246. CANCER NATION

From the Archives (September 2006) I figured out today that 18 people in my family or immediate circle of friends or work peers have been diagnosed with cancer in the last 8 years.

Can somebody tell me what in the hell is going on?

I mean, I appreciate the medical research that (sometimes) gets my loved ones to the other side of chemo and all the medical breakthroughs and all that, but what is going on? Is our environment poisoning us because we’ve filled it so full of chemicals? Are the hormones they've put in our food to blame? Or what?

And what’s the connection with obesity (if there is one), because I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that larger portions at restaurants explains these statistics adequately.

Then there are those studies no one talks about that say that most people who are fat do not actually overeat and that some people who are fat are far healthier than thin people.

So what’s really making us grow?

And speaking of size, sales of wasteful SUVs are down 45 percent and sales of small cars are up 70 percent, thanks to the increasing gas prices.

Meanwhile, today’s Yahoo! headline is “GDP growth increases slightly in spring.”

I read that line and immediately thought about these 18 people who have been diagnosed with cancer.

Does anyone else consider it troubling that every time a person is diagnosed with cancer our GDP goes up?

190. DATA MINING WHILE RULING WITHOUT RESTRAINT

From the Archives

(February 2006) All this talk about NSA’s illegal data mining exploits reminds me of Mud’s bright yellow textbook that had the words “DATA MINING” splashed across it in huge block letters. I remember it well because every time I saw the thing I started humming we are miners, hard rock miners. To the shaft house we must go ... and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold. Yes I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.

But hey! Let's turn lemons into lemonade, shall we, and make this West Virginia’s new post-regulation theme song now that miners seem to be getting trapped or killed on a daily basis.

•

So don’t you find it odd that President Bush has suddenly discovered science and now says he wants to recruit 30 thousand math and science professionals into our public classrooms?

Hasn’t he made the connection between scientists leaving public education and his party’s Dark Ages attempts to force scientists to teach myth-based bullshit?

And why does he refer to Social Security as a so-called entitlement program when I’ve paid into it every month since I was sixteen years old?

The man talks about our nation falling behind in technology and scientific knowledge, then refers to the federal student loan program as an entitlement program too (as opposed to an intelligent investment in the future—one that gets paid back with interest, as I know all too well).

And does it strike anyone else as depressingly humorous that Bush actually bragged about his party’s “spending restraint” with a straight face yesterday?

Anyone with a brain can see that taking another scalpel to already lean social programs while hemorrhaging money in a war fought on false evidence while operating under the faith-based notion that the dollar will remain the exchange rate while handing even more money to the super-rich is not exactly showing fiscal restraint.

Maybe he meant to say the Republicans are restraining from paying home health-care providers and the working poor adequately (which seems more like ethical restraint to me).

When yesterday’s policy—clearly written by special interest lobbyists from the insurance and drug industries—passed, even Republican party members were acknowledging that this administration’s reverse-Robin-Hood approach is unsustainable (although they didn't always get the reasons right).

Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said “the present course is unsustainable. We can’t keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society.”

John Dingell (D-MI) said “the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber.”

Is the administration oblivious to the burgeoning lobbying scandal or do they believe that no one will make the connection to this special-interest butt-kissing and even more civil and criminal complaints that have just been announced against former insurance executives for apparent financial inproprieties?

Meanwhile, NPR ran an interesting show last night about health savings accounts, during which a guy from the Wall St. Journal said that each GM car has about $1,800 dollars in health-care costs rolled into its cost. These benefits makes it hard for US corporations to compete with overseas sweatshops.

The Republican solution is to quit offering health-care benefits to employees.

Why doesn’t it occur to these people that we can refuse to do business with overseas sweatshops instead and force human rights issues onto the table?

(Wouldn't be prudent?)

Remember that bumpersticker: The Labor Movement. We’re the folks that brought you the weekend?

Meanwhile, these corporations are raking in profits and getting tax breaks hand over fist right now.

For instance, if you want to get really pissed, take a look at the record oil company profits that occurred as we paid outrageous gas and heating bills.

The climate is right for corporations to shit on laborers and customers right now though.

Here’s another quote that references yesterday’s bill (that passed): “A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich” (Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY).

Where’s the goddamn outrage?

But, as Tom at tomdispatch.com notes, “This disconnect between the garnering of potentially staggering powers to rule without restraint and the incapacity to use them for the well-being of just about anyone on the planet (other than a few friends and cronies) is now a major part of our domestic landscape.”

READING: tax documents.

LISTENING TO: someone’s stupid car alarm

SANG IN SHOWER: Why should I keep loving you when I know that you are not true? And why should I call your name when you’re to blame for making me bluuuuuuue?

BEST OF SPAM: Before i wrote you,i prayed that you will be a honest and reliable person whom i can work with to achieve this deal of our life.From my section in the bank, I discovered an abandoned sum of EIGHTEEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS...

184. TRANSITIONING INTO THE NEW HUMANITY

From the Archives

(January 2005) Headline on Yahoo! today: “Shatner sells kidney stone to charity.”

Huh. I wonder if it will try to rap, entertain its new owner....

If that’s not disturbing enough, then here’s news from Kiplinger’s: if you’re one of those consumers who charged $232 billion on your Visa between November 1 and Christmas Day, then you’ll be pleased to know that your government is concerned about your credit-card debt so—even though you have probably not gotten a substantial raise in 5 years and even though the cost-of-living has gone up substantially and even though your heating and transportation costs have doubled—nevertheless, your friendly Big Brother has issued new federal guidelines that require creditors to double your minimum credit-card payments.

Meanwhile, the coauthors of the million-copy selling, New Age Medicine Cards deck and the memoir Crossing into Medicine Country are also looking out for us.

(People are so NICE, aren’t they? I mean, all this charity has inspired me to do a Sally chant: They like me. They really liiiiiiike me!).

Yep, the Medicine Card folks are now publishing 2012 Oracle: Transitioning into the New Humanity, and well before 2012! This divinatory deck and accompanying book are “intended to help guide humanity through immense world change heralded for 2012 by the Bible Code, Nostradamus, astrology, and the Mayan calendar.”

(Why not go all out and include the fucking Code of fucking Hammurabi in that list too?)

Well, clearly, I best rush right out and purchase this deck since I like to plan ahead for such momentous life events.

I wonder, though, if these co-authors might need to make a slight adjustment in their calculations. I mean, our boy dictator apparently believes that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. And we know he’s competitive. So surely he’ll notice soon enough that he and his party and their corporate interests haven’t quite controlled the Press as much as, say, dictators in Chile and El Salvador were able to do.

Nope, he just hasn’t gone far enough.

If he believes that our ancestors walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, then the Medicine Card folks better adjust their oracle transitions to fit these beliefs or he’ll prohibit them from publishing this information.

Meanwhile MSN is looking out for us (there are angels everywhere!) by publishing this depressing list of

THE TEN WORST THINGS YOU CAN EAT
Hydrogenated/Trans fats > These manufactured fats are used in bakery items and margarine. Studies indicate that it isn't so much how much fat you consume, but what kind you consume. These are the worst, so better avoid cookies, crackers, baked goods etc. that include hydrogenated oil in their ingredient list.
Olestra > This fake fat is used in the manufacturing of fat-free potato chips and other snack foods. It binds with fat-soluble vitamins A, E, D and K and carotenoids—substances believed to keep the immune system healthy and prevent some cancers—and eliminates them. Proctor and Gamble, Olestra’s producer, has acknowledged the problem with vitamins and is now fortifying their um food-like stuff with them. Olestra causes some serious digestive problems in many people too and environmentalists suggest that, since Olestra does not break down, it is incredibly harmful to our environment.
Nitrates > Nitrates are used in many foods, especially cured meats such as bacon and hot dogs, to preserve color and maintain microbial safety. Nitrate is harmless, but it can convert to nitrite, which can form nitrosamines, a powerful cancer-causing chemical, in your body so, whenever possible, look for nitrate-free preserved meats. If consuming foods containing nitrates, have a glass of orange juice at the same time (for instance, orange juice with your morning bacon), since Vitamin C is known to inhibit conversion to nitrosamines in your stomach.
Alcohol > This one item has created more problems than all the rest put together. Of course, it is possible to consume alcohol wisely and safely. Just stick to that one glass of red wine for its healthful side effects, exercise caution, and don’t overdo it.

(Damn it! Now that is just not fair!)

Raw oysters > Raw oysters can carry a deadly bacteria that can cause severe illness or death so are marketed strictly in the "buyer beware" category. You take a big risk every time you consume them raw.
Saturated animal fats > That means fatty meats, especially beef and pork, or the skin on poultry. It also includes full-fat dairy products such as cheese, milk and cream. Fatty meat and dairy products do have some contributions to make to a diet, but none that can't be found elsewhere.
Soda > Drinking soda is a poor way to get fluids. They are full of sugar or artificial sweeteners and often contain caffeine, artificial colors and flavors. Substitute homemade soda by mixing sparkling water with fresh, 100 percent juice.
Low-acid home-canned foods > Home canning can be dangerous for foods low in acid such as green beans, carrots, or other garden vegetables. The potential of botulism is high because home canners often do not reach the temperatures and pressures necessary to kill the botulism spores that may contaminate the food. Low-acid home-canned foods are one of the main causes of food poisoning.
High-fat snacks, chips > Even if they are made with vegetable oil, they should be minimized. The balance of fat in our diets has shifted too far to the omega-6 variety (found in most processed vegetable oils) and it is thought that consuming too many of omega-6 fats may lead to certain chronic diseases. Focus on fruits and non-fat whole grains for snacking instead.
Liquid meals > They aren't inherently bad for you, but they do keep you from eating whole, natural foods that contain more nutrients and fiber and disease-fighting phytochemicals. They may be okay for people who are too sick to eat, but don't let them displace the real foods in your diet.

Finally, my advice (’cause hey I’m looking out for you too, wink wink): just don’t even look at the number of nitrates that are now allowed under the revised-for-corporate-gain-at-the-expense-of-your-health “organic” label. It’s too depressing.

All right. Back to work now. Mush, mush!

183. KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, OR ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR ÜBERLIBERAL RANTING

From the Archives

(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.

“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”

I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.

I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.

I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.

When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.

Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.

... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!

Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.

The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.

In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.

The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.

If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.

(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)

It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.

Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.

In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.

Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.

•

So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:

WATER PRAYER
by Stuart Kestenbaum (From The Sun magazine (12.2005)

And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.

LISTENING TO: the tea kettle starting to boil

READING: The Sun magazine

182. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES

From the Archives

(January 2006) Okay does anyone see a pattern here? We withhold body armor from soldiers then mortality rates rise. We destroy our environment then hotter oceans yield stronger hurricanes and tsunamis. We destroy barrier islands then hurricanes hit cities full force. We deregulate, then inspectors who once drove their Chevies to the levees to see if they’re dry and structurally sound wind up bagging groceries somewhere. We lower taxes to the point that chronically understaffed offices can no longer perform vital services such as visiting mines to ensure compliance, then trapped miners die waiting for missing rescuers to arrive.

There’s a gap we’re not minding here, a critical black hole into which the cause-and-effect rationale of people who complain about long lines at the DMV while demanding further tax cuts has been sucked.

Meanwhile, 5 million more of us slipped into poverty in the last four years even as the conservative bobbleheads insisted that our economy is fine, and middle- and lower-class citizens experienced substantial cost-of-living increases alongside a 40-percent rise in health-care costs.

Molly Ivins points out that the federal minimum wage has held steady at $5.15/hour since 1997 even though the Economic Policy Institute reports that inflation has eroded away minimum wage’s buying power to its second-lowest level since the fifties.

The gap between (vanishing) middle-class workers and the super-rich is the largest ever recorded, yet no one’s calling it the new gilded age. Yet.

Conservatives argue that increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses and causes layoffs, but there’s ample evidence to prove otherwise.

Meanwhile, Democrats are holding strategic sessions to determine how to best pepper their speeches with more religious and “moral” phrases. But bless Edwards’s lobbyist-fed heart, at least he is saying publicly that “the poverty thing” is a moral issue.

•

I forgot to include one key event in my recap of 2005: Bill Frist watched a video of Terri Schiavo then declared that she “certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” even though her autopsy revealed that she was blind.

(It is, as Paul Simon says, an age of miracles though, isn’t it?)

Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who isn’t glad that 2005 is behind them. As Molly Ivins says, “With a few, shining exceptions (such as Cindy Sheehan) we can bid adieu to 2005 without great regret. Or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said to a reporter earlier this year, "Adios, mo-fo."

SANG IN SHOWER: “Slipsliding Away” by Paul Simon

READING: Hoppin’ John’s Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah Dining at Home in the Lowcountry cookbook (gotta find that poached pear recipe before this weekend)

BEST-OF SPAM: We cure any disease!