tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41199432024-03-14T01:43:03.793-07:00Anglachel's JournalYou say I'm a bitch as if that were a bad thing...Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.comBlogger1041125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-81323918217393111602012-02-08T09:06:00.000-08:002012-02-08T09:07:50.244-08:00UncharitableThe Komen Foundation is backing down from their stance on Planned Parenthood for one reason and one reason only - it's costing them money. They will try to figure out some way to reimpose the ban, probably by lumping PP with a group of other donation recipients and declaring that this type (what ever the criteria) will no longer get donations. Or they might declare that they will only donate to accredited research institutions. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
My counter-intuitive take on this is it's probably better for PP not to receive money from Komen. The local PP organization, for San Diego and Imperial Counties, does not take Komen funds. They probably will get more money from the bad publicity over the Komen misstep than they were getting from the foundation.<br />
<br />
My take on Komen itself is more complicated. On the one hand, I work with a number of women of all political stripes, several of whom are breast cancer survivors, who always do the Komen walk. They display pink ribbons (on lapel pins, shoe laces, security card lanyards, coffee mugs, etc.) to show their support of each other first and foremost, and for all women who contract this form of cancer. Their loyalty to the foundation is not so clear cut. It's just the pink-ribbon group that sponsors the annual walk and sells the merchandise. What matters is the community that provides the face-to-face support. Some of these women are fine with PP, some are not, but they are all behind the pink ribbon.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, I look at the foundation and I see another Whole Foods operation - something that appeals to the warm and fuzzies of a certain socioeconomic and cultural class and makes them feel virtuous, all the while pouring millions of dollars into right-wing coffers.<br />
<br />
Unlike Whole Foods, which really is merely a grand exercise in self-delusion and any "liberal" who shops there deserves every rabid right wing politician in their immediate vicinity (Why not? You're paying for them...), there is a significant disconnect between the Komen parent organization and the women (and men) who are using it as a focal point for their own personal participation and show of solidarity. <br />
<br />
Komen itself is an anti-charity. If it could not skim funds and redirect money to business associates and personal friends, it would cease to exist, just like a wide swath of other "charitable" operations. There is no reforming it because it doesn't actually exist to support medical research. It exists to enrich its top operatives and its business partners, just like any other large corporation.<br />
<br />
But what about the very real community actions that happen under its umbrella, which are charitable and done for the sake of loved ones, friends and people the actors will never meet but for whom they have only compassion?<br />
<br />
These are not trivial concerns. Self-righteously declaring the local participants to be suffering from some kind of false consciousness or saying "they" need to support some other organization doesn't address the reasons for the support in the first place. It is not as simple as shopping somewhere else, where barriers for exiting one choice (Whole Foods) and entering another (locally owned grocery) are low and transactions are easily interchangeable. The disconnect between personal beliefs and corporate behavior is not so stark. It's not a transactional relationship imbued with emotions - it is emotional commitment and a public expression of compassion.<br />
<br />
To do battle with an entrenched organization takes much more than loudly declaring your disgust with the operation. There must be something to replace it and a clear path to adopting the alternative in a way that appeals to actors' identity.<br />
<br />
This is the lesson for any attempt to modify entrenched habits and actions. <br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-83341046097955080552012-02-06T17:25:00.000-08:002012-02-06T17:25:51.462-08:00More Than I Can SayI have a lot I'd like to blog about. I haven't finished the OWS writeup. The presidential primary is turning out to be far more entertaining than I had thought it would be. There's a bunch of political theory bumping around in my head waiting to be turned into words. There's more good stuff for online security and Teh Dumb that surrounds the glorification of hacktivists. But there's just more out there to talk about than I have the energy to cover.<br />
<br />
My company has entered its death spiral and the daily up and down from that is consuming most of my mental energy. I come home drained. My off-hours are now filled with preparing for the job hunt. That gets launched in March. Until that gets sorted out, there won't be too much on the blog. I may get bursts of inspiration, but a post or two per month is probably all that's going to happen.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-55340602830867644352012-02-02T20:18:00.000-08:002012-02-11T07:48:38.627-08:00Rotten to the CoreDear Apple defenders,<br />
<br />
I don't give a damn about Apple as a corporation. I am only interested in Apple as a cultural phenomenon. However, if you wish to encounter <i>real</i> criticism of Apple's corporate practices, not some fluff by the NYT, please read William Black's two analysis pieces about Apple as a criminal fraud operation:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/01/anti-employee-control-fraud.html" target="_blank">Anti-employee Control Fraud</a> - In this article, Black discusses the nature of this kind of white-collar crime, how it functions, why it drives ethical corporations out of business, and how international supply chains encourage this behavior. </li>
<li><a href="http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/01/new-york-times-ode-to-foxconn-and-anti.html" target="_blank">The New York Times’ Ode to Foxconn and Anti-Employee Control Fraud</a> - In the second article, Black goes through the New York Time's article and it's failure to really interrogate the discrepancies in the accounts given by and about Foxconn. </li>
</ul>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Black's evaluation of Apple is unyielding: <span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">"Apple creates a
criminogenic environment in its supplier selection process that leads it to,
pervasively, hire criminal suppliers." The explicit and documented treatment of labor in this supply chain is, on the face of it, criminal.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span><br />
So, go argue with him about the facts of the case. My interest in Apple is as a signifier of a particular mentality among the cultural elite - let's call them Whole Foods Nation - that wants others (like me) to ratify their consumer purchases (phones, canned beans, presidents) as markers of cultural, moral and intellectual superiority.<br />
<br />
Use whatever gadget you want, but don't lie to yourself about the very brutal world of global manufacturing where it was produced.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-1542259334112731222012-01-31T20:41:00.000-08:002012-01-31T20:41:25.854-08:00Decisions, DecisionsPoor Wall Street. They have such a hard choice this election year.<br />
<br />
Should they vote for the candidate they own who occasionally makes tsk-tsk noises about them in speeches and only delivers 99% of what they want, but who makes them feel like they've done something morally daring, even hip, by voting for a black dude, or should they put their weight behind the candidate they own who loudly proclaims their greatness in speeches and will be even more obliging in policy, but who may wear goofy underdrawers?<br />
<br />
Decisions, decisions, decisions....<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-5591287197111767852012-01-29T18:34:00.000-08:002012-01-29T18:34:19.104-08:00Weekly Menu - January 29Here's what's on the menu for this week around here.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Last week the menu got messed up because I got sick during the week. The black-eyed peas for Friday didn't get cooked, so they are back for this week.<br />
<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5">
<colgroup>
<col></col>
<col></col>
<col></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Sunday</td>
<td valign="top">Goan Beef Curry</td>
<td valign="top">Cardamom, fennel, cloves, cinnamon, fenugreek, black pepper, cumin, onions, garlic, ginger,
tri-tip strips, turmeric, chili powder, coconut milk, potatoes</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Monday</td>
<td valign="top">Lentils and Sausage</td>
<td valign="top">Spices, onions, garlic, ginger, tri-tip, coconut milk, potatoes</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Tuesday</td>
<td valign="top">Drunken Noodles</td>
<td valign="top">Rice noodles, garlic, eggplant, bell pepper, tofu, fish sauce, kecap manis, soy sauce, sambal oelek</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Wednesday</td>
<td valign="top">Mushroom and Sausage Pasta</td>
<td valign="top">Mushrooms, porcinis, red wine, stock, olive oil, shallots, garlic, sausage, sour cream, pasta</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Thursday</td>
<td valign="top">Reshteh from freezer</td>
<td valign="top">Soup and roasted vegetables</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Friday</td>
<td valign="top">Black-eye Peas and Bulgur</td>
<td valign="top">Bulgur, black-eye peas, canned tomatoes, red onion, walnuts, spices, sausage, potato, sambal oelek</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Saturday</td>
<td valign="top">Five Spice Ginger Beef</td>
<td valign="top">Flank steak, orange juice, Hoisin sauce, ginger, 5 spice, chili paste, rice vinegar, soy sauce, rice</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Sunday</td>
<td valign="top">Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes</td>
<td valign="top">Pork chops, spices, shallots, butter, prunes, white wine, chicken stock, couscous</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
New on the menu are Drunken Noodles, the Black-eyed peas and the Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes. The Reshteh is a Persian mixed lentil and greens soup we made for New Years and then froze about half of it to enjoy later. I'll be roasting some fennel and carrots in pomegranate molasses to go with it.<br />
<br />
There's not many meatless meals, though in two I just have sausage as a condiment supporting lentils and mushrooms. Drunken noodles, Reshteh and Black-eyed peas are meatless. <br />
<br />
Here's how the costs break down: <br />
<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5">
<colgroup>
<col></col>
<col></col>
<col></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<th valign="top">Meal</th>
<th valign="top">Serves</th>
<th valign="top">Cost</th>
<th valign="top">Cost/serving</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Goan Beef Curry</td>
<td valign="top">4</td>
<td valign="top">$8.53</td>
<td valign="top">$2.13</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Lentils and Sausage</td>
<td valign="top">4</td>
<td valign="top">$2.49</td>
<td valign="top">$0.62</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Drunken Noodles</td>
<td valign="top">2</td>
<td valign="top">$3.61</td>
<td valign="top">$1.81</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Mushroom and Sausage Pasta</td>
<td valign="top">6</td>
<td valign="top">$7.08</td>
<td valign="top">$1.18</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Reshteh from freezer</td>
<td valign="top">12</td>
<td valign="top">$10.65</td>
<td valign="top">$0.89</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Black-eye Peas and Bulgur</td>
<td valign="top">4</td>
<td valign="top">$4.01</td>
<td valign="top">$1.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Five Spice Ginger Beef</td>
<td valign="top">2</td>
<td valign="top">$6.80</td>
<td valign="top">$3.40</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes</td>
<td valign="top">4</td>
<td valign="top">$4.91</td>
<td valign="top">$1.23</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Things with meat cost most, especially things with beef. The 5-spice ginger beef is double or triple other meals entirely due to the cost of the flank steak. The pork & prunes don't end up costing so much because the pork chops were super cheap. The mushroom pasta is the surprise higher ticket item because of the mushrooms (over $3.00) and the sour cream. The sausage adds only .86 cents to the entire meal. It does serve a large number. Things with beans are the cheapest (lentils and sausage, reshteh, black-eyed peas. The tofu dish is more costly, despite the lack of meat, because of many fresh vegetables and a lot of condiments that collectively add up.What do we do with the extra servings? Lunches, snacks and freezing. <br />
<br />
I'm about to sit down to the Goan Curry, which has been bubbling away in a crock pot since noon. It has certainly made the house smell divine, so I suspect it will taste yummy.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-91751393138491428252012-01-29T17:14:00.000-08:002012-01-29T17:14:04.525-08:00Reality Check on Grocery CostsIn early January I put up a post <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2012/01/grocery-costs-at-casa-anglachel.html" target="_blank">Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel</a>, talking about my shopping habits and spending in 2011. A few days ago, an article was posted in the local paper, the Union-Tribune, about <a href="http://web.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jan/25/restaurant-menu-prices-on-the-rise/?page=2#article" target="_blank">restaurant menu prices going up</a>. The article included a table on wholesale food cost increases, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Looks like I have managed to miss most inflation, probably because of the kinds of food we buy. From the article:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent numbers, wholesale food prices were up 6.1 percent in December compared with a year earlier — the highest increase since 2007. Some of the more notable increases were in beef and veal, which soared 16.1 percent; dairy, which rose 12 percent; and pasta products, 19.3 percent. ...</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The consensus is we’re in an era of high, volatile and rising food costs, and it’s pretty unlikely we’re going to see a big drop-off in any of the major categories that are so critical for operators, like proteins, dairy and grains,” said industry analyst Bob Goldin of Technomic, a research and consulting firm. “Operators are highly reluctant to raise menu prices in this kind of economic climate, but they’re doing so out of economic necessity.” </blockquote>
These price increases are at a wholesale level and the types of food purchased at restaurants are not the same as what gets purchased by grocery stores (you're not going to find "Prime" beef at Ralph's), but there is no reason to believe that food inflation and the categories where prices are rising are not also affecting the grocery stories. <br />
<div class="inline-right imarB10">
<h4 class="borB1S padB3 marB5 block">
Wholesale food cost changes</h4>
<style type="text/css">
table.tableizer-table {border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;} .tableizer-table td {padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #ccc;}
.tableizer-table th {background-color: #7BA3CB; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold;}
</style>
<br />
<table class="tableizer-table">
<tbody>
<tr class="tableizer-firstrow"><th>Food categories</th><th>Change from Dec. 2010</th></tr>
<tr><td>Wholesale foods</td><td>6.1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Fruits and melons</td><td>-12.9</td></tr>
<tr><td>Vegetables</td><td>-2.0</td></tr>
<tr><td>Eggs</td><td>7.8</td></tr>
<tr><td>Bakery</td><td>5.0</td></tr>
<tr><td>Rice</td><td>1.7</td></tr>
<tr><td>Pasta</td><td>19.3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Beef and veal</td><td>16.1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Pork</td><td>7.1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Processed chickens</td><td>5.7</td></tr>
<tr><td>Processed turkeys</td><td>9.6</td></tr>
<tr><td>Seafood</td><td>2.0</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dairy products</td><td>12.0</td></tr>
<tr><td>Roasted coffee</td><td>13.3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Shortening and oils</td><td>16.3</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h6>
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics</h6>
</div>
Pasta costs more because of the wheat shortage of last year driven by the fires and drought in various areas of the world. Meat's going up because the meat industry relies on the oil industry and those prices are going up, from fertilizers for feed to having to drive delivery trucks to deliver perishable goods. I know dairy and meat are up for me for the year. Vegetables remain a decent buy, though quality varies more than price. I can usually count on getting 4 bunches of radishes for a $1 at my produce store, but they can range from fantastic to not worth buying. <br />
<br />
If restaurants are convinced that prices are going up <i>and staying up</i> such that they must raise menu prices, then food costs are up for us all. This will hit and hurt more the lower your household income is combined with how many mouths you're feeding.<br />
<br />
Ordinary families are seeing their non-discretionary food costs go up at a time when their incomes are stagnant or falling. The people who caused the economic mess are not affected by this. They always have plenty of dollars to spend on the best quality food (cook in, eat out). This is a concrete fact OWS should be using.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-77456834431657423032012-01-29T15:14:00.000-08:002012-01-29T15:14:02.618-08:00Rotten ApplesThere is nothing so annoying as an Apple fanboi/grrl. Especially when they are probably just some shill hired by Apple to search The Interwebz and post pro-Apple comments to blogs that have said something less than complimentary about their gizmos. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
No kidding. I've received a few critical comments about the <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2012/01/occupation.html" target="_blank">Occupation</a> post which is no more than I expected (and a response is forthcoming) but reactions to the substance of the post are nothing in comparison to the inundation of my inbox by helpful Apple defenders trying to show me the errors of my way. <br />
<br />
Jesus, you freaks, give it a fucking break, will ya?<br />
<br />
New flash - the article wasn't about you or Steve Jobs or Apple, except as cultural types or patterns of industrial production. <br />
<br />
The hinge of the article is Chris Bowers' post from back in 2008 trying to convert a political process - a way of determining the distribution of social and political goods - into a triumph of culture - down with poor working class whites, up with the "creative class" - and the resultant confusion of political success with cultural expression.<br />
<br />
To the degree that the self-identified creative class loves owning electronic gadgets produced under inhumane conditions and delivered with an outrageous retail markup and to the degree they can't stop shopping at a grocery store chain they want to think of as in line with their liberal, green, organic life-style, but is owned and operated by a radical right-winger who takes their money and spends it on conservative political causes, that is the degree to which this cultural class works against its political self-interest.<br />
<br />
Responses that try to convince me that Apple isn't as bad a corporate citizen as [Microsoft/Oracle/Google/IBM/Exxon/Walmart/you name it] or that if I would only TRY Apple, I, too, would understand its magical appeal [Sorry, the aesthetic is completely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999" target="_blank"><i>Space:1999</i></a> and my user experience of these products is meh] or you feel <i>so sorry</i> for me being <i>such</i> a hater, and so forth are wasted on me.<br />
<br />
I am not interested in your products as such. If someone else likes them, that's fine by me. I don't care. My focus is on why the left in the US continues to suck so badly in the political arena, and the kinds of cultural biases that Apple products appeal to are part of this analysis.<br />
<br />
I'm just thinking differently about this than you are.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-75312889141701289512012-01-29T14:05:00.000-08:002012-01-29T14:05:30.319-08:00What Riverdaughter Says<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The left blogosphere might want to think about that for awhile. If it thinks that nothing it does makes a difference to the powers that be, maybe it should try dissenting and allow the pain of independence work its magic. DON’T say you’re going to vote for the bastards even if they treat you like shit. And then mean it. They’re counting on you to go along with the crowd in order to alleviate that pain and fear. Peer pressure only works if you let it. And those of us who have resisted from the beginning can’t reason with you to make you see our point of view. Resisting peer pressure is something you need to come to grips with on an emotional level your own. It *is* painful but worth it when your thoughts are your own. It’s sometimes physically disorienting and nauseating, I won’t lie to you. People aren’t going to like you. They’re going to call you stupid or mentally ill. They’ll say they were wrong about you and you’re not as sexy and smart as they thought you were. They’ll tell you that you will bring Armageddon down on everyone’s head if you let the Republicans win. They know how the brain game works because they’ve read the studies and it’s always worked this way. If you give in to them, they win and they can do whatever they like because they know you will go along in order to feel good about yourself.<br />
<br />
They need you more than you need them. They still need the momentum of
the crowd, the frenzy of the mob, the mounting pressure as the election
gets nearer. They need your vote. If you refuse it, you monkeywrench
their entire peer pressure apparatus and then they have to start paying
attention to you and addressing your demands. They’d rather not have to
do that. They have other people to win over. It’s easier for them to
know that they have checked you off their list so they can move on to
tougher nuts. Don’t make it easy for them. </blockquote>
<a href="http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/sunday-ok-i-think-were-on-to-something-here/" target="_blank">Sunday: Ok, I think we’re on to something here</a><br />
<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-36945426784926309442012-01-27T22:46:00.000-08:002012-01-27T22:47:37.487-08:00Occupation<h2>oc·cu·pa·tion</h2>
[ok-<i>yuh</i>-<b>pey</b>-<i>shuh</i>n]
noun<br />
<ol>
<li>a person's usual or principal work or business, especially as a means of earning a living; vocation: <span class="ital-inline">Her occupation was dentistry. </span></li>
<li>any activity in which a person is engaged.</li>
<li>possession, settlement, or use of land or property.</li>
<li>the act of occupying. </li>
<li>the state of being occupied. </li>
</ol>
<a name='more'></a><hr />
Revolution was brewing in America’s factories in the 1930s, as autoworkers and other blue-collar workers fought for the right to be represented by unions.<br />
<br />
The Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37 was fought and won in Flint. Historian Sidney Fine calls it "the most significant American labor conflict in the 20th century."<br />
<br />
The strike hit GM factories nationwide, but attention was focused on the Fisher Body No. 1 factory on S. Saginaw Street and the smaller Fisher Body No. 2 on Chevrolet Avenue, and later at the nearby Chevrolet Plant 4.<br />
<br />
"Money wasn’t involved," said Robert Keith, 91, of Grand Blanc Township, who was a sit-down striker at Fisher No. 1 and is one of the charter members of UAW Local 581. "We didn’t talk at all about money."<br />
<br />
He said the strike was more about working conditions, lack of job security, treatment and about piecework – paying workers based on the number of parts made – than about wages.<br />
<br />
He explained how the company would set a piecework rate. When workers found ways to do the job quicker to earn more, the company would set the pay rate lower.<br />
<br />
Keith said employees had no job security before the union. Factory workers of the 1920s and ’30s were like migrant farm laborers, going from place to place to find work, he said. After summer layoffs, management hired back only those whom they wanted.<br />
<br />
"If you was 35 years old, you had a hard time getting back in there, unless you had pull with somebody," said Keith, whose wife, Florence, also worked at Fisher No. 1 and was one of the first women there to join the union.<br />
<br />
The sit-down in Flint began on Dec. 29, 1936. The UAW had planned to go on strike against General Motors here, but workers at Fisher No. 1 heard that GM was removing dies as a suspected countermove. The union seized the opportunity to call the strike. Earlier that day, Fisher No. 2 went on strike after management transferred three inspectors who refused to quit the union.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flintjournal.com/20thcentury/1930/1930strike.html" target="_blank">Strike changes Flint – and a nation</a><br />
<br />
<hr />
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.<br />
<br />
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors. ...<br />
<br />
Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every
year.<br />
<br />
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.” ...<br />
<br />
<div itemprop="articleBody">
“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do
things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company
that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the
next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.” </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple
manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues,
including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins.
Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred
employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause
nerve damage and paralysis. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone
screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing
alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each
minute. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier
responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using
n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have
been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical
reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to
fix the ventilation system. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/technology/23apple.html" title="A related Times article.">who said they had never been contacted</a>
by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to
resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of
liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more
compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to
speak with some of them. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you
don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one
former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier
responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to
cut safety.” </div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all" target="_blank">In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad</a><br />
<br />
<hr />
And so, in many ways, have most of us, and not just by buying what
Steve Jobs was selling—the products and the feeling of being a better
(smarter, hipper, more creative) person because of them. Through his
enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging, Jobs
was able to convince millions of people all over the world that the
provenance of Apple devices was magical, too. <i>Machina ex deo</i>. How
else to explain their popularity despite the fact that they actually
come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the
factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed
suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating
that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families
will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured
when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical
suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense;
where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in <i>The New York Times</i>,
typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal
compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming
demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the
consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes
without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it?<br />
<br />
While
it may be convenient to suppose that Apple is no different than any
other company doing business in China—which is as fine a textbook
example of a logical fallacy as there is—in reality, it is worse.
According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple
ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of
responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in
China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely
work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night
standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest
reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a
factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and
hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters
about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a
factory, it’s pretty nice.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false" target="_blank">Who Was Steve Jobs? </a><br />
<br />
<hr />
So, unless Obama somewhat surprisingly does not become the next President of
the United States, the Democratic Party will experience its first changing of
the guard since the late 1980's. What differences will be in store? Here are the
three major changes I expect: <br />
<ol>
<li><i>Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives</i>: There should be a
major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite
will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the
markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his
Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole
Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and
it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier
decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a
socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the
Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently
send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class
instead of rich donors and the white working class.
</li>
<li><i>Policy Shift: Out with the DLC, up with technocratic wonks</i>. My sense
of Obama and his policy team is overwhelmingly one of technocratic, generally
less overtly ideological professional policy types. We should see a shift from
the more corporate and triangulating policy focus of the Democratic Party in the
1990's, and see it replaced by whatever centrist, technocratic policies are the
wonkish flavor of the month. It will all be very oriented toward think-tank and
academic types, and be reminiscent of policy making in the 1950's, 1960's and
1970's. A sort of "technocratic liberalism" that will be less infuriating than
DLC style governance, but still not overtly leftist.</li>
<li><i>Coalition reorganization: Out with party silos, in with squishy
goo-goos</i>. In addition to a shift in culture and policy focus, I also expect
a different approach to coalition building. A long-standing Democrats approach
of transactional politics with different issue and demographic silos in the
party shift toward an emphasis on good government (goo goo) approaches. We will
see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead
of on, say, placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community
by throwing each of these groups a policy bone or two. Now, the focus will be on
broad, squishy fixes that are designed to appeal to several groups at once. George
Lakoff wrote about this a couple months ago.</li>
</ol>
<a href="http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5650" target="_blank">Changing Of the Guard </a><br />
<br />
<hr />
Many of Obama’s liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve
Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by
Obama’s pessimism—he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. “The
president is very smart,” Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.
“But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It
infuriates me.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all" target="_blank">The Obama Memos </a><br />
<br />
<hr />
As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis
that drew on social
psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s
model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially
emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz
explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics
sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented
itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political,
pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy
concerns to the wonks. Yet the successful movements of the past had
more than values; they had specific goals. The civil rights movement’s
eyes were on the prizes of desegregation and voting rights. Cesar
Chavez’s United Farm Workers,
where Ganz learned so much about political organizing, also had its
emotive side—summed up in its slogan, “Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama
campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can”—but it
also had in mind the recognition of organized fieldhands and the
negotiation of fair contracts involving wages.
The point of the Obama campaign-as-movement was conceived differently:
exciting people with the thrill of empowerment, and collective
self-empowerment, by electing to the White House a community organizer
who believed in “hope” and “change.” Why electing Obama was
imperative required no explanation among the faithful; it was enough to
get the spirit, share the spirit, and revel in the candidate’s
essence, which, by definition, no other candidate possessed. The leader
was the program. ...<br />
<br />
Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the
hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements,
imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it
against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties
and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_16524059">believes</a>
were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The
Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from
the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective
leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government
policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political
system. ...<br />
<br />
According to Ganz’s theory and practice of
the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of
feelings and values. Supposedly,
these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist
community, devoted to the collective good and not personal
gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring
political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community
organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional”
politics. ...<br />
<br />
Obama in office upheld the community organizers’
post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and
finding common ground, in part under the pressure of the organizer’s own
reasonableness. But that was not how it worked in Washington during
the past two years; nor had it worked that way for 20 years. A ruthless
and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign
of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s
presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal
dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of
“post-partisanship.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/79004/you-said-you-wanted-revolution-midterm-elections-obama" target="_blank">Live by the Movement, Die by the Movement</a><br />
<br />
<hr />
There is a persistent anxiety within the movement of
being “co-opted” by potential allies—the word crops up frequently in
conversation. The country’s largest labor unions were among the earliest
supporters of Occupy Wall Street, donating money and space. The
movement’s two most impressive marches by far—in Foley Square on October
5 and November 17—were largely made possible by the teachers,
communications workers, and hospital employees who showed up in
significant numbers at their unions’ behest.<br />
<br />
Yet a wariness of
organized labor’s hierarchical structures and establishment contacts has
prevented a deeper alliance. Overtures from left-leaning factions of
the Democratic Party have been met with similar resistance. The open
nature of the general assemblies and working groups, it was feared, made
the movement vulnerable to takeover by such groups, though there seemed
to be little evidence that any such takeover was in the works. Many
demonstrators argued, in effect, that the integrity of the fledgling
anarchist experiment must be protected at all costs.<br />
<br />
Occupy Wall
Street had succeeded, after all, where the “old left”—afraid of damaging
Obama, and meekly plodding on—had failed in recent years. Traditional
liberals, its members said, didn’t understand the particular
generational impulses behind the movement, its new way of protesting
and—here was the central point—of making people feel listened to and
heard. Still, despite the large number of sympathizers it had gained,
the movement, after being expelled from Zuccotti Park, seemed in danger
of remaining more or less what it had been in September—a group of
freelance activists with no reliable power base or allies. ...<br />
<br />
As I spoke, I could sense the impatience of my listeners. I wasn’t
getting the point. Any such demand would turn them into supplicants; its
very utterance implied a surrender to the state that went against
Occupy Wall Street’s principles. Katie maintained that Occupy Wall
Street didn’t yet have “a broad enough base” to make such a demand with
any reasonable expectation that it could be met. And Amin said, “It
doesn’t matter what particular laws you pass. We’re not about laws.”
They saw themselves as a counterculture; and to continue to survive as
such they had to remain uncontaminated by the culture they opposed. ...<br />
<br />
Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing
your life together in assembly.” To participate fully in its process of
“horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based”
democracy, you had to make the movement a central part of your
existence. For many, this posed an insurmountable problem. A social
worker and single mother with little free time told me that she had
given up trying to join Occupy Wall Street because she couldn’t figure
out how to do so “without hanging out with them all the time.” The
ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than
political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people
think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin
told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face;
what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty
gaze of the screen.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/what-future-occupy-wall-street/?pagination=false" target="_blank">What Future for Occupy Wall Street? </a><br />
<br />
<hr />
Occupation - The texture of a life. A job. A way to get a paycheck. That which fills your thoughts and guides your actions. Being in a place. Having colonized or taken control of something, be it a place or a mentality. The condition of being colonized.<br />
<br />
There are many ways to be occupied, many modes of occupation. The occupations that succeed are those that are material - I've got this space and I am getting these goods in exchange for occupying this space, perhaps as a worker, perhaps as a striker. The Flint Strike at Fisher No. 1 is perhaps the finest example of occupation in US working class history. The occupation of the various electronics manufacturing plants in China by multinational corporations, such as Apple, is a no-less profound moment in workers' history.<br />
<br />
That occupation would not be possible without the (pre)occupation of consumers - almost all in the developed world - with having the coolest, swoopiest, hippest gadgets they can get their hands on, exemplified by the obsession (the cultural and psychological occupation) with owning Apple.<br />
<br />
The distortion field is not just around Steve Jobs. It can't be. If it was, only Steve would have bought the sales pitch. There is an occupation of the mind, a fantasy of unity, among "creative" types, the ones I labeled Whole Foods Nation back in the 2008 campaign. <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/05/revolution-of-saints.html" target="_blank">It is determinedly anti-political, anti-working class, and anti-transactional, preferring morality to effectiveness, righteousness to power.</a> Thus the people who can gaze upon hucksters like Steve Jobs and The Precious and see saviors instead of snake-oil salesmen.<br />
<br />
And I watch Occupy Wall Street recapitulate the failures of the movement that put The Precious in office, occupied as they are with transformation rather than achieving immediate, material goals that will persuade the majority of the 99% who only see dirty fucking hippies begging for handouts while they labor on at their thankless jobs. <br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-5877399356788915242012-01-26T21:04:00.000-08:002012-01-26T21:04:48.334-08:00MinutiaeOne of the reasons data aggregation is both big business and hard to grasp is that is it composed of many, many tiny bits of our lives, very few of which are particularly meaningful in isolation. An IP address in and of itself is not much. That IP address mixed in with your cell phone number, your YouTube viewing history, and a bunch of locally stored tracking cookies can speak volumes about you.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
I took some time today to read through the new Privacy Policy that Google will enforce starting March 1, 2012, and what struck me most was the range of information they now state they will collect and integrate about you if they are able to get their hands on it. From the top:<br />
<ul>
<li>"Information you give us" </li>
<ul>
<li>Name</li>
<li>Email</li>
<li>Telephone number</li>
<li>Credit card number</li>
<li>Photo</li>
</ul>
<li>Device-specific information</li>
<ul>
<li>Hardware model</li>
<li>Operating system</li>
<li>Unique Device Identifiers</li>
<li>Mobile network information including phone number</li>
<li>"Google may associate your device identifiers or phone number with your Google Account"</li>
</ul>
<li>Server Log Information</li>
<ul>
<li>"details of how you used our service"</li>
<li>"Telephony log information like you phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls."</li>
<li>IP address</li>
<li>Device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL</li>
<li>Cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google account</li>
</ul>
<li>Location Information </li>
<ul>
<li>GPS signals</li>
<li>various technologies to determine location</li>
</ul>
<li>Unique Application Numbers (specific to your install of a Google product/service)</li>
<li>Local Storage</li>
<ul>
<li>We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches. </li>
</ul>
<li>Cookies and anonymous identifiers </li>
<ul>
</ul>
</ul>
They may use this to use your name across all Google services. "In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so
that you are represented consistently across all our services" - so no guarantee that things you deliberately put under another name will remain that way.<br />
<br />
Taking this minutiae and recombining it is the stuff of marketeers' wet dreams. All the stuff your phone company can get about your phone combined with all of your on-line search, click and purchasing activities, wrapped up with the bow of electronic "finger-prints" for every device you bring into contact with Google.<br />
<br />
Sweet.<br />
<br />
This information is for sale. It has value and it will be packaged and sold. How will it be packaged? You don't know. Maybe it's Google using it directly. Maybe it's a third party who bought some stuff from Google, some stuff from Facebook, a bit more from Amazon and stirred in a splash of Yahoo for good measure. And they are far from the only corporation gathering, slicing, dicing and distributing information about you. <br />
<br />
Of course, here I am, logged in with a Gmail address to a Blogger blog bitching about Google. They've made me an offer I'm not inclined to refuse, namely a platform from which to shout my opinions of whatever the hell is bugging me today in exchange for gathering as much of the above information as they can. It's "free", after all. And it's more time and cost effective than trying to build my own blogging software and maintaining my own server. I have search prominence. My voice is heard.<br />
<br />
Is this bargain (Faustian or otherwise, though I don't think it quite rises to that level of moral compromise) a reasonable one? If at some level I didn't accept it as such, I wouldn't be writing this, would I? I like to think I have prevented release of most of my information. I won't contact Google from a phone, I don't fill out a profile, I don't use the services except Gmail and Blogger and I don't use this browser for anything but blogging, so not a lot of cookie info to be had. I won't let Chrome anywhere near a computer I own.<br />
<br />
The deep problem is not, in truth, Google or even data aggregation. The fundamental issue is that I have no right to privacy, no right to manage my own identity and say what information a service provider may use and under what conditions. I can refuse to participate in the Google ecosystem. I can delete some information or decline to provide data points to certain services. Once they have the information, however, the only real limit on what can be done with it is the degree to which the will follow their own deeply mendacious and politically vacuous motto of "Don't be evil." I'm on my own.<br />
<br />
The real question is to what degree will I surrender the minutiae of my life to gain access to this quasi-public space? <br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-35223840149858099412012-01-25T20:44:00.000-08:002012-01-25T21:20:53.437-08:00HomeworkThere is a post brewing around here. Probably a couple of posts. Here's a little background reading for what is coming up.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2012/01/modes-of-reaction-and-revolution.html" target="_blank">Modes of Reaction and Revolution</a> - Pretty much misunderstood by everyone. If you don't get the difference between treating politics as a response to human nature and treating politics as a world historic unfolding (in short, Kant vs. Hegel), then you won't get almost anything I'll be writing this year.</li>
<li><a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2010/11/where-can-i-piss.html" target="_blank">Where Can I Piss?</a> - My analysis about politics, power, institutions, and why the Stevensonian Left wanted to be conned by Obama.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/79004/you-said-you-wanted-revolution-midterm-elections-obama" target="_blank">Live By the Movement, Die By the Movement</a> - Sean Wilentz's article that inspired the above analysis. As relevant today as when it was published.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all" target="_blank">The Obama Memos</a> - Ryan Lizza's recent "expose" (and gutless waffling) of what kind of political actor Obama really is. I'm less interested in Lizza's confused proclamations than on the specifics of Obama's behavior.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/what-future-occupy-wall-street/?pagination=false" target="_blank">What Future for Occupy Wall Street?</a> - The most recent of Michael Greenberg's series on OWS in New York. He provides a sympathetic but ultimately critical, look at the efforts of OWS.</li>
</ul>
Anglachel<br />
<ul>
</ul>Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-65525804083685324582012-01-24T17:32:00.000-08:002012-01-24T18:05:57.167-08:00You're the MerchandiseWith free apps comes loss of anonymity.<br />
<br />
There is a trade-off between the user and the provider of apparently free online applications. It's not implicit because it is built into the EULAs. The wording varies but the gist is pretty much the same: When you sign up for and use the service we're providing, you are giving us information about you that we <i>will</i> use as we see fit for our financial advantage. The EULAs are getting more aggressive these days because the providers are using your data more aggressively.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The two biggies in the news that are sliding in somewhat under the radar due to SOPA garnering the lion's share of attention are <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360" target="_blank">Apple's preemptive claim on the revenues of your intellectual property</a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-opt-out/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_story.html" target="_blank">Google declaring that it will take all of the information it can gather</a> about your use of its various services and will data mine it for detailed information about you. Facebook, of course, has always done this kind of thing and <a href="http://www2.webpronews.com/facebook-timeline-youre-getting-it-like-it-or-not-2012-01" target="_blank">continuously expands its data mining operation</a>.<br />
<br />
I'm less concerned by Apple's move than Google or Facebook mostly because they are using it to sell you their stuff and profit off your work directly. They are setting up a classic walled garden, and I don't think they are going to be able to sustain it. The other two (and not just them, this would be true of any service that needs to monetize its data) are not so much selling <i>to</i> you as selling <i>you</i> to <i>others</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>You ARE the merchandise.</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2010/10/its-not-big-brother-you-have-to-worry.html" target="_blank">I've talked about this subject</a> before where I distinguished between government data collection and private industry data mining. In the latest news from Google (which I cynically believe simply is the corp 'fessing up to what it already does), <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” she said. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Google can track users when they sign into their accounts. It can also use cookies or find out where people are if they use a Google phone or its maps program. The company will now attempt to mix all of that information together into a single cauldron for each person. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.</blockquote>
<br />
The services that you have opted in to use are now being stitched together as a single service that is anchored by your browsing device(s) - tied to you by that mechanism - and which interrogates the information you freely provide to minutely examine where you go, what you do, who you associate with, and what your next move is likely to be. If this data was severely restricted to use by Google, it would be troubling. Google (or Facebook, or other social networking system) must monetize this data to advertisers and other services providers because that is how they make money while offering it to you for "free". It how they pay their bills, period.<br />
<br />
This behavior bothers me far more than SOPA, quite frankly, and SOPA concerns me a lot. While netizens love to scare themselves with paranoid fantasies of being "censored" by the government, they don't seem to take seriously that they are being dissected and tracked by the very companies they rely on to provide them with their soapboxes and organizational tools. These corporations have no interest in censoring you. Quite the opposite. They want you stomping around, ranting and clicking and buying and using and generally leaving huge footprints all over the place.<br />
<br />
With this in mind, there is a need for end users to become savvy about how information gets collected and stored and how this aggregated of data is subsequently deployed for fun and profit. If you are online, you are known to some degree. Using services that are designed from the ground up to aggregate and resell your information is something online users must become aware of. <br />
<br />
<br />
Aggregation of data is both the best and worst aspect of the
Interwebz because data is only as significant as the entity that wishes
to use it.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-58655685495504850972012-01-22T17:00:00.000-08:002012-01-22T17:00:45.379-08:00Republican FolliesObama is extraordinarily lucky in his selection of opponents this time around. Though hard to believe, the Republican Party is more internally divided than the Democrats, though the individual divisions have more ideological and participatory coherence than their counterparts in the Democratic Party.<br />
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I'm basically in agreement with Sam Popkin of UCSD (someone the Spousal Unit and I worked with during our grad school days) in this account he provided to the local fish wrap, the Union-Tribune last night, "<a href="http://web.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jan/21/gop-defies-its-own-reality/" target="_blank">GOP defies its own reality</a>". Popkin gets down to business in the first paragraph, saying, "I never thought I’d see the day where you got punished in the Republican Party for making a fortune. Stranger than three-wives Newt Gingrich winning the religious vote is a capitalist big winner being punished."<br />
<br />
This is a rather amazing turn of events. The business wing of the party can no longer call the shots, at least not in two of the three political environments they've encountered - Midwest, upper New England, deep South. <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2011/12/long-nasty-year.html" target="_blank">The resentment voters I mentioned in an earlier post</a> appear to be holding sway, with resentment being aimed at two things, economic success and religious minorities. Popkin foregrounds this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Look, we are not talking a lot about it and we want to pretend it’s not an issue, but Romney’s religion is an issue — there’s no getting around it. In South Carolina, among people who said it was very important the candidate shared their religious beliefs, it was Newt 45 percent to Mitt’s 9 percent.<br />
<br />
This is conservative populism, but it’s also anti-Mormon. Both Mitt and Newt did well with Catholics. The big thing is the religious Protestant. This is the election where the conservative religious community is in the position the unions were in in the Democratic Party in the 1980s. This is not a growing power, this is their fighting to hold on a little longer. It’s very clear how much more secular the country is becoming.</blockquote>
The religious angle was probably the deciding factor in Iowa for Mittens, and gave Santorum the Sanctimonious a big boost. It was not so much on display in South Carolina where it worked more as a disqualification factor for Mittens than a preference factor for Man-On-Dog.<br />
<br />
What won the day for Newt was resentment. Someone has screwed me over and someone is going to pay. This is why Ron Paul can't really break into the top-tier - he's crazy enough, he's got perfectly crack-pot economic theories, he's got the right teenage boy fantasy of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency (Mom! Bring me a soda!), but he just isn't resentful enough. He wants to tell people what to do, but he doesn't actually take pleasure in doing harm, which is what Newt and Santorum are peddling.<br />
<br />
The surprise that Popkin expresses is how the resentment over the excesses of Wall Street are being applied to one of their own insider candidates, someone who has basically been selected by the powers that be as the preferred choice of the current crop. The boogey monster is no longer just the metrosexual multi-colored Other in the urban jungle driving a Cadillac and living off welfare. It's now the top-dog in the economic kingdom, the alleged wealth creators who just need to be freed up from all the regulations and tax burdens to let the honest, hard-working 'Murikan join the gravy train. <br />
<br />
I'm getting interested in how this will play out. Something has happened to the Republican Party base, the forces mobilized first by Nixon with the Southern Strategy of racial division and then with Reagan's anti-feminist, anti-abortion engagement with the previously a-political evangelical community. They are having a hard time keeping a pro-business agenda in front of a base that wants the government to punish people for personal success. Where I disagree with Popkin is his claim that this is not a growing power, though it may be divorcing itself from actual religious belief.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_574734169"><br /></a><br />
<a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2012/01/modes-of-reaction-and-revolution.html" target="_blank">The political gambit set in motion by reactionaries</a> to try to reclaim a pre-war social order seems to have taken on a life of its own.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-30201409033723434652012-01-22T15:44:00.000-08:002012-01-22T15:44:35.325-08:00Weekly Menu - January 22I'm not sure I'll keep posting this, but I've had a few people ask me the kinds of things I cook and how I decide what to cook.<br />
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For me, if I don't put a little thought into what I'm cooking, I'll end making garlic and oil pasta 5 nights of the week. On Saturday night or Sunday morning, I pull together a general menu for the week, naming a recipe and listing out main ingredients. I try to cook something new every week, I try to make half the dishes vegetable based. Having a menu makes me look at what's on my shelf in the pantry and try to use up stuff I already have on hand.<br />
<br />
This is what I cam up with this week:<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5">
<colgroup>
<col></col>
<col></col>
<col></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Sunday</td>
<td valign="top">Dinner w/friends</td>
<td valign="top"><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Monday</td>
<td valign="top">Fennel-Rubbed Pork</td>
<td valign="top">Pomegranate molasses, tangerine,
shallots, butter, red wine vinegar, pork tenderloin, fennel, garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, couscous</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Tuesday</td>
<td valign="top">Fish-Fragrant Eggplant &
Tofu</td>
<td valign="top">Eggplant, chili bean paste, soy
sauce, black vinegar, rice wine, sugar, garlic, ginger, cornstarch, Szechuan pepper, tofu, noodles</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Wednesday</td>
<td valign="top">Pasta in Tomato-Beer Sauce</td>
<td valign="top">Capers, sun dried tomatoes, garlic, anchovies, red onions, chile flakes,
gherkins, bock beer, canned tomatoes, olive paste, pasta</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Thursday</td>
<td valign="top">US Senate Bean Soup</td>
<td valign="top">Mayacoba beans, ham hock,
onions, potatoes, fennel, parsley</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Friday</td>
<td valign="top">Black-eye Peas and Bulgur</td>
<td valign="top">Bulgur, black-eye peas, canned tomatoes, red onion, walnuts, spices, sausage, potato, sambal oelek</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Saturday</td>
<td valign="top">Braised Black Vinegar Chicken</td>
<td valign="top">Chicken thighs, shallots,
ginger, dried chilis, scallions, Shiitakes,black vinegar, sweet soy sauce, light soy sauce, sugar, salt, water, rice</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Sunday</td>
<td valign="top">Goan Beef Curry</td>
<td valign="top">Cardamom, fennel, cloves, cinnamon, fenugreek, black pepper, cumin, onions, garlic, ginger,
tri-tip strips, turmeric, chili powder, coconut milk, potatoes</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
As you can see, I'm not yet into a meatless diet. The soup on Thursday got cooked over the last few days and was lunch today. It will taste even better on Thursday and provide plenty to freeze for another meal. The Fish-fragrant eggplant will get served with some kind of noodle. The sauce for the pasta on Wednesday is a new recipe and is simmering in the crock pot right now to allow flavors to develop as well as be heat-and-eat on a weeknight. The Black-eye peas and bulgur and the Goan beef curry are also new recipes. Hmm, so is the fennel rubbed pork. I meant to have that for tonight, but friends asked up over for dinner, so it's bumped to Monday.<br />
<br />
So, three recipes with meat, four new recipes, four that have been/will be cooked in a slow cooker (Pasta in Tomato-Beer sauce, bean soup, Braised black vinegar chicken, and Goan beef curry), three with legumes, and all with a lot of flavors.<br />
<br />
The cost of each dish as a whole to cook comes out to:<br />
<ul>
<li>Fennel rubbed pork - $5.75 - serves 4/$1.44</li>
<li>Eggplant & Tofu - $2.60 - serves 2/$1/30</li>
<li>Pasta & beer-tomato sauce - $6.00 - serves 4/$1.50</li>
<li>Bean soup - $7.00 - serves 6/$1.16</li>
<li>Black-eye Peas & bulgur - $4.01 - serves 4/$1.00</li>
<li>Black vinegar chicken - $3.03 - serves 2/$1.52</li>
<li>Goan beef curry - $8.53 - serves 4/$2.13</li>
</ul>
Why do I list the costs of things? A few reasons. One, I want to emphasize that meals cost money and the lower your income, the more they cost relative to everything else. I also want to show where and why costs are what they are. Beef is expensive, dried beans are not. Home cooked meals are not necessarily cheaper than low-cost fast food meals - none of my dishes come in under $1.00 per serving and I'm not trying to calculate cooking and clean up costs or the cost of shopping.<br />
<br />
I also like to emphasize that, except for the Szechuan peppercorns, nothing I buy is "organic" or a specialty food product or otherwise different than what can be obtained from a local grocery store. Some of my Asian condiments come from Ranch 99, an Asian supermarket chain in southern California. The peppercorns come from a gourmet cookware store, were outrageously expensive, and I won't buy them there again. I don't shop Whole Foods ever.<br />
<br />
Food is political because it is used to identify insiders and outsiders, who belongs to the tribe and who does not act within the proper social norms. It takes work to make it both delicious and affordable.<br />
<br />
We need to think about our food.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-38337457856315619262012-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:002012-01-22T14:23:31.647-08:00Mayacoba BeansMy new most favorite legume.<br />
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<br />
I like most beans. Pintos, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, favas, black-eye peas - you name it, I've probably cooked it up in something recently or have some killer recipe for it. Such comfort food. They are filling, taste good, have a marvelous feel in your mouth, mix with other ingredients in interesting ways, good hot or cold, and so forth.<br />
<br />
My two exceptions to this are red kidney beans and almost any kind of white bean. I don't like the texture of red kidney beans. Their skin is tough, the bean thick and unyielding, the flavor odd. As for white beans, there's no there there. Bland, dull, mushy, only occasionally providing a decent foil to the other flavors and textures of the the food.<br />
<br />
For red kidney bean recipes, I usually substitute in a different red bean, or even black beans, but white bean recipes have left me stymied. Pintos/spotted beans are too assertive, garbanzos have the wrong flavor/texture, and black-eye peas get too mushy. Now I have the best replacement - mayacoba beans.<br />
<br />
Also known as maicoba beans, peruano beans, canary beans, and a few other names, these are yellow beans about the size and shape of pinto beans that cook up into a creamy white bean about the size and shape of cannellini beans and with a flavor similar to pintos, but much milder. I just made a big crock pot of "US Senate Bean Soup" which calls for navy beans and substituted mayacoba beans with great results. They became very tender and creamy without becoming mushy and they had a flavor to add to the pot instead of needing tons of ham/bacon/sausage to carry the day.<br />
<br />
Mayacoba bean soup - $7.00; Serves six generously - $1.16/serving <br />
<ul>
<li>1 lb Mayacoba beans - $0.96</li>
<li>2 medium onions, minced - $0.18</li>
<li>4 stalks of celery finely chopped or 1 fennel bulb, finely chopped - $1.00</li>
<li>2-3 russet potatoes, peeled and cubed - $0.74</li>
<li>1 smoked ham hock - $1.32</li>
<li>1 bunch of kale (optional) - $0.99</li>
<li>water or chicken stock - $1.81 (5 cups stock)</li>
</ul>
<ol>
<li>Soak beans overnight or quick soak.</li>
<li>Cook beans in water until almost done. This can be on the stove top or, as I did, on High in a slow cooker for a few hours.</li>
<li>Drain beans.</li>
<li>Put finely chopped vegetables in bottom of slow cooker, layer potatoes over them, dump drained beans over them, and bury the ham hock down in the middle of the beans.</li>
<li>Pour in water or stock to just cover the beans.</li>
<li>Cook on low in slow cooker for 10 hours or until everything is tender. Add salt, pepper and Chipotle hot sauce at the table to taste.</li>
<li>If you want to add kale (and you really should, it's so good), stem, wash and chop one bunch of kale and stir it into the soup at about the 8 hour mark and cook until it is tender.</li>
<li>For more flavor, you can saute the onions and celery/fennel before putting them in the slow cooker in your cooking fat of choice - butter, olive oil, bacon grease, ghee, nitr kibe, etc.</li>
</ol>
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AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-82831551854482237082012-01-13T21:05:00.000-08:002012-01-14T12:09:01.207-08:00Money, Morality and MittensI've been following some of the back and forth in the MSM and the blogosphere about Mitt Romney, what did or did not happen with Bain and what it tells - or fails to tell - us about the Mittster. The crude analysis is that Bain robbed a certain company blind in the 90s and this tells us Romney is a Bad Guy, a vulture capitalist. OMG even Newt tells us it's true!!!!!<br />
<br />
To me, it's another round of reducing political judgment to matters of morality.<br />
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Since the <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2010/11/san-diego-experiment.html" target="_blank">City of San Diego has done much the same with its own pension fund</a>, the decision to underfund having been made by union heads and politicians of both parties, the assault on worker pensions and retirement funds can't simply be laid at the feet of rapacious Republicans, though they can claim the lion's share of the responsibility. Here are <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/09/political-investment.html" target="_blank">three</a> <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/09/partisans-and-pigs.html" target="_blank">posts</a> <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-myth-debunking.html" target="_blank">of mine</a> from a few years back discussing how Democrats have worked very hard to assist with dismantling the legacy of FDR, Truman and LBJ. That's not the interesting part of the hand-wringing over Mittens, at least not to me. <br />
<br />
What piques my interest is how determinedly the loudest voices on the Left want to make this a <i>moral</i> judgment rather than to address it <i>politically</i>. The focus is on the particulars of the case and what it says about Romney's character. <a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/mitt-romney-vulture-capitalism-and-gs-technologies" target="_blank">Kevin Drum</a> talks about the contrast between Bain making money and factory workers losing their pensions and whether voters will be more upset by the latter than Romney was, while <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/uncompassionate-conservatism/" target="_blank">Paul Krugman</a> directly questions Romney's ethics and capacity for compassion, his moral imagination, if you will. Bob Somerby goes after Rachel Maddow in "<a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2012/01/from-both-sides-now-big-stupid-wins.html" target="_blank">The Big Stupid Wins</a>" for not even getting that interested and choosing to make the long-suffering Seamus and his bout of diarrhea the paradigm by which we unwashed masses should comprehend the Mittster.<br />
<br />
Substituting morality (He abuses his pet! He laughs at the little people!) for politics (What are his policies on healthcare? How did he handle corporate regulation when governor?) reduces the scope and scale of public scrutiny, asking people to respond viscerally and with antipathy/euphoria towards a particular political actor rather than step back and ask questions about a larger policy and approach to governance. It's a method that can win elections but won't have much power for building and sustaining coalitions. It is also by its very nature more amenable to politics of resentment (You threaten me, you're The Other, you're an enemy, you must be eradicated) which in turn favors <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2012/01/modes-of-reaction-and-revolution.html" target="_blank">the forces of reaction, whether restorative or redemptive</a>.<br />
<br />
Let me be clear that I'm not opposed to the use of moral (or ethical) claims in political arguments. I pass plenty of judgements. Good thinkers, such as Krugman and Somerby, use moral arguments to bolster their very fact-based claims, giving their analyses another method by which to persuade their readers. Sadly, the bulk of the commentariat will pull a Maddow and will not be able to rise above the merely moralistic. When dealing with politics-as-cocktail-party writers (Collins, Dowd), we'll be lucky if we can escape the realm of taste (Oh, those awful earth-tone sweaters!) and attain a moral stance, no matter how shallow.<br />
<br />
In marked distinction from the moralistic tone of most Bain-focused posts, there is a dispassionate analysis of the matter, both in its particulars and on its wider political meaning in this post on <a href="http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/">Sic Semper Tyrannis</a>, "<a href="http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2012/01/mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-understanding-the-reality-.html" target="_blank">Mitt Romney and Bain Capital: Understanding the Reality</a>" by Robert Lifton. Lifton spends the bulk of the article talking about what private equity funds do and why. He neither approves nor disapproves of these organizations, he just explains them. After this, he directs his attention to Romney (my emphasis):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So what does all of that tell us about Mitt Romney. Certainly, his
success in founding the Bain equity fund and operating it very
successfully for a number of years speaks to his initiative and
intelligence, his commitment to hard work, his ability to pull together a
team of talented people and work closely with them. It also tells us
that he is willing to take risks and to take action required to achieve
his goals irrespective of whether that action helps or hurts people
affected by it – in this case employees of the acquired companies. <b>It
also tells us that he is flexible</b> – he could not accomplish what he did
without being adaptable, willing to “go with the flow” and accommodate
his views to his business interests and those of his investors and
lenders. <b>We have already seen much of that flexibility in his
willingness as a candidate to change his political positions to
accommodate the demands of the constituency whose support he is seeking.
It also tells us that what he says now on the stump is not necessarily
what he will do if he is elected president to accomplish his goals.</b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>It also should be evident that “turning around” a business has little
relationship with trying to change the direction of a country. </b>The
objectives of Bain were clear-cut: increase the profits from the
business at whatever cost to employees or suppliers. The objectives of a
nation are rarely clear-cut and reflect the balancing of interests of
different constituencies with different, often conflicting, desires and
aims. The ability to change an acquired company’s direction lay within
the power of Bain management. By contrast, the power of a President is
diffuse and depends on political circumstances beyond the President’s
control, like which party is in power in which branch of government.
Leading a nation in a particular direction in those circumstances is
very difficult if not impossible, and requires political talents of the
highest order to bring the nation with him.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And therein lies the rub. <b>Mitt Romney of Bain Capital was a good
businessman. The selection process of choosing the Republican candidate
and later the President calls for a different valuation based on other
criteria: choosing a political leader whose values conform to those of
the voter making the choice. </b>A person whose emotional make-up allows him
to handle the crushing burdens of office and gut wrenching decisions
such as sending troops off to war. Mitt Romney’s business activities at
Bain tell us very little about those important values and what he would
seek to do as President. And unfortunately, <b>Mitt Romney’s career as a
politician and now as a candidate tell us little more than that he can
be all things to all people.</b> We have to look elsewhere than Bain
Capital to make a well-reasoned decision about Romney’s qualifications
for the job of President.</blockquote>
This bigger picture is the political story that needs to be told and the political question(s) that must be asked. Shouting about the morality of how Bain dealt with the acquired company will not stick, particularly if the words are coming from Newt Gingrich. (Warning to left wing analysts - if you are agreeing with Newt, you'd better wonder what's going wrong in your argument.) Talking about the poor treatment of blue collar workers doesn't work in this country. It hasn't since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. People don't want to show solidarity with the unemployed lest their employers decide they should join those ranks.They may dislike what Bain as a company does, but they can be persuaded that Romney was simply acting in the interests of his company, that he earned that return from the investment.<br />
<br />
What Lifton's argument does is show the qualities that made Romney successful in the business world are not going to serve well in politics, and he never has to make a claim that there is something morally deficient about Mittens. Two different kinds of work, two different kinds of skills. On this you can build a critical analysis. You can give someone their due, not demonize them, and still pull the rug out from under their feet.<br />
<br />
Of course, there is the question of The Big Stupid (thank you, Incomparable One, for adding yet another marvelous phrase to my political invectives collection), which says "So what? Moralizing means more viewers, more page views, more entertainment. You want talking heads? Go watch C-Span." Morality sells, as any good televangelist can attest, and, perhaps, in our degraded discourse, only antipathy/euphoria can make a big enough impression to move people to action.<br />
<br />
When there's not much euphoria to be had, antipathy rules. Will the voters hate Mittens with his mitts on the workers' money more than the incumbent with his bail out of Wall Street? I'm not holding my breath.<br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-36661153256306880482012-01-12T20:35:00.000-08:002012-01-14T12:11:14.931-08:00Republican ChoicesIt's a good thing I had some parsnips to roast for dinner so I'd have something sweet to go with the bitter reporting by the Incomparable One.<br />
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I don't refer to Bob himself, of course, but about the topic of his post today, "<a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2012/01/horrible-plutocrat-watch-how-long-will.html" target="_blank">Horrible terrible plutocrat watch: How long do we tolerate this?</a>", which is a textbook example of why no politician of any party feels terribly threatened by either the press or the increasingly beggared populace. The social elites, regardless of professed political proclivities, just don't give a shit about the little people. An extended excerpt, but there is more at the post so please be sure to read the whole thing:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Those average people who got their lives looted are just an amusement to Collins. Darlings! You should watch the video! “It’s full of heart-tugging former factory workers who used to have happy homes and wonderful Christmases!”<br />
<br />
We have never been able to get a read on this very puzzling person. But she makes it rather plain today:<br />
<br />
To Collins, this election is all about the (imagined) mistreatment of Mitt Romney’s poor abused dog. Those average people who got their lives looted? <br />
<br />
Darlings! They offer delicious amusement! Just watch as they tug at your hearts!<br />
<br />
<b>An early assessment:</b> A very important debate has broken out—a debate which goes right to the heart of this decades-long plutocrat era.<br />
<br />
What does Collins say as she starts? Of course:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
COLLINS: What will the big issues be in the South Carolina primary?<br />
<br />
When five of your six candidates could not be elected president if they were running against Millard Fillmore, <b>I think you can presume there will not be much serious issue discussion. </b></blockquote>
This person is simply amazing.<br />
<br />
As we speak, Gingrich and Perry are hammering away at Romney, going right to the soul of this terrible plutocrat era. But to Collins, there’s nothing to look at! There won’t be any issue discussion here!
Darlings! Move right along! <br />
<br />
Collins has long been a weirdly horrible person. How long does our pseudo-progressive world plan to tolerate this?</blockquote>
<br />
My answer is for as long as the Kewl Kidz and the Purchased Fellows feel themselves safe from downward mobility, they will be more interested in amusing each other than in addressing unpleasant things that might prevent them from being invited to pseudo-insider confabs with the people in power.<br />
<br />
What Bob won't address because he will not attack a nominal Democrat in the White House is that there are only Republican choices in the presidential line up this go-around. Obama has demonstrated that he is just as willing as Mittens or Newt to loot the lives of average people. <b>The salvation of Wall Street's living standards was his administration's highest priority. </b>Collins' jibe about the five candidates who couldn't beat Millard Fillmore serves to highlight the difference between 2008 and 2012. In 2008, it would have been nearly impossible for any of the five top-polling Democrats to have lost to the Republican (though The Precious came damn close). This time, the "Democrat" is practically guaranteed of losing to the Republican, no matter how despicable the Mittster may be.<br />
<br />
Collins may be the worst excuse for a "progressive" opinionater around (though I think she's got a lot of competition on that count) but that doesn't mean she is wrong. We <i>are</i> guaranteed "there will not be much serious issue discussion," and by serious issue I mean the looting of the nation on behalf of the social elite. The top candidates are all in agreement that it should proceed.<br />
<br />
Peter Daou's post today about <a href="http://peterdaou.com/2012/01/why-bain-isnt-hurting-romney/" target="_blank">dissonance and consonance</a> in the context of campaigns holds a warning about how the Republican contest may play out in the general election this fall:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Conversely, the negative frame against Obama in 2008 was that he was
“all words and no action.” But that frame was far less potent than it
might be in 2012, since all he really had at that point was words, and
people wanted to believe – and believe in – what he was saying.</blockquote>
More cynical Peter - Obama was an ineffectual hack in 2008 and anyone with a scrap of honesty knew it. The Hopeium won't work a second time. All Mittens & Co. have to do is play up the discontent about the disparity between the advertisements and the delivered product. Obama's done the hard work for them by selling out his own constituency.<br />
<br />
Unlike McCain, who had to pick a running mate who appealed to the party's extreme wing in order to balance defection from the political center, Mittens knows the defections are going to go his direction because A) these isn't that much perceived difference between himself and Precious and B) the discontent with Obama is strongest among people who were uncertain but willing to give him a chance last round. This will allow Romney to pick a more moderate running mate, like a Huntsman, to try to solidify that appeal. Most people won't care about Romney's ever changing political stances when compared to Obama's political failures.<br />
<br />
So, the choices are all on the Republican side of the table and the pseudo-progressives can spend the campaign worrying about the Romney family's poor tormented dog. <i>So</i> much more fun than discussing why ordinary Americans are the dog's dinner.<br />
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AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-27165015045205869232012-01-12T19:35:00.000-08:002012-01-14T12:15:09.024-08:00Parsnips, YumI love parsnips. I just had a big serving of them for dinner. I roasted them with a red onion in a balsamic vinegar and brown sugar marinade for about an hour, then served them up with a barley and mushroom baked thing. A little dusting of grated Parmesan was the right touch on each. <br />
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It was very good.<br />
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AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-84927379685345791762012-01-04T21:47:00.000-08:002012-01-14T12:16:28.552-08:00Grocery Costs at Casa AnglachelMy take on the Iowa caucuses - nobody much likes anyone. The election in November will be for who is least detested by the general population. Meh.<br />
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I've been keeping my grocery database for just over a year now. I started it with my shopping trip on 10/31/2010 and now I'm starting a new year. I set up some crosstabs and reports last week to see what is going on with food prices and my purchasing habits.<br />
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Last time <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2011/03/food-experiment.html" target="_blank">I wrote about the database</a>, I had 262 food items in it. I now have 470. In terms of variety, I have purchased 90 kinds of fresh produce, 73 pantry or staple goods, 63 kinds of herbs and spices, 52 types of meat or fish, 44 condiments or sauces, 31 dairy products, 29 kinds of legumes, 24 types of snack food, 23 types of pasta, rices and grains, 21 types of baked goods, 10 types of cooking alcohol, and 5 each of frozen products or beverages. These selections accounted for 1996 different purchased items - 32 items purchased per week on average over the last 62 weeks. The total bill for food was $6,466, or an average of $2.48 per meal per person (62 weeks * 7 days * 3 meals * 2 people = 2604 meals).<br />
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Things are getting more expensive. Dairy products are very price sensitive from store to store and they are more expensive now than a year ago, though butter seems to be an exception. The cheapest time for buying butter is right around Christmas when people do a lot of baking. The cheapest price per pound I got was $2.69 on sale at Ralphs just before Christmas, the most expensive was $3.99/lb at Fresh & Easy in September. Trader Joe's had butter at $3.29/lb November 2010 and I just got it for $2.99/lb on Monday. <br />
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Trader Joe's has the cheapest day-to-day dairy prices in my area of San Diego and a decent selection. Costco can always beat it on unit price, but the amounts we'd have to buy are usually too large for a 2 person household. Sliced Provolone at Costco started the year at $6.99/2 lbs, went as high as $8.19 for the same package and is now at $7.99. That adds 3 cents per slice. Put one slice on three lunch sandwiches every working/school day (you and two kids), that's an extra 50 cents a week or $25/year (factoring holidays when you didn't eat sandwiches). Did <i>you</i> get a $25 raise this year? I know I didn't. <br />
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Sour cream went from $1.69 to $1.79 a pint at Trader's for the house brand. A gallon of fat free milk was $2.69 in February, rose to a high of $3.19 in August and now seems to have settled in at $2.99 since October. I buy a gallon a week, so an extra 30 to 50 cents depending on the price since the start of the year. The half gallons went from $1.69 to $1.99, which is also 30 cents more a purchase, but half the amount. All in all, it's another $15 this year for milk. <br />
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Extra large eggs went from $1.49 a dozen to $1.69 a dozen, then back down to $1.49.<br />
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Meat got more expensive, too. Most of what I buy is cheap and stewable, usually purchased in bulk and divided up into smaller serving portions. I don't buy often, so the price fluctuations are bigger compared to weekly purchases like milk. Chuck roast at Ralphs went from $2.53.lb on sale to $2.99/lb on sale. Flank steak at Costco went from $5.99/lb to $6.49/lb. Stew meat went from $3.29/lb to $3.89/lb. In the summer, when it's grilling season, I look out for whole chickens on sale. The sales price varied from a ridiculous manager's special of .48/lb to .99/lb. I don't buy chickens if they're over that per pound. Pork chops at Costco went from $2.29/lb up to $2.69/lb. Overall, meat went up 40 to 50 cents per pound. We might eat a pound of meat in a week, so it's somewhere between $20 and $26 more per year for us. What about a four person household that eats just a 1/4 pound per person per day? Then we're talking an increase of $145/year. For a minimum wage worker, looking at $7.25/hour, that extra $145 is 2.5 working days gross pay.<br />
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Fresh produce had the wildest price fluctuations. Chinese eggplant ranged from a low of .68/lb to a high of $2.33/lb, but usually came in at @ .89/lb. At the height of summer, I could get my beloved red bell peppers for as little as .49/lb, but they were usually closer to $1.00/lb at North Park Produce, and I paid as much as $2.83/lb at Trader Joe's. <br />
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The store mattered when buying produce. I purchased 459 fresh produce items in 2011 at North Park Produce, and 232 produce items at Trader Joe's. My purchases at North Park came to $491, or an average of $1.06 per purchased item, vs purchases of $550 at Trader Joe's, or an average of $2.37 per purchased item. If I had bought most of my produce at Trader's, my grocery bill would be much higher. This is something that affects food purchase choices for lower income households. If you have a small budget for food and the price of produce is both high and fluctuating, making it difficult to budget, you're less likely to buy it. Especially when the price of meat and dairy is steadily marching upwards.<br />
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The powerhouse purchases in my grocery database are the legumes. Whether dried or canned, they're usually under $0.10/ounce or $1.60/lb. Dried beans cost even less per ounce than canned, of course, by the time they hit the dinner plate since that 1 ounce of dry will equal 4 ounces cooked. Much more economical than meat and probably better for everyone involved. Unless you're sitting next to me when I'm farting, but then that's your cross to bear, ain't it? A bag of dried beans, a slow cooker, water and some odds and ends of vegetables has to be the best way to make food dollars go furthest.<br />
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Whole grains are fun to toss into that pot along with the beans. My current favorite is freekeh, a green cracked wheat that is roasted and so has a smoky taste. I also love bulgur and wheat berries. Rice is good, especially basmati, though I don't much like brown rice. Quinoa stays the hell out of my kitchen, but I am in love with pearl barley. <br />
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In terms of proportion of spending, less than 1% of my grocery budget went to alcohol for cooking, about 7% was baked goods (mostly tortillas and sandwich rolls), the same went to beverages, which means coffee, 3% to condiments and sauces, <i>so</i> necessary to make food interesting, 11% was for dairy, 23% was fresh produce, 19% was general pantry, 3% was legumes, 18% was meat and fish, 2% was pasta, rice and grains, 2.5% was snacks and 3.5% went to spices & herbs. My single biggest purchase this year was for a turkey for Thanksgiving ($28.66 and a terrible buy), nuts are surprisingly expensive, and fresh produce may be expensive per pound, but you don't generally need to buy that much of any one thing. Beans are the best buy on the shopping list.<br />
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Anglachel<br />
<br />Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-33501754104132029372012-01-02T18:21:00.000-08:002012-01-02T18:21:29.752-08:00Modes of Reaction and RevolutionI am all about distinctions. It matters that we study differences between political actors and correctly identify points of congruence as assiduously as we try to separate the political world into the members of the Beloved Community and those who are beyond the Pale. That's why I was very pleased to read a deceptively simple article in the latest <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/" target="_blank">New York Review of Books</a> by <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/mark-lilla/" target="_blank">Mark Lilla</a>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/republicans-revolution/?pagination=false&printpage=true" target="_blank">Republicans for Revolution</a>. It is a review of a Corey Robin's book "<i>The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism form Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin</i>," and it gets to the heart of many of the observations and criticisms I've posted on this blog about misapplication of political labels, though with fewer polemics and greater elegance.<br />
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While the review of the book itself is utterly damning (Money quote - "That’s why Corey Robin’s <i>The Reactionary Mind</i> is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid."), Lilla uses it as an opportunity to engage in some much needed public thinking about the meaning of "conservative" and "liberal" and their mutual relationship to the concept of "reactionary". In doing so, he demonstrates how and why reactionary politics is empowering for the Right and self-defeating for the Left. He does not explicitly describe the political outcome, leaving it as a thought exercise for the reader. Instead, he explicates the differences between political types in a way that transcends the conventional presumption that Conservative = Right =Reactionary and Liberal = Left = Progressive, the fundamental categorical error both of Robins' book and almost all political pontificating on the Left.<br />
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Lilla disposes of Robin in the first few paragraphs of the article and then leaps into what really interests him and me (all emphasis mine):<br />
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An opportunity has been missed. Robin is not wrong to think there are two tribes in modern politics, and the terms “right” and “left” are as good as any other to describe them. But within each tribe there are clans that do more than express more radical or moderate versions of the same outlook. <i>Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right</i>, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites. To understand why the distinction between them still matters, we need to remind ourselves what the terms “conservative” and “reactionary” originally meant. </blockquote>
Lilla then goes into a three paragraph examination of Edmund Burke, conservatism and liberalism that is breathtaking in its accuracy and economy. He segues into his true interest, analyzing reactionaries by saying, "The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. <b><i>The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.</i></b>"<br />
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Before getting into his brilliant categorization of reactionaries, I want to tease out something he left unsaid when comparing the conservatives and liberals (and these terms, of course, refer to the theoretical categories, not the current US bastardization of their meaning), which is the ground on which they can do political business, the reality that underlies the fantasy of bipartisanship. Conservatives in the Burkean mode defend the accretion of habits, customs and mores that create the society individuals accidentally inhabit. As Lilla writes,<br />
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"Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. <i>Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism.</i>"</blockquote>
In tension with this is the liberal presumption that the individual is prior to the society in which he or she inhabits - society is the accident, not the individual:<br />
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Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, in contrast to conservatives, give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds. <i><b>They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action. This assumption, more than any other, shapes the liberal temperament.</b></i> It is what makes liberals suspicious of appeals to custom or tradition, given that they have so often been used to justify privilege and injustice. <i>Liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs.</i> Principles are the only legitimate constraints on our freedom.</blockquote>
The common ground is mentioned in the conservative description - institutions. In the institution, the past/inheritance is given form and public stability. Likewise, the institution becomes the collective power of individuals to insist upon and defend their rights against the arbitrary exercise of power by elites. Institutions are necessary for both political perspectives because they are what shape and defend us against human nature - the rapaciousness of elite and mass alike are subject to the disciplinary power of the institution. The battle the conservatives lost - which is the topic of <i>Reflections on the Revolution in France</i> - is how institutions will be legitimized. Age, as represented by custom, is no longer the chief defining characteristic of legitimacy. Instead, property occupies that place, and it is specifically fungible property that is the foundation for the institutions that define modern society. Provision of rights is inextricable from defense of fungible property (property in the abstract, that can be governed by universal, impersonal rules), as rights are cast in the mode of things that cannot be taken away.<br />
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If an institution is founded on the basis of defense of (property) rights and then the institution is modified by exercise of its own rules, it can be acknowledged as legitimate by both conservative and liberal political factions. Human nature is defended and constrained in the same moment. There is actually little reference to past or future as the logic of the institution is inward looking, seeking to more faithfully explicate the universal (and thus unchanging) principles that the institution exists to house <br />
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It helps that there is almost no true conservatism in the US, as Lilla points out, "Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. <i>We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves.</i>" Our collective view of human nature is liberal. This is how you can end up with a "conservative" Eisenhower endorsing Social Security
because it has now become part of the warp and weft of the (modern,
abstract, liberal, rights-based) US society into which particular human beings are
accidentally born. Perhaps ironically, the liberalism that venerates and celebrates the centrality of freedom to the human condition is committed to the preservation of formal structures that cannot be changed very easily, lest the space for the enactment of freedom be endangered. The duty of a liberal institution is to conserve.<br />
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In distinction to a mode of politics that is mostly inward looking and static (progress is not change but fulfillment of universal principles, after all), there is the view that politics is about change and time - going forward to go back or simply going forward. Reactionaries battle against the creation of stable institutions that do not fulfill their preferred eschatological vision. <br />
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Lilla distinguishes between two types of reactionaries - <b>restorative</b> and <b>redemptive</b>. The former "dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic," while the latter "take for granted that the revolution is a <i>fait accompli</i> and that there is no going back. ... They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over." While the first type wishes to reclaim and and reimpose the past, the redemptive reactionary has nothing conservative in their nature.<br />
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They want to blow shit up and watch the world burn. It is political apocalypticism. <br />
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Lilla's concern is with the rise of this political mode on the Right, something he thinks intellectuals and political analysts like Robin won't see because they want big sound-bite-ready political targets, because political actors who care nothing about conserving institutions of any kind ("Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society—representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement—that we forget they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. They had contempt for weak German aristocrats with their dueling scars and precious manners, and reserved their nostalgia for a new Rome to be brought into being through storms of steel. There was nothing conservative about them.") have nothing to lose by continually upping the apocalyptic ante. We think we're dealing with restorative reactionaries, who are dangerous enough:<br />
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On questions of history, however, Americans are all over the map. As we were reminded in the run-up to the last Iraq war, <i>every now and then the prophetic strain in our political rhetoric inspires eschatological fantasies of democratic avant-gardism</i>, with Lady Liberty replacing the French Marianne on top of history’s barricades. Then reality intrudes and <i>Americans revert to the converse fantasy of American exceptionalism, which must be protected from history through isolation and self-purification</i>. We have also had our share of restorative reactionaries, from Southern nostalgics for the ol’ plantation, to agrarian despisers of the great American cities, to racialist despisers of the immigrants they attracted, to no-government oddballs who think they can go it alone, to trust-fund hippies who went back to the land, to lock-and-load eco-terrorists who want to take us off the grid (after they recharge their Macs). <i>What we have not seen much of, except on the fringes of American politics, are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos. At least until now. ...</i></blockquote>
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Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but <i>how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties</i> that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. <i><b>In other words, how to undo history.</b></i></blockquote>
My concern is how the Left has been captured by much the same impulse towards politics as history, wanting to <a href="http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/02/netroots-liberal-democrats-and-jacobins.html" target="_blank">see themselves as revolutionaries</a> who have a world-historic mission to transform society and free it of [insert hated-thing-of-the-month-here]. The thing they hate most, almost a meta-hatred from which all others derive, is institutionalized power. They are, as hinted at throughout Lilla's article, much closer to the Right's reactionaries than they'd like to admit, sharing a resentment against structures that defend political power settlements, but unlike the Right, doing little to mobilize economic and political resentment in the general population to accrue power for apocalyptic political action. Occupy Wall Street protests eschewing actual objectives and one-off hacktivist raids on government and corporate servers are unlikely to translate into votes and it's questionable whether the participants care. <br />
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The redemptive reaction on the Left was, I think, Obama's election. We returned to the Kennedy White House, the time when we were all happy with the direction of the nation. The award of the Nobel prize to Obama was done in a political-historical mode, not a reflection of what was but of the fantasy of what the world ought to be in light of the grand historical moment we were witnessing. Reality, sadly, has a distinctly liberal, that is to say, factual bias, and keeps stubbornly persisting in the now instead of breathlessly charging forward into the always already perfect future.<br />
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Neither the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries on the Left have a snowball's chance in hell of contesting with their counterparts on the Right in the popular imagination. <br />
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In any event, Lilla has provided me with new and interesting ways to look at the current political milieu. The question will be whether the Right's redemptive reactionaries apocalypticism will burn itself out before it burns the place down.<br />
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Anglachel <br />Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-44102551793802438402011-12-28T21:06:00.000-08:002011-12-28T21:06:56.932-08:00A Long, Nasty YearThis year started out badly and didn't get a fuck of a lot better. I started with a compressed nerve in my neck, swiftly followed by my mother's death and went on to weeks of persistent illness. I feel like I've been sick the entire year. Now, at the end of December, the compressed nerve is making a comeback. Oh frabjous day...<br />
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The company I work for is being dissolved by greedy ideologues who declare - without a scrap of evidence - that outsourcing <em>of course</em> is more economical than having people directly on staff. The multi-million dollar contracts will be signed sometime in April and then all staff are simply waiting to be absorbed by the IT Borg Services company slurping up their section of the operations or else get laid off. I'm going to take advantage of some job placement training that's due in January/February, then I'm going to start looking. I don't fancy waiting around to be fired. My manager, whose pretty cool, knows what I'm doing and said she'll help with my resume, send me job leads and even do practice interviews if I'd like. <br />
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I keep up with the news but have resisted the urge to comment. Pretty much everything I said back in 2008 about the wrong track the respectable people on the Left were determined to take has come true, not that they appear to notice. The Boyz of the Blogz continue to be as shallow, narcissistic, clueless, and self-congratulatory as ever, no matter how many times the Incomparable One and the Shrill One smack them upside the head. <br />
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My political perspective doesn't align with most other blogospheric positions, left or right. I am unimpressed by the street rebellions (though I agree with Eric Hobsbawm that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16217726" target="_blank">it is like 1848 all over again</a>), rolling my eyes at the wasted opportunities of the Occupy movement, and deeply cynical about the antics of hacktivists, from Julian Assange to Lulzsec to Anonymous. A customer of the company the Spousal Unit works for got attacked by Anonymous a while back and it was days of effort to keep the little fuckers from bringing down the site. No, not amused by these hooligans whatsoever. <br />
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I watch an allegedly liberal intelligentsia unable to escape its collective fantasy that anyone who rejects Obama can only be doing so because they are racist, not because the guy is to the right of Richard Nixon. No, I won't be placated by the knowledge that the Right is worse - shitty governance is shitty governance even if the choice is that or obscenely shitty governance. It's bad and sad when you realize Nixon would be an improvement.<br />
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In the absence of material improvements to living conditions brought about by the Long Recession (which, truth be told, really started when Reagan took office), increasing numbers of people will vote their resentments. If it won't get better, you might as well make other people hurt. The high-minded left doesn't want to consider that the dumb-shit cop who pepper sprayed the protesters at UC Davis is a perfect representative of the portion of the 99% who must be wooed away from the reactionary right if any high-mindedness is to have an actual effect in the world. That's the deep failure of the left in this country since LBJ. <br />
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So, that's been this year for me - pain physical and emotional, job stress, and political estrangement. Instead of blogging, I've been watching old TV shows on Netflix, reading books, cooking lots of amazing things, tracking local food prices, trying to exercise, visiting with my dad, seeing my friends and generally have this thing called a life. <br />
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It's kind of nice.<br />
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AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-36265022880958070312011-05-01T21:41:00.000-07:002011-05-04T20:03:30.211-07:00PanettaThe news tonight also puts a different light on some of the reshuffling of major posts. The move of Panetta from CIA to Defense makes more sense. If this was an intelligence victory, as seems to be the case, then moving the person in charge of that to head up the remaining operations in the area offers continuity.<br />
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Petraeus in at CIA strikes me more as trying to keep him out of the upcoming presidential contest than anything else, though, again, this takes some rethinking. It may be that the general understood he would not be able to contest once OBL had been disposed of as this will be the horse BHO rides to victory next year, and is content to bide his time for 2016.<br />
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But the interesting story to tease out of here is what was Panetta's involvement in this operation and why is this leading to him going to replace Gates at Defense rather than have him remain at the CIA?<br />
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AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-14600583664373818882011-05-01T20:24:00.000-07:002011-05-04T20:05:29.462-07:00Bin Laden Dead - UpdatedI've already read cynical responses from the anti-Obama contigent (left & right wings) and I think they are missing the real point.<br />
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Osama bin Laden is someone who declared war on the rest of humanity and has engaged in the butchery of thousands of people across four continents (North America, Europe, Africa and Asia) for more than two decades. Any justification for his violence was long ago vitiated by the purposeful targeting of ordinary civilians. It matters not that Bush & Cheney and their neocon crew used him as an excuse to engage in their own butchery. In the attack on the World Trade Center, he was attacking the <em>world</em>, not just the US, and everything that modernity stands for, particularly what is best about it - secularism, equal rights, equality before a rational rule of law, and the undermining of fundamentalist power structures.<br />
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Will this event be used in opportunistic ways by every political operator under the sun? Duh, and irrelevant.<br />
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This person did not care to share the world with the rest of humanity, wishing to arrogate to himself the power of life and death over all others. It is right and just that the world decline to share the world with him.<br />
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Anglachel<br />
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<strong>UPDATE</strong> - Interesting news snippet I have only seen in <a href="http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/may/01/us-official-bin-laden-killed-near-islamabad/">my local fish-wrap</a>: <br />
"An American official says Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion close to the Pakistani capital. <br />
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A Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that the al-Qaida leader had been killed in Pakistan. " <br />
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This news intimates that he has been living in Pakistan under the protection of someone influential for some time. Time to be following some money.Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-1764398789934172722011-04-09T16:28:00.000-07:002011-04-14T17:44:41.936-07:00Updated - Create your own TPL for IE9Tracking Protection List, that is. For the IE9 users out there who want a little more fine grained control over what gets delivered to your browser and who have access to web server, you can create your own handy-dandy TPL.<a name='more'></a><br />
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First, a quick review of what a TPL does on IE9. A TPL is a plain text file that you can open up and read directly to see what's in it. Nothing compiled or hidden here.<br />
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When you add and enable a list in your browser, it checks that list for instructions on how to handle the stuff the web page you want to view is trying to download. Each thing that comes in is evaluated for two things:<br />
<ol><li>Is it coming from the same site where you're browsing? An example of this is news site like LA Times with ads from Double-click. If the content is coming from the LA Times, it is allowed. If it is not, the next thing kicks in.</li>
<li>Is there a rule for it in one of the TPLs loaded in the browser? The rules are relatively simple - yes, let it downlaod or no, block that sucker. If it is blocked, the browser refuses the connection and the junk doesn't download.</li>
</ol>OK, now that you know the basics, here's the two caveats:<br />
<ol><li>If you have multiple TPLs, and one says No, don't download X and another says Yes, download X, the Yes rule wins. <strong>The exception to this is your built-in personalized list.</strong> The rules in that list take precedence over the rules in <em>all</em> other lists. The problem I find with the personalized list is that it will block cookies and tracking stuff, but it doesn't let you specify exactly what things you want to block.</li>
<li>The professionally prepared lists may block advertisement and tracking stuff, but they don't block annoying sites as such. They really don't handle the social media sites very well, letting Facebook in particular run rough-shod across a page.</li>
</ol>In general, the TPLs work pretty well as long as you<strong> do <em>NOT</em> load the TRUSTe TPL</strong>, last link on this page: <a href="http://www.iegallery.com/us/trackingprotectionlists/default.aspx">http://www.iegallery.com/us/trackingprotectionlists/default.aspx</a>. Why not? TRUSTe is the Trojan Horse of the TPL world, and deliberately <em>allow</em>s all the tracking shit to access your computer. If you don't install it, it can't override the other lists.<br />
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Be sure to install Easy List, which is from the same company that produces the Ad Block plug-in for Firefox. The lists from Abine and Privacy Choice are pretty good, too. Once in place, your browser will automatically go and check them for updates. They work sliently in the background at all times. The updates are delivered transparently and you don't have to restart the browser.<br />
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The issue that happened today was a site I use all the time suddenly and obnoxiously displayed the Facebook "Like" button. I started checking other sites I frequent and realized that this miserable bit of crapware was infesting everything. I looked at the various TPLs I have installed, and found that none of them attempted to block any Facebook stuff downloaded as a 3rd party item on a web site. The Like button sits inside an Iframe in the page, which further masks its presence. <br />
<br />
After a little searching, I found some great information from the W3C on how to build a TPL. It's located here: <a href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/2011/SUBM-web-tracking-protection-20110224/">http://www.w3.org/Submission/2011/SUBM-web-tracking-protection-20110224/</a> A little dense to get through, but if you use Easy List's TPL as a model, not hard to figure out. Start at section 4 - List Format, and read down.<br />
<br />
Armed with a bit of knowledge, I opened up Notepad and created a TPL that blocked Facebook as a 3rd party download to my system. The file reads:<br />
<br />
msFilterList<br />
: Expires = 5<br />
# blocked strings<br />
- like.php<br />
# domain rules<br />
-d facebook.com<br />
-d facebook.net<br />
<br />
This says check for a list update every five days, block any URI (<strong>U</strong>niform <strong>R</strong>esource <strong>I</strong>dentifier) that has "like.php" anywhere in the URL, and block anything from either facebook domain, .com or .net. I saved it as "personaltpl.tpl" and uploaded it to my web server. (You can save it with a .txt extension and it will work just as well, by the way.) I also created a simple HTML file that just had a link to the tpl file with a little added javascript to tell the browser to install the file. I took that code from the links on Microsoft's page with the TPLs list I linked above. <br />
<br />
After I uploaded the files, I browsed to the HTML page, clicked the link and installed the new TPL. Bye-bye Facebook Like buttons. The extra nice thing is I can add whatever other blocks I want to the file at any time and block the stuff the other lists won't do. When I go to a third party site (making it first party), then the list doesn't block stuff because it is being delivered directly and it's assumed that if you are on the site, you want stuff from that site. <br />
<br />
So there's a little tutorial on how to take blocking into your own hands if you're using IE9. You can actually also use this method in IE8, it's just harder to install the lists. <br />
<br />
The TPL list method is efficient and effective. You can see the marketing hyenas trying to keep people from using it by turning it off by default in IE9 and not promoting the TPL list links. In truth, it is as or more easy to use than downloading Ad Block for Firefox. After all, Firefox doesn't come with it installed and ready to switch on, does it? You have to know about it and go find it. Here's how to get "Ad Block" for IE9, easy.<br />
<ol><li>Click the Gear icon in the upper right corner of the browser window.</li>
<li>In the menu, select Saftey/Tracking Protection. A new window opens. </li>
<li>In that window, look for the item "Your Personalized List" in the main window. Select it.</li>
<li>Click the "Enable" button.</li>
</ol>Congratulations, you now have "Ad Block" for IE9 working. Want to add a few more lists? Go to the Internet Explorer Gallery site (it's a preloaded bookmark in the browser, but if you're incapable of using bookmarks, here's the URL: <a href="http://www.iegallery.com/us/">http://www.iegallery.com/us/</a>). On the home page, there's a BIG button that says "Get Tracking Protection Lists". Click it for the page I linked to above. Install Easy List. That will give you the actual, latest "Ad Block" blocking list. <br />
Now, see, that wasn't so hard, was it? If you want to block even more, build a custom TPL and put it on your own website or ask a friend with a site to post it for you. <br />
<br />
For how to get the same protection on XP with IE8, read over my Safe Browsing article, especially <a href="http://www.henneth-annun.net/stories/chapter_view.cfm?stid=8354&spordinal=15">Chapter 15, How I Browse</a>. It is a more manual version of what I told you to do with IE9, plus you can't add pre-compiled lists of blocked 3rd party sites, you have to build your own list, but it works and you don't have to worry about ad-ons breaking or being incompatible with the latest update. <br />
<br />
It's popular among the technorati to scream and howl about how <em>awful</em> IE is, and never offer a hint to ordinary users on how to turn on built-in features of the product that are as if not more effective than the plug-ins for other browsers. This post is for the majority of web site users who are on IE and who are getting sick and tired of being sneered at instead of helped by your allegedly technically literate friends. The sad truth is they don't know about the real differences between browsers, don't understand security, confuse blocking ads with being secure, and reflexively bash Microsoft instead of critically interrogate all corporate claims. They probably don't know about TPL and its status as a proposed standard for dealing with attempts to track you, or about how your personal list trumps commercially prepared TPLs. Etc.<br />
<br />
Safe browsing means not being railroaded by corporation <em>or</em> the conventional wisdom of the hip crowd. <br />
<br />
Anglachel<br />
<br />
Update - with thanks to commenter John, I have been pointed at a very interesting site by Hal Berenson. Hal has three links of relevance to this particular post:<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://hal2020.com/2011/04/09/microsoft-ie9-tracking-protection-lists-part-1-the-why/" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to Microsoft IE9 Tracking Protection Lists (Part 1 – The Why)"><span style="color: black;">Microsoft IE9 Tracking Protection Lists (Part 1 – The Why)</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://hal2020.com/2011/04/09/microsoft-ie9-tracking-protection-lists-part-2-%e2%80%93-the-how/" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to Microsoft IE9 Tracking Protection Lists (Part 2 – The How)"><span style="color: black;">Microsoft IE9 Tracking Protection Lists (Part 2 – The How)</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://hal2020.com/2011/04/10/truste-gets-its-tracking-protection-list-act-together/" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to TRUSTe gets its Tracking Protection List act together"><span style="color: black;">TRUSTe gets its Tracking Protection List act together</span></a> </li>
</ul>Anglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4119943.post-59315571816610491892011-04-06T17:05:00.000-07:002011-04-06T17:06:05.106-07:00Help Lambert on a Sudden ShortfallLambert, the indefatigable person who keeps the wheels in motion at <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/">Corrente</a>, is <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/help_2">asking for some short term financial assistance</a> due to an unexpected interruption of income. What has been happening lately at Corrente? Some good stuff:<br />
<blockquote>1. Corrente was the only political blog to <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/live_cairo_0">cover the Egyptian revolution live</a>, 24/7, from its beginning to the fall of Mubarak. Correntians LostClown and DanPS attended post-Egyptian events in WI and OH, and tweeted them to the Corrente sidebar.<br />
2. Corrente is the only political blog to <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/nv">integrate the 198 techniques of non-violent protext and persuasion</a> with its postings on political events, whether in Egypt or this country.<br />
3. Correntians produce consistently excellent serial content, like Vast Left's <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/slideshow/american_extremists">American Extremists</a>, the Plantidotians' <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/slideshow/plantidotes">Plantidote of the Day</a>, the Corrente Review of Games, Hugh's reports on unemployment statistics, <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/life_gas_lane">PA_lady's reports on fracking</a>, Annals of Career "Progressive" Idiocy, or <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/its_all_about_rents_0">It's All About The Rents</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/">.</a><br />
4. Corrente excels at calling bullshit, whether on Obama, our famously free press, the legacy parties, or career "progressives." In fact, Corrente is consistently ahead of the curve in recognizing bullshit as bullshit. We knew Obama was a fraud before it was cool.<br />
5. Corrente has assembled an excellent list of long-form guest posters of whom I would single out <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/posts/all?uid=Stirling+Newberry&type=All">Stirling Newberry</a>, <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/posts/all?uid=danps&type=All">danps</a>, <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/posts/all?uid=letsgetitdone&type=All">letsgetitdone</a> and <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/posts/all?uid=Tony+Wikrent&type=All">Tony Wikrent</a> (both now Fellows), as well as <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/posts/all?uid=davidswanson&type=All">David Swanson</a>. And I'm sure I'm missing somebody!<br />
6. Corrente has been consistently ahead of the curve on Depression Era/Peak Oil topics like gardening, growing your own food, and home maintenance, as well as the overall theoretical construct of "rent."<br />
7. At Corrente, two candidates for emergent parties continue to be active commenters and posters -- Julia Williams and Warren Mosler -- putting Corrente firmly in the mainstream of American public opinion, where 58% support a third party (although some would say a second).</blockquote><blockquote>To which -- appropriating the Versailles<a class="glossary-icon" href="http://www.correntewire.com/glossary/term/8274" title="The Beltway; for background, see here. Denotes the Village, but with connotations of ruling (as opposed to governing), absolutism, wretched excess, decay, and ultimate collapse. "><img src="http://www.correntewire.com/sites/all/modules/glossary/glossary.gif" /></a> subjunctive -- I would add that the 2012 campaign began today. Independent platforms like Corrente will, I hope, be important for those who wish to avoid drowning in the oncoming tsunami of mis- and dis-information from the legacy parties.</blockquote><a href="http://www.correntewire.com/help_2">Read the whole post</a>, and then fish around in the sofa cushions for some goodness to throw his way. There are very, very few political thinkers and bloggers in the Left Blogosphere who have contributed as much to keeping critical thinking alive as Lambert has done. <br />
<br />
AnglachelAnglachelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01110546252851760414noreply@blogger.com0