in the state, it was absolutely vital when flipping channels during a NFL commercial break on Sunday, that I stop on some NBC programming called “Halloween on Ice.”

The subject of things “on ice” is pretty much an endless source of hilarity. It’s truly the end of the celebrity chain. Where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a bloody black and white edgy kung fu comic about ninjas and radiation, that tale ends with a Macy’s Thanksgiving float and actors in foam turtle suits wearing ice skates and singing in front of kids waving $15 glow sticks. And it’s true of any item you put “on ice.” Whether you are talking about Lion King or He-Man on skates (you must click on that one), or the classic Ice Capades, things are just more pathetic and hilarious when you slap it onto an ice rink.

So here we have Halloween on Ice, sponsored by an apple sauce company. Kids are interested because (I guess) there are people dressed up like a vampire or a mummy. Mom can say “wow” when they do a lutz or whatever (first performed in 1913!). And Dad can look at the boobs of the witch and try to remember when it was that Nancy Kerrigan was in the Olympics and gosh wasn’t it sad when that hillbilly smashed her in the knee that once.

Now, the applesauce company (mushin’ up apples since 1907!) has decided to sponsor all sorts of figure skating events. Not sure if they lock up washed up Olympians under contract or what. But if you liked Halloween on Ice, there’ll soon be the Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular and Kristi Yamaguchi Friends and Family! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Halloween on Ice is coming to you live from from the Qwest Center in awesome Omaha, Nebraska. And it doesn’t look even close to sold out.

This thing runs for two whole hours, from 3-5. Needless to say, I didn’t tune in for the whole thing, but can only comment on clips. The first thing I noticed was the jammin’ music by Mannheim Steamroller! All members of the band were wearing costumes and playing amid cheesy props (like cobwebs and ghost-shaped sheets). Let me just say here that I hate Mannheim Steamroller. I hate the Christmas music that made them famous. I hate their secular jams. It’s canned Disney music — synth-heavy, faux-classical music for people for whom Rush is too edgy. If you are into that sort of electro-prog crap that you can play around your parents, Mike Oldfield might be more up your alley.

Anyway, the fact that they were wearing zombie makeup didn’t make the Steamroller suck any less.

Add to it, a dude in all black with a Fu Manchu skating around and doing super fancy little hand gestures at the audience. Throw in some dry ice to add a little fog on the rink. What’s that? The evil wizard is Canadian Olympic silver medalist Elvis Stojko? Zzzzz.

Oooh! A mummy came out to some synth-Egyptian music. The announcer comes on. “Why don’t mummies take vacation? They’re afraid they’ll unwind.” Then the skater/mummy threw a roll of toilet paper into the crowd and started skating around. Oooo!

To get a further feel for the atrocities, click here and watch this YouTube video of an ice skater doing the Monster Mash at one of the previous year’s incarnations of this eye-gouger. See? It’s cute because he skates like a Frankenstein!

Evidently, there is a market for this shit. Nancy Kerrigan is selling her 2004 Halloween on Ice show on Amazon here. And evidently, these former champions are hard up enough for the cash to keep doing the events. And I guess it’s cool that they get to keep getting paid for “entertaining people” doing what they love, which is more than you can say for Olympic pole vaulters or even swimmers.

So here’s to you legion of ice skating enthusiasts. May you always land your triple axles and may your televised events long be sponsored by our nation’s leading sellers of fruit mush.

This is the second part of two posts. Read the first one here.

A few weeks ago I received a 2,500+ word email from the person behind J.L. Hudson. Turns out his name is David Theodoropoulos, and most of his comments (and any number of other interesting things) are available on his website (there is also an anti-Theodoropoulos website, much less populated, available here - I love that Theodoropoulos links to his “anti” site from his own website…is it also a matter of how his ideas are taken by his peers that there are no comments on the “anti” site?). The highlights of the email are as follows:

NAPPRA is an end-run around “Option 1,” otherwise known as the “white list,” or universal screening. The white list concept has already been adopted in Australia and New Zealand, and seems to mean that all “exotic” (non-native) species would have to be pre-approved for importation through a variety of tests. Right now, importation is relatively unrestricted unless the plant you are trying to import is on a “black list.” Recently, the USDA leveraged additional restrictions requiring all imported seeds to be accompanied by a “phytosanitary certificate” – the best I can figure out is that this certificate shows the seeds are free of weeds. But NAPPRA and the white list are both moves that would shift the burden of proof on importation. NAPPRA creates a new category (“Not Approved Pending Pest Risk Assessment”) that would basically put a hold on some imports while their risk is assessed. It is not a white list. The white list was originally proposed by Bruce Babbit when he was the chair of the National Invasive Species Council. The major argument against the white list seems to be that it risks corporatizing species – the kinds of testing that would be required to get “clean listed” would be very expensive and only affordable by major corporations. One proposal that has been floated is, evidently, to give the patent rights for the form of life to the corporation that bankrolls its testing; additionally, it has been proposed that the tester gain immunity if the species in fact becomes invasive. Theodoropoulos argues that NAPPRA (which is not quite a white list, in that will “initially list taxa of plants for planting that, to our knowledge, have not yet been imported into the United States but present a potential risk”) is the “camel’s nose in the tent” of the white list – note the word “initially” there.

The USDA’s evidence is bad. Theodoropoulos says that the three pests cited as reasons for the NAPPRA would not be stopped by it (briefly, citrus longhorned beetle came on maple trees but maple trees were already present here; Asian longhorned beetles are on untreated wood products not covered by NAPPRA; and Ralstonia solanacearum race 3 biovar 2 was found on geraniums which were already present in the US).

Exotic species aren’t so bad. Here’s where it gets a little strange. I had always thought (maybe reflexively, although I’d certainly read a bunch about invasive species for debate preparation) that exotic species were bad. Like, really bad. There’s all kinds of information across the Internets about this. Evidently the USDA’s main source for the costs of invasive species is a 2000 paper by Pimentel, et al. (it can be downloaded here, as well as any number of similar papers). The best part of Theodoropoulos’ email is his critique of their cost estimate, which I quote here for all the cat lovers among us:

In order to justify NAPPRA, the USDA cites Pimentel et al. (2000) as their primary source for the costs to society of non-indigenous species. This paper has been shown to be pseudoscientific and an example of serious misrepresentation  many of the “costs” are grossly over-inflated and have no actual economic basis whatsoever. For example, economic loss from cats is placed at $17 billion, fully 12% of the total, yet this figure is derived through completely speculative estimates of the number of birds killed by pet and feral cats, then valuing each bird at $30 through a contorted and unjustifiable logic involving birdwatchers, hunters, EPA fines, and the costs of rearing birds by ornithologists for release. This figure is a “value” essentially picked out of the air and entirely outside of actual economic costs – no actual money was spent or lost on account of cat predation on birds. The estimate also did not account for economic savings provided by the number of “pest” birds like starlings taken by cats, nor was any accounting made of the tremendous economic gains from rodent control (the original reason for the long association between cats and man), nor of the value of the cats based on dollars spent acquiring, feeding, and providing veterinary care for pet cats. No estimate of any differential in predation rates between cats and missing native predators was included. While cats are not plants, it is important to note this as an example of the poor quality of Pimentel et al.’s data and reasoning, as well as the professional misconduct that this represents. If the USDA is citing this sort of misinformation to justify NAPPRA, this demonstrates a level of scientific incompetence that should disqualify the Department from making any determinations under NAPPRA.

There is no doubt that some invasive species, like the much-maligned zebra mussel, are bad, right? Not so fast, says Theodoropoulos. He claims that zebra mussels have improved water quality and clarity in the Great Lakes, leading to improved fish populations and decreased eutrophication. When you add in the argument that there’s no such thing as an “exotic” species, things begin to seem a lot more complicated.

We can’t determine what species will be “invasive.” Theodoropoulos points out that we simply do not have good methods for risk assessment – we can’t even assess what species may become “invasive,” since “invasiveness” is by definition a relationship between any number of other plants, animals, etc. in an ecosystem. As an example, consider the humble asparagus fern (not a “fern” at all, as it turns out). It is widely used all over the US but considered to be highly invasive in Florida – presumably because of climate conditions. This casts some doubt on the reliability of the “risk assessment” part of NAPPRA, especially as it related to stopping invasive species.

When researching this post, I found the website for the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health – interesting for any number of reasons, but mostly because I

Vinca...seems harmless, right?

was able to find and name all of the horrible vines that continue to infest our yard despite repeated diggings and prunings and burnings. Without fail, the recommendations for getting rid of these things involve combinations of pesticides I’ve never heard of and don’t particularly want to purchase.

Take the vinca major on the right (it’s periwinkle to some). It’s commonly sold in nurseries, and would not be held by NAPPRA, or white listed, or anything, since it’s already here. In our climate it is highly invasive. In New Mexico it is happily contained, makes some nice flowers, and that’s about it. I hate that it strangles our tomatoes and won’t go away, but I’m not about to go buy a bunch of pesticides to pour on it. We eat stuff that comes out of that soil, after all.

After all this, I’m not sure I have an opinion on NAPPRA. It doesn’t seem especially well conceived, and I do know that the US has fairly stringent laws regarding control of noxious weeds that should solve much of the problem. I am very sympathetic to the work done by J.L. Hudson and others trying to preserve global biodiversity by encouraging propagation of rare and endangered species. In particular, I am appalled at the idea of patenting those species, especially as a payoff for dubious-at-best risk assessment. I wish there was more of a moral to this story – especially for those of you who have struggled through to the end of this long post. Myself, I’m taking away the idea that even issues that seem obvious (“exotic species are bad”) are more complicated than they seem, and that their solutions may create other problems. Also I’m thinking about what I’m going to plant in the spring.

This all started when I decided to read Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature during a recent trip to the beach. It’s a book about gardening, and this year’s pretty much failed gardening efforts (tomatoes not so good, only a handful of cucumbers, misjudged flower plantings, but scads and scads of basil) inspired me to read up on the subject. I found myself really captivated by Pollan’s essay on gardening catalogs. He talks about the different ways the major catalogs seem to represent different class positions and expectations about what flowers, gardens, and gardening is for:

After you’ve read a dozen or so catalogs, you start to realize that the differences between them are not so much in the varieties of plants and seeds they offer, for there is a great deal of overlap, as in the distinctive way each of them chooses to imagine the garden. Among other things, a garden is a form of self-expression, and we page through the various catalogs looking for the elements of a vocabulary that suits us, that can give body to our wishes. From White Flower Farm or Wayside Gardens we can have a perennial border that fairly bristles with class distinctions, floral testimony to our sophistication from Harris or Park or Gurney’s we can order a middle-class garden that proudly announces to the neighbors our family’s enterprise, independence, and togetherness; from Johnny’s Selected Seeds we can get a garden that reflects our environmental consciousness; and from Seeds Blum or J.L. Hudson one that proclaims our political convictions, in particular our zeal to protect the planet’s diversity from the depredations of big business. (p. 206)

I was interested. I ordered all the major catalogs immediately, despite lacking the disposable income to experiment with ordering plants by mail, no matter how lovely they are promised to be. One of the first to arrive was the J.L. Hudson catalog (the website itself is worth a visit), which was just as weird and wonderful as I thought it might be – it is a small-type catalog without much in the way of illustrations but liberally sprinkled with quotations from Emma Goldman and William Burroughs and full of plants I’ve never heard of but found myself wanting to order just to see if I could get them to grow.

J.L. Hudson sells seeds from two lists. First, there is the “Reserved Access List.” To order seeds from this list, you have to agree to the Reserved Access terms, which basically include agreeing not to complain when you can’t get the seeds to germinate (plants on this list seem to be difficult to germinate and rare or endangered)  and agreeing to propagate and share the seed where possible without trying to make or enforce intellectual property claims on the seeds or plants. Also, from this list there are no refunds or replacements. The other list is regular, and does not contain these caveats. From the bulk of the non-reserved catalog, you can order any number of plants from the mundane to the highly unusual. We’ve got our eye on some watermelons for next year.

The proprietor of J.L. Hudson makes it clear that you cannot call him. But his site does spell out, in sometimes excruciating detail, everything you need to know to place an order. If you choose to complain about the service they offer, you might want to make sure you have your story straight, as these exchanges demonstrate.

I was so compelled by the strangeness of the seed bank that I agreed to be on their mailing list. Which is how I learned about the NAPPRA. That law establishes a category of plants for planting whose importation is Not Authorized Pending Pest Risk Analysis (NAPPRA). I’m going to break this post up into two parts, because what I learned about the white list, NAPPRA, and the debate about invasive species deserves a whole different post. In the meantime, may I suggest that anyone remotely interested in gardening spend some time poking around the Hudson seedbank?

I like comics. Well, I used to. I mean, I still like them, but I don’t really buy them anymore. And I think a lot of people are in that category.

Pretty much, I collected comics at the boom times for the industry. For those that don’t know, people went crazy for comics in the 1990s. New comics companies were created. Issues were produced with all sorts of foil covers and laser holograms. Artists became superstars. Prices of comics went up. Marvel went public. The groundwork was laid for the current explosion of Hollywood comics-based movies. All those comics we purchased, thinking they would pay for college, are pretty much worthless.

Still, I remain interested in the format, the characters, the industry. I’ll still buy a few graphic novels or trade paperbacks that compile particularly well-regarded runs of issues. How do I know what’s good? I read comics blogs. And I thought I’d share a few links with you. Whether you like good stories about Batman (I do. A lot.) or more “adult” titles like Watchmen or Sandman, there’s something for you. There are (of course) even nerdy blogs that follow comics like Archie. Well, OK, pretty much all of the comics blogs are pretty nerdy.

Here are my favorites:

Dave’s Long Box — This was actually the first ever comics blog I discovered. Dave no longer blogs at this site, and for a while had moved to Society of Dave, which I think is also abandoned. He got a job doing some writing at ABC or something and, like many of the comics bloggers out there, is producing a lot of his own material that distracts from taking old comics, scanning them in, and making fun of them.

Tales from the Long Box — Another comics blog with “long box” in the title. Why? That’s how most nerds store their comics — in long cardboard boxes, with each issue bagged in a special acid-free Mylar bag, frequently with a special board to prevent any bending of the corners or the spine. And that’s not even going so far as the having the comic professionally graded, with a special wrinkled paper expert awarding a numeric grade as to how well-preserved the comic book is. After that, you pay lots of money to have the thing locked in a preservative case, sealing away the damaging elements and ravages of time, maximizing the re-sale value of your paper treasure.  None of which speaks to the fact that Tales from the Longbox is an awesome periodically-published blog about comics. Very well written and quite funny.

Kevin Church — This guy is one of the two kings of comics blogs. He writes a lot and writes well. He also produces his own comics. And of all of the comics bloggers, his non-comics posts are among my favorite. I really like his “design fetish” feature, which is random, but visually appealing. It goes in my eyes.

Chris Sims — This guy is the other king of comics blogging in my book. He likes Batman. He likes things that kick other things in the face. He has a wide-ranging set of interests as far as pop culture goes, and it helps that his interests overlap substantially with my own. He has been producing some cool stuff about vampires in the run up to Halloween. Where else are you going to find original radio spots advertising Blacula?

Dorian Wright — Postmodern Barney is a great place to find good writing about comics and pop culture, but Dorian’s writing has a bit more of a social conscience than many of the other sites. The posts are longer than those on your average blog (which resonates with me and my often too-long Toxic Culture posts) and I appreciate the thoughtfulness that seems to go into each post, even it’s just a review of a crappy monster movie.

Savage Critics — This one is written by more than one person and, as such, lacks that compelling voice that keeps you coming back for more. Still, there are some good reviews here, and it’s often worth a scan to see what’s happening in the world. Rarely do such scans result in me actually buying some comics, but it’s got to be pretty good writing if it’s still fun to see what other people think about stuff that I’m not reading.

Comics Worth Reading — Again, this one spills into pop culture a bit more than just comics. But if I don’t want to read about Bob Dylan or Disney or Ally McBeal, I can just scroll past those posts until I find something cool about, say, Captain America.

Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin — This is a really good one. It’s a good site if almost every time you go there, you say to yourself, “Damn, why don’t I read this more often?” Then you say to yourself, “Damn, I have a job and really ought to be doing more productive things that reading about the run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics produced by the people who produced Archie comics.”

Bam Kapow! — Sort of a TMZ for comics nerds. Good place to look if you want up-to-date information about how the script for the upcoming Thor movie is coming. I myself am partial to Thor-themed space horse Beta Ray Bill.

The Horrors of It All — It’s nearly Halloween. I like good creepy art. This site is full of that stuff. Has whole stories scanned in from some of the old horror and sci-fi comics. Lots of good links for distracting you from more productive things. Punk rock! Goth! Horrorcore!

So anyway, enjoy. I may have left off some great sites, but these are the ones I check on pretty regularly. Whether you like pre-code comics, like it when Batman punches a ninja into a volcano, or merely have some fond memories of taking a sick day from middle school and laying on the couch while your grandma brought you some “funny books,” there’s something out there for everyone.

Sometime you learn new things about your home state. Sometimes those things break your heart.

Emelle.

I’ve never been there. Evidently, the 2000 census says only 31 people live there.

Emelle: site of great sadness, threat to us all.

1978. Enter Waste Management. There is a lot to say about this company. What exists on the Interwebs is not attractive, but is potent. It earns over $16 billion a year. And because of it, Emelle is home to the largest hazardous waste dump in the nation (and maybe the world).

From a 1992 case decided by the United States Supreme Court (504 U.S. 334):

The parties do not dispute that the wastes and substances being landfilled at the Emelle facility “include substances that are inherently dangerous to human health and safety and to the environment. Such waste consists of ignitable, corrosive, toxic and reactive wastes which contain poisonous and cancer-causing chemicals and which can cause birth defects, genetic damage, blindness, crippling and death.” Increasing amounts of out-of-state hazardous wastes are shipped to the Emelle facility for permanent storage each year. From 1985 through 1989, the tonnage of hazardous waste received per year has more than doubled, increasing from 341,000 tons in 1985 to 788,000 tons by 1989. Of this, up to 90% of the tonnage permanently buried each year is shipped in from other States.

A pretty comprehensive discussion of the dump at Emelle lives on the University of Michigan servers here. I wish that the person who did the coding for the page knew how to make all of the punctuation marks show up as actual punctuation marks and not as little question marks. Other than that, it’s a good start.

Here’s where the science kicks in. The Emelle dump is over the Cretaceous Eutaw aquifer. According to some academics from Auburn,

Over 50 million gallons of water per day is pumped from the Eutaw aquifer reaching more than 650,000 people in 20 counties. The quality of drinking water supplied to this increasingly large population has been the concern of many in recent years. Although many have studied the geology of the coastal plain, elevated metal (iron, manganese, and strontium) content, water-sediment interaction, and influence of subsurface microorganisms on groundwater chemistry remain insufficiently understood. Preliminary data indicate that high alkalinity levels correlate with high metal concentrations in groundwater.

This does not make me happy. Further, hydrologists writing articles about the aquifer point out that it has an important filtering role. And this is where our drinking water comes from.

So then there’s this red-text-on-powder-blue-background webpage, which links up to this 1991 Greenpeace report.

It’s frustrating because all of the information on this dump appears to be dated. Obviously it was a hot issue to battle with Waste Management Inc. back in the 1990s. Maybe everyone has simply gotten burned out on the issue. Or maybe they were right to pick out a super poor part of Alabama with low population density for their dump. Hard to get people organized out there, especially when the corporation is pumping the “jobs” angle.

That’s what we’ve seen in other environmental justice fiascos here in Alabama. For example, over in Perry County (Be sure to click on the video). Local leaders have been bought off. People take poison because they think it’ll help their pocketbooks. Slightly different deal over in Anniston with the military and the chemical weapons incinerator. People will take risks with their health (and the health of their children) if they think there’s a buck to be made. And as long as Alabama remains poor (and those poor people remain disorganized and short-sighted), we’ll remain the dumping ground for the trash of the nation.

Alabama: America’s Toilet. Just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as our actual slogan.

There’s a classic Chris Rock piece that will probably be removed from YouTube by the time I link to it (but it can probably be easily found again anyway). It’s about medicine and how humans no longer cure diseases. He’s talking about how the last disease that was really cured was polio and how drug companies no longer attempt to cure diseases because they make true profits, not by eradicating something from human experience forever, but by marketing various mitigation techniques that require repeat purchasing.

“Ain’t no money in the cure! The money is in the medicine!”

The idea of getting paid “on the come back” is what I thought about when I read this Jeffrey Smith post about Eli Lilly over at the Huffington Post. Readers of this blog know that I like Jeffrey Smith and the Institute for Responsible Technology. They have some of the best stuff about GMOs around. And this piece is about bovine growth hormone. And it even ties back to Kate’s great post about breast cancer since Breast Cancer Action is a part of the Milking Cancer campaign. There’s an 18 minute film here.

And while we are on the subject of brief Internet films, here is a well-worth-your-time 10 minute movie about the lawyers who authorized torture. It’s by the Alliance for Justice and it’s called Tortured Law. It’s worth your time, whether you are a product of law school or simply think that the United States ought to be above the world’s lowest common denominator when it comes to treatment of detainees.

And finally, rounding out the video recommendations is the most recent Adbusters ad that was rejected by the major networks. The ad is only a minute and can be seen here. The design is kind of tough on the eyes, but I think that’s intentional. I’m always interested when people refuse to simply take the money. The people who run the TV don’t want you to see images about brands and consumption habits. And that makes me want to see those things even more.

Because those flashing images are like the “sky flowers” that distract the zombies in George Romero’s Land of the Dead. We, of course, are the zombies. And we shuffle around in a stupor, while our minds are invaded by acts of psychic piracy and our ecosystems are invaded by cogon grass. More pesticides will solve anything.

We are armed with paper weapons. They are armed with Laserblasts.

So Errol Morris, superstar documentary filmmaker (among his films is one of my very favorite movies of all time: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), has a “blog” on the New York Times website. I put those quotes around “blog” because this is a website that really calls into question some of the fundamental assumptions of blogging – that blog posts are relatively short (here at Toxic Culture we sometimes push up against a thousand words, and people are constantly telling us that our posts are “too long”) and that in general, blogs don’t provide original content (the “Let’s see…What’s in the news today?” approach, and yes, we can all think of exceptions to this like the original reporting done at Talking Points Memo, etc., but that doesn’t change the major characteristics of the genre).

I became fascinated with Morris’ blog reading the Bamboozling Ourselves series (part one is here – it’s about forgeries in the same way that Infinite Jest is about movies) and branched out into the Whose Father Was He? series at the same time I was reading Drew Gilpin Faust’s sad and insightful book on death and the Civil War. It’s not just research. It’s the old time, serious academic research with primary source documents and meaningful history – a taste of high culture in a medium usually replete with the worst kind of auto-citation generated by digital Maoism and the confidence that nobody that matters will actually check your facts.

What I like about Morris’ blog isn’t just the writing (which is great) or the subject matter (which is, if there is such a thing, predictably idiosyncratic). In a certain way, what I appreciate is also the editing. You can feel the editor’s hand behind his posts, even just to give the go-ahead to do a three-part series on the origin of some Crimean War photographs, or the current (and, seriously, unbelievable and totally worth reading) series on a faked photograph from the FDR administration.

The New York Times today announced it would be cutting its newsrooms by 8%. Much has been written on the death of newspapers, and maybe a project like Morris’ blog is contributing to the problem, or maybe it is part of the solution. But I hope that even as the Times reconsiders and reformulates, they will have the wisdom and strength of purpose to keep on Morris and his redoubtable editor. There’s simply nothing else like this available online right now.

I’m not sure how I heard about the Jon McNaughton painting – somehow, in the mish-mash of the Internets, it came to my attention and has lived on my desktop for a few days as I scanned over its many details. See for yourself here. Special favorites include the absence of Martin Luther King, Jr. (litigation threats by the family, it appears – nice work replacing him with a soldier rather than a fellow practitioner of non-violence), “Mr. Hollywood,” and “The Professor.”

It is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Which you probably already knew if you were not living in a cave, due to the extreme saturation of pinkness that this month brings out in every visible surface.

The definitive work on this subject, as far as we’re concerned, is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Welcome to Cancerland. It was published in Harper’s in 2001 and is available read or download as a PDF file here (Go ahead. You should read it. Really. Ok, fine – just bookmark it for later, but promise you’ll go back to it.)

This year, there seems to be a lot of sporting involvement. We had the “Sports Illustrated” headline printed in pink for one issue and the NFL’s second year of pink – allowing some players to wear pink cleats and gloves while coaches can wear some pink too. Well, I wasn’t going to get a mammogram, but now that Chad Ochocinco has pink gloves, I’m reconsidering my position. It’s not just about “awareness” (is any woman in this country really not aware that she could die from breast cancer?); it’s also about contributing to foundations where some of your money will be spent on research (the NFL’s Referee Association gave a $14,000 check to the Komen Foundation this year, for example).

Whether that is the right research or not is a question that is likely to get you booted from any breast cancer type event; at the very least you’ll get some raised eyebrows even in the most liberal of groups if you are critical of American Cancer Society because they (like the Komen foundation) do not recognize the possibility that environmental factors like exposure to chlorinated organic pesticides contribute to breast cancer.

Perhaps you could try mentioning, by way of seeming like a conspiracy nut, that Zeneca Pharmaceutical (and now Astra-Zeneca) is the sole sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You might wonder out loud at the coincidence of Zeneca being a spinoff of Imperial Chemical Industries (now owned by Dutch company Akzo Nobel), which made a bunch of money marketing organophosphates as insecticides (there’s a whole crazy Internet rabbit hole to follow here with the people who say that this caused the BSE (“mad cow”) outbreak in the UK) and persistent pesticides. To be fair, Astra-Zeneca doesn’t make pesticides any longer – ICI spun Zeneca off as an independent company in 1993 – nine years after the Breast Cancer Awareness Month architecture had been put into place.

Turns out that the Cancer Prevention Coalition is very critical of the American Cancer Society and its resistance to investigating environmental causes of breast (and other) cancers. Also that the Zeneca spinoff doesn’t seem to have increased interest in research on the relationship between cancer and pesticides. Witness this 2001 press release cited in Ehrenreich’s article:

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., and the well-known physician activist Quentin Young castigated the American Cancer Society for its “longstanding track record of indifference and even hostility to cancer prevention. . . . Recent examples include issuing a joint statement with the Chlorine Institute justifying the continued global use of persistent organochlorine pesticides, and also supporting the industry in trivializing dietary pesticide residues
as avoidable risks of childhood cancer. ACS policies are further exemplified by allocating under 0.1 percent of its $700 million annual budget to environmental and occupational causes of cancer.”

You might be in the “better to do something than nothing” boat on this one (to be absolutely clear, we are NOT here advocating “do nothing not something”) and come down squarely in defense of the “it’s all about awareness” argument. Fine. It’s hard to argue with the benefits of awareness. Which is, as it turns out, a pretty awesome profit-making opportunity for folks selling everything from cars to safety pins. MSNBC trumpets this year’s pink products that will make you feel “healthy, gorgeous, pampered and happy.” Oprah’s got 26 “major bargains that support breast cancer research.” Good Housekeeping has a Think Pink showcase that includes everything from tank tops to tea kettles.

Because it’s so much better to buy the pink-accented tea kettle ($49.99; a minimum of 10% of the purchase price of the kettle will be donated to the Komen Foundation IF you go to the KitchenAid website and register your product) than it is to, say, give $5.00 or even $50 to the Foundation, even if you were okay with somewhere around 30% of the money being used for overhead and promotion-type activities, as the Foundation itself does not actually do the research, but instead funnels money to research.

What a bummer, right? I haven’t blogged in more than ten days (big writing project + other issues = Stephen coming through with a whole slew of awesome posts), and this is what I come back with? Tomorrow I promise a light-hearted and happy romp through the marvelous world of … well, we all know that’s not happening. It’s nice to be back.

What’s the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg?

One’s a flaming Nazi gasbag, the other’s a dirigible.

Comes now the news that the currently-sorry St. Louis Rams might be up for sale and Rush might be in the market to buy. Yes, Rush and Dave Checketts are looking to buy a team. Checketts, a Mormon who came up as the head of the Utah Jazz, owns the St. Louis hockey team. Limbaugh was spawned from some rancid womb in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. So he’s a local. Sort of.

If you haven’t already heard it, it’s worth using the Internet to find a recording of comedian Bill Hicks talking about Rush. His opinions, while extreme, are increasingly widely-held. There simply isn’t time or space to chronicle all of the flaws with Rush. Hell, it’s quicker to say that I actually think he occasionally makes some funny jokes and I admire his ability to run a radio show, and I pretty much loathe everything else about him.

But I’m not alone! The NFL Players Union agrees! The Executive Director of the union, DeMaurice Smith, was quoted as saying about Rush’s ownership bid:

“I’ve spoken to the Commissioner [Roger Goodell] and I understand that this ownership consideration is in the early stages. But sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.”

And others are coming out and going public too! Noted sports blog Deadspin speculated whether black players would even agree to play for a Limbaugh-owned team. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who would get to vote with other owners about whether to allow Rush into the ownership club, vowed to vote against Limbaugh. Commissioner  Goodell said the conservative commentator’s “divisive” comments would not be tolerated from any NFL insider.

I find all of this interesting, not just because I like the NFL and not just because I hope for bad things to happen to the career and finances of a noted hatemonger. I find it particularly interesting whenever groups come together and act to check the forces of capitalism. In a world where people didn’t care, the Rams would be sold from the family of dead crazy lady, “Madam Ram,” Georgia Frontiere, to the highest bidder.

But people care. People are drawing a line in the sand. They are saying that the team won’t simply go to the highest bidder. They are saying that they will circle the wagons and police the borders of the elite club of hyper-rich team owners. And players might not play simply for a paycheck. They might actually boycott a chance at wealth and fame if faced with the prospects of playing for a team owned by a racist. Maybe.

And it’s those glimmers of hope, those prospects of possible refusal to simply follow the dollar to its logical end … it’s those moments that I live for and wish to try to create. Here’s hoping that Rush’s bid is blocked. Here’s hoping that none of the civic joy that could possibly stem from a city’s relationship with a sports franchise is ever linked to Limbaugh’s stained name. And here’s hoping the money he hopes to spend on the Rams is sunk and lost in some sort of Madoff scheme as he sits in some darkened bathtub wolfing down stolen pills.

Update: Mission accomplished.

One of the neat features of having a blog on WordPress is that you have a user toolbar up at the top of your screen when you log into WordPress. This is not only a useful way to edit your own blog, but gives you some neat options when looking through other WordPress blogs. My favorite of these is, “Random Post.” It obviously does what you think it does, taking you to a random page on a given blog.

I like using it on our own blog, here at Toxic Culture, just clicking through and re-reading some of our old posts, seeing if the links still work (about half do), remembering things I have forgotten that I’d written. So I was looking through some old posts and came across this one, which was about the disparity between the revolutionary optimism of Bob Marley and the actual political realities of Zimbabwe.

So I started following some of the links and went to this great blog (a bit slow to load, but worth it).

That’s how I came across this interesting video from Amnesty International about a little something called Murambatsvina. It’s a word used to refer to a government program of mass forced evictions. And it constitutes a heaping addition to the already sizable damning case against Robert Mugabe.

I know this may not be new to many readers, since it began several years ago, but it as news to me. Thus, consider from the International Crisis Group:

the Zimbabwe government collectively mounted a brutal, ill-managed campaign against its own citizens. Whatever its intent — the urban clean-up claimed by authorities, or more sinister efforts to punish and break up the political opposition lest resentment explode into revolution — that campaign has exacerbated a desperate situation in a country already sliding downhill for a half-decade.

Learning about this terror led me to a report from July 2005 produced by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka. The report is here (PDF), but I’ll provide a (long-ish) snippet of the executive summary:

On 19 May 2005, with little or no warning, the Government of Zimbabwe embarked on an operation to “clean-up” its cities. It was a “crash”operation known as “Operation Murambatsvina”, referred to in this report as Operation Restore Order. It started in the Zimbabwe capital, Harare, and rapidly evolved into a nationwide demolition and eviction campaign carried out by the police and the army. Popularly referred to as “Operation Tsunami” because of its speed and ferocity it resulted in the destruction of homes, business premises and vending sites. It is estimated that some 700,000 people in cities across the country have lost either their homes, their source of livelihood or both. Indirectly, a further 2.4 million people have been affected in varying degrees. Hundreds of thousands of women, men and children were made homeless, without access to food, water and sanitation, or health care. Education for thousands of school age children has been disrupted. Many of the sick, including those with HIV and AIDS, no longer have access to care. The vast majority of those directly and indirectly affected are the poor and disadvantaged segments of the population. They are, today, deeper in poverty, deprivation and destitution, and have been rendered more vulnerable.

Operation Restore Order took place at a time of persistent budget deficits, triple-digit inflation, critical food and fuel shortages and chronic shortages of foreign currency. It was implemented in a highly polarized political climate characterized by mistrust, fear and a lack of dialogue between Government and local authorities, and between the former and civil society. There is no doubt therefore that the preliminary assessment contained in this report constitutes but a partial picture of the far-reaching and long-term social, economic, political and institutional consequences.

Not sure exactly what to say about that sort of stuff other than it somewhat puts our battle for universal health care in perspective somewhat and also points to how far we have to go in a world where we continue to talk the talk about a global international order of democracy and civil society. While Obama is given an important prize and celebrated for promoting peace and liberty around the world (while fighting two wars and continuing renditions and torture), these kinds of things happen in places like Zimbabwe while we talk (even briefly) about a Michael Jackson single released from beyond the grave or a spat between the White House and Fox News.

Anyway, Zimbabwe. Sad. Blogging will pick back up now that the Columbus Day holiday is behind us. Thanks for reading.

I have written before about the stocking of Obama’s cabinet. But much to my post facto puzzlement, there was nothing in my In Come the Ghouls post about the EPA. How could I have skipped over Lisa Jackson and the nation’s leading federal eco-agency? No idea. Let’s remedy that now.

Let’s remember, Bush appointed Christine Todd Whitman to be the head of the EPA. So why not replace one lady from New Jersey with another one? I mean, after all, it’s called the Garden State, right? So it’s got to be a lush and verdant state, full of environmental awareness and wholism. What better place from which to draw our nation’s most important environmental policymaker?

Lisa Jackson was on Bill Maher’s show on October 2. Skip ahead to 6:00. The interview goes until 14:30 and you can tell that Bill is pretty disgusted with her. Be sure to watch the part where he calls her out on trying to dodge his question about the environmental consequences of the meat industry.

New Jersey, with more Superfund sites than any other state in the nation, has produced this shining knight of the federal executive. Let’s take a look at some of the slivers from her career in Bon Jovi’s home:

Here is “The Lisa of Our Concerns,” from the always good (but for some reason never on my list of things to read) publication called Grist. State environmentalists seem split, but the “some good, some bad” picture seems to come down more on the side of “some bad.” Spiegel from the Edison Wetlands Association has some particularly damning comments. The praise seems mostly to be that she was better than the previous people in her position, which seems like faint praise.

Grist continued with this piece, which has further interesting info about Jackson, including news of a scientist who quit in disgust at the way she was handling a toxic chromium issue.

Turns out she also supported cleanup of toxics by contractors hired by the same developers who caused the pollution in the first place. What could go wrong? Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club, was not pleased with that decision by Jackson.

From Bill Wolfe, a columnist in Jersey, rebutting the claim that she’s good on warming, but weak on toxics:

Although Jackson is touted as a leader on global warming, few realize that she has done nothing to regulate green house gas emissions as NJ DEP Commissioner, despite having existing regulatory authority to do so. The Jackson record amounts to the same as the Bush policy – no regulation, no action, no reductions.

and again here, with an interesting and detailed outline of Jackson’s Sierra Club defenders and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

From John Bury, a long time New Jersey columnist:

In my opinion, Lisa Jackson has ably used NJ and the DEP as a stepping-stone to a federal position, leaving behind no legacy of environmental resource protection but only an outstanding record of self-preservation and self-publicity.

We’ll soon learn a lot about Lisa Jackson and how she’s running the EPA. The NRDC, for example, is worried that the Army Corps of Engineers is seeking to turn the Everglades into mining pits. Will the EPA allow it? Good news may be pending on other fronts too. Maybe.

Jackson has been going around talking about “undoing” a lot of the damage from the Bush administration, and no doubt there is a lot of truth to the fact that it will take some time to unravel the threads of 8 years of attacks. But it’s not like Clinton was anything but pro-corporate and indications are that Obama is also a dear and close friend of industry. We all know about the environmental thoughts of the Department of the Interior. We shall soon see to what extent the federal government truly prioritizes protection of that which cannot be replaced.