Most Dangerous

I missed this one - World's Most Dangerous Countries for Women, at the Big Picture

Yellow Peril

Interesting how a few facts about the US debt ceiling talks have been wilfully obscured - like the old chestnut about China owning 'most' of the US debt ...

Many people — politicians and pundits alike — prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt.

But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. While the Chinese, Japanese and plenty of other foreigners own substantial amounts, it's really Americans who hold most of America's debt.

Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider:

• Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
• Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
• Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
• Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
• Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
• Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
• Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
• State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
• Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
• United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
• Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
• State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
• Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
• U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
• China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
• The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
• Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

via & mudede

I will never be cut

Guardian:

I struggle to understand why the systematic and brutal wounding of young girls is not considered a national scandal. I know that right honourable and honourable members would not tolerate a situation in which little British girls were taken abroad and returned missing their fingers. Likewise, we should not tolerate female genital mutilation.

I am the MAAAASTER

via kottke

You ARE EATING SHIT ... I paraphrase

After midnight horrors, Goldy gets reflexive ....

Then I let out a long, welcome fart. Oh. It was the beans. I eventually fell back to sleep.

But it got me thinking once again about the absolute insanity of an industrial food system in which we have been taught to treat the meat we consume as if it were dangerous medical waste. You might think me crazy for my groggy, early morning hypochondria, but if you've ever suffered a case of severe food poisoning, I think you'd understand. It's the status quo that is crazy, not me, that we should so legitimately fear the food we eat. Read the warning labels on the meat packaging itself, or read the CDC statistics on foodborne illness, and then tell me I'm blowing things out of proportion.

They will know us

... By our extraordinary dress sense

Raw power

Came across this on Saturday morning in Pittsfield.

Rape in Uttar Pradesh

RECENT RAPE CASES

• 20 June - Salia, 11, is raped and killed on her way back from school. A 23-year-old villager is arrested and confesses
• 19 June - A 35-year-old woman is gang-raped by five men inside her home. Afraid she will identify them, the men burn her to death
• 17 June - A 14-year-old girl is stabbed in the eye by her two attackers when she resists their attempts to rape her
• 10 June - Sonam, 14, is raped and murdered, allegedly by police. Her body is found hanging inside a police station
• 5 February - 16-year-old Sarika's ears are cut and one hand cut off when she resists her attackers

BBC

... What I mean to highlight here is the shifting climate of orthodoxy ... (Harper's, July 2011) - note, not heterodoxy.

Amaru (2)

Andrés Neuman - Palabras a una hija que no tengo

Entornaré tus ojos si prometes soñarme.
Compréndeme, no es fácil velar por alguien siempre:
a veces necesito saber que tienes miedo.
Cuando sepas hablar, dame mi nombre;
diciéndome papá habrás hecho bastante.
En invierno no abrigues demasiado
tu cuerpo de princesa, más útil y más noble
es irse acostumbrando a resistir.
Acepta golosinas de los desconocidos
(no está el mundo como para negarse)
pero apréndete esto en cuanto puedas:
más frecuente es lo amargo, que te ignoren,
y no los caramelos.
Te enseñaré a leer fuera del aula
y llegada la hora quiero que escribas «mar»
sobre los azulejos del pasillo.
Cuando cruces por fin la calle sola
sabrás que el riesgo y la velocidad
perseguirán tus días para siempre.
No creas que en el fondo no soy un optimista:
de lo contrario tú no estarías ahí
cuidando que te cuide como debo.
Como ves, desconfío
de quienes no veneran el asombro
de estar aquí, ahora.
Existe la alegría, pero duele;
tendrás que conseguirla.
Y cuando la consigas tendrás miedo.

Amaru

The process of death

Two articles that speak to the process of learning to live with impending death - "We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die."

1. Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.

Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence.

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?

2. Dudley Clendinen in the New York Times:

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.

No, thank you. I hate being a drag. I don’t think I’ll stick around for the back half of Lou.

Freedom - Franzen

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

LGBTQ Parades - Photos

The Big Picture

Death of the Heirlooms

From Middle English heirlome, a compound of heir (“heir”) and lome (“tool”), thus "a tool passed to one's heirs":

Great graphic at National Geographic, covering Our Dwindling Food Variety:

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct.

Holy megaweeds - USDA GM Deregulation

from Laura Flanders:

It's a hoary bureaucratic trick, making a controversial announcement on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, when most people are daydreaming about what beer to buy on the way home from work, or are checking movie times online. But that's precisely what the US Department of Agriculture pulled last Friday. [...]

In its July 1 response, the USDA agreed: "[N]one of the organisms used in generating this genetically engineered (GE) glyophosphate tolerant Kentucky bluegrass...are considered to be plant pests," so Roundup Ready bluegrass "does not meet the definition of a 'regulated article' and is not subject" to the Plant Protection Act. In other words, go forth and multiply.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing - explains how the US regulations against GM crops were based on a 1950s era fiction bolstered by a slightly (but only slightly) more binding recent law that has now been blown thru ...

Wazí Aháŋhaŋ Oyáŋke

Demographics (Wikipedia)

In 2005 in an interview, Cecilia Fire Thunder, the first woman president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, noted the following: "68 percent of the college graduates on the reservation are women. Seventy percent of the jobs are held by women. Over 90 percent of the jobs in our schools are held by women."^[38]

• As of 2011, population estimates of the reservation range from 28,000 to 40,000. Numerous enrolled members of the tribe live off the reservation.^[39]
• 80% of residents are unemployed (versus 10% of the rest of the country);
• 49% of the residents live below the Federal poverty level (61% under the age of 18);
• Per capita income in Shannon County is $6,286;
• The Infant Mortality rate is 5 times higher than the national average;
• Native American amputation rates due to diabetes is 3 to 4 times higher than the national average;
• Death rate due to diabetes is 3 times higher than the national average; and
• Life expectancy on the Pine Ridge is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, other than in Haiti; Men - 48 years, Women - 52 years.^[40]

All sorts of morons are common

Oak Park Woman Faces 93-Days in Jail For Planting Vegetable Garden

Code enforcement gave her a warning, then a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor. Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

We asked Bass whether she thinks she has suitable, live, plant material in her front yard.

"It's definitely live. It's definitely plant. It's definitely material. We think it's suitable," she said.

So, we asked [the city] why it's not suitable.

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," he said.

But when you look at front yards that are unsightly and overgrown, is Bass' vegetable garden really worth the city's time and money?

[via]

A call for urgent international action

Occupied Palestine, 9 July 2011 – While the Arab Spring for freedom, democracy and social justice has exposed and challenged the collusion of world governments with autocratic and oppressive Arab regimes, many states and corporations continue their business-as-usual arms trade and military cooperation with Israel. Cooperation with Israel is maintained despite its systematic resort to massive violence against and killing of Palestinian and other Arab civilians, including school children and peaceful activists, and in spite of its increasingly brutal colonial policies against the Palestinian people and the persistent flouting of international law. Seven years after the International Court of Justice advisory opinion recommending international cooperation to ensure that Israel dismantles its illegal Wall in the occupied West Bank, and on the sixth anniversary of Palestinian civil society’s call for a broad campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) calls for immediate international action towards a mandatory comprehensive military embargo against Israel similar to that imposed against apartheid South Africa in the past.

[more]

Rick Perry is a fucking madman

1. Texas has executed a Mexican-born man after the US supreme court and the state's governor, Rick Perry, spurned appeals from Barack Obama to spare the convicted murderer's life in order to protect US interests abroad.

2. Gov. Rick Perry signed a budget that was balanced only through accounting maneuvers, rewriting school funding laws, ignoring a growing population and delaying payments on bills coming due in 2013:

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst bragged that the $80.6-billion, two-year budget will cut state government spending by $15 billion compared to the previous budget.

Critics, who see things differently on what services are truly essential, say it underfunds the state’s needs by $10 billion beyond that.

Democrats also derided the GOP’s claim that it was truly a balanced budget.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors and misdirection,” said state Rep. Garnett Coleman, D-Houston. “There’s no way this is a balanced budget. It’s billions short of where Texas is supposed to be on Medicaid and education.”

Washington Post

Teabagging Barker

Two tables down, Clive Barker, in a silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and an iron cross hung from his neck, was calling for more tea.

“Do you know what ‘teabagging’ is?” he asked an elderly woman waiting in front of him with her open book, then proceeded to provide her an anatomically detailed explanation.

(source)

Clinton tells it like it is

Speaking before a liberal student activist group, former President Bill Clinton was absolutely blunt about the Republicans' nationwide campaign of voter suppression.

“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.

(here, of course)

World Access for the Blind

Echolocation for blind people offers a real alternative to being treated as invalids.

site, more

Abortion Culture Wars

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

Guardian

BDS Movement

In 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a call for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights. A truly global movement against Israeli Apartheid is rapidly emerging in response to this call.