| I'm not dead... |
[07 Jul 2009|08:32am] |
...just absent.
I survived my 21st birthday, survived my family reunion in Texas, and even had fun along the way. I got back last night at 9:00pm.
And now I'm taking off for the Oregon Country Fair.
Back in another week!
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[24 Jun 2009|11:36am] |
My cousin's girlfriend wrangled me into going to a free yoga class with her today. Believe it or not, I've never done yoga. I'm nervous. I'm afraid it'll be like gradeschool P.E. all over again.
Not to mention, I don't have any "sporty" clothes. Just lots and lots of spandex. Damn you, spandex. What does one wear to yoga, anyway, aside from spandex?
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| Perfect Day (minus the Lohan) |
[15 Jun 2009|09:39am] |
Never ever watch "I Know Who Killed Me" with Lindsay Lohan. It is probably the worst movie I've ever seen, and not even in an entertaining way.
Yesterday, Bri, Amba, Brenna, Blake, and our neighbor crashed my big sister's barbeque. It was kind of incredible. We got high at my house and all of a sudden the perfect opportunity falls into our lap to go make some tofu dogs and jump around in the giant bounce house in my sister's back yard, like this:
Except that we called it "Das Bauns Haus" like we were german (or "Springen Sie Haus").
I've never had an opportunity to be in one of those things without adult supervision. It was awesome.
Tattoo today. I had just woke up from a terrible nightmare about it, where I went in for my appointment and the man was just a total annoying fuckoff who didn't actually know how to draw and had this crazy posse of naked girls who just hung around him all the time and created distractions. So in my dream it took him like ten hours to get my tattoo finished because he kept being distracted by naked girl shenanigans and was generally incompetent, and I had to pay for all ten hours.
Let's hope things go a little smoother than that.
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[17 May 2009|10:59am] |
We have a fire pit now! Well, two of them - Home Depot accidentally gave us two of them and we only paid for one.
I got very high last night. I couldn't move. It was nice to sit back and watch people.
I was still high when my mother woke me up with a phone call at 7:30 this morning. I couldn't find the phone while it was ringing, freaked out and called Amber back accidentally, woke her up and yelled at her for waking me up because I thought she was my mother.
I was still mostly asleep when I did this too. I was practically sleep-dialing. We had a half-asleep argument about who woke who up with a phonecall until I realized it was Amber and hung up without explaining.
Then I promptly called my mother back - my actual mom - and yelled at her proper. Her reason for calling me so early? She wanted to know her home phone number.
Fucking shit mom, you seriously don't know your home phone number? The one you gave to me yourself, and had for like three months now? Knowing your home phone number is a crucial life skill.
I'm still pissy about it. Oh, mom.
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[06 May 2009|09:00am] |
One of my absolutely least favorite ways to wake up is hearing the garbage/recycle truck outside my house at 7am, realizing that I forgot to put out the garbage/recycling, then running outside barefoot in the rain to put it out and hope it's not too late.
Happened this morning.
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[03 May 2009|08:54pm] |
The winner of the 90's costume contest, our darling Lisa Foster!
( More 90s pictures! )
Everything is up on Brenna's facebook now. I'm so glad this party was well documented!
It was so much fun that I think it would be well worth throwing another 90s party. However, next up on our list is an Ugly Mug Party.
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| APORKALYPSE! |
[03 May 2009|10:07am] |
The NAFTA Flu
(April 28, 2009)
Some wibbly-wobbly, science-y stuff at the beginning of the article has been snipped out—read the source article if you're a nerd like myself.
 What is clear is that the more countries affected, the more likely the virus will find chinks in the world’s epidemiological armor. The new strain may develop the right epidemiological momentum once it reaches those countries whose public health infrastructures are underdeveloped or undermined by structural adjustment programs. On the other hand, that may have happened from the start. Since the early 1980s Mexico has been subjected to IMF-specified truncations in animal and health infrastructure.
<moar snippity snip>
Early reports have identified the sources of the new H1N1’s genome as strains that have infected humans, birds and pig populations from both North America and Europe. In an important way, then, ’swine flu’ is a misnomer. This influenza is a ’swine-bird-human’ reassortant. The extraordinarily complex origins of the new influenza—across so many host types and geographic regions—is telling us something about influenza’s present ability to cross host species and bridge great spatial distances between livestock populations.
First, we know that agribusinesses are moving their companies into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor and cheap land (something to which we will return). But companies are also engaging in sophisticated corporate strategy. Agribusinesses are spreading their entire production line across the world. For example, the Thailand-based CP Group, now the world’s fourth largest poultry producer, operates poultry facilities in Turkey, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the US. It has feed operations across India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Trade in live animals is also expanding in geographic extent.
These new configurations act as a cushion against the market’s putative ability to correct corporate inefficiencies.
For instance, the CP Group operates joint-venture poultry facilities across China, producing 600 million of China’s 2.2 billion chickens annually sold. When an outbreak of bird flu occurred in a farm operated by the CP group here in the province of Heilongjiang, Japan banned poultry from China. CP factories in Thailand were able to take up the slack and increase exports to Japan. In short, the CP Group profited from an outbreak of its own making. It suffered no ill effects from its own mistakes.
There is, then, another reason why the ’swine flu’ tag fails. It detracts from an obvious point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.
The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.
Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises [XD] to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy.
So if we are to impart responsibility where it should lay, North America’s new influenza would be better called the NAFTA flu.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, pushed by Bill Clinton in 1993 and approved by a bipartisan Congress, reduced trade barriers across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Products could now be marketed across the three countries without levies that favored domestic industries. The agreement also allowed companies to purchase and consolidate businesses in other member countries. Granjas Carroll, the Veracruz-based company under present scrutiny for the present outbreak, is a subsidiary of U.S.-based Smithfield Foods.
NAFTA had a fundamental effect on North American agriculture, including Mexico’s hog industry. As Batres-Marquez and her colleagues reported in 2006,
Among the changes that have occurred since NAFTA, many small commercial producers have exited the industry because of their inability to both produce animals more efficiently and meet the quality standards required by their buyers. As a result of the exit of smaller producers, the scale of production has increased and the industry has become more highly integrated. This reduction in small commercial production and expansion of technologically advanced production has taken place alongside continued production using traditional backyard methods.
Batres-Marquez et al., trade boosters, go on to praise the sanitary conditions of large commercial operations at the expense of those of smallholders, but their censure misses an obvious point. Smallholders may be individually less able to control outbreaks, but how do the most virulent strains emerge in the first place? Can we blame small farmers for their failure to control pathogens that first evolved in factory farms? In short, why did the veritable zoo of newly evolved human-specific influenzas arise only with deregulation and once vertically integrated livestock spread across the globe? Is this nothing more than a coincidence?
As Mike Davis notes,
Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story (reported by the admirable Bernice Wuethrich) to evidence that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track.”
Since its identification at the beginning of the Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then, in 1998, all hell broke loose.
A highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a factory hog farm in North Carolina, and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a weird variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).
The newly porous borders raise another question. Could the new influenza have percolated first in the United States before crossing Mexico’s border? The blame game is already underway:
Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova late Monday said no one knows where the outbreak began, and implied it may have started in the U.S.
“I think it is very risky to say, or want to say, what the point of origin or dissemination of it is, given that there had already been cases reported in southern California and Texas,” Cordova told a press conference.
Fascinating that a nationalist ethos reemerges once free trade appears implicated in a disease that could kill millions of people worldwide. The cross-border fisticuffs have the additional effect of detracting from core causes. Will the business nomenklatura who pushed NAFTA across all three countries be held to account for their decisions?
Where the housing bubble and banking collapse mark the aftermath of financial deregulation, H1N1 is only one of several pathogens that now track neoliberalism’s effects on global health.
(SOURCE)
- - - - -
Another article on the "NAFTA Flu":
How “The NAFTA Flu” Exploded
(By Al Giordano, April 29, 2009)
US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:
Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.
By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”
La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico:
In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.
It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”
Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.
The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.
False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.
None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.
Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.
(SOURCE)
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[03 May 2009|09:51am] |
I don't know about y'all, but I had so much fun last night - even though there was drama with someone who isn't allowed here and someone broke a window.
Listening to 90s music is totally excellent and fun, especially around people you enjoy, and especially drunk.
I stayed up until 5am singing to old old Britney Spears and old old Mariah Carey. No regrets.
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[02 May 2009|09:06am] |
Yesterday, after wandering around Value Village for a mere five minutes, I stumbled upon The Perfect 90s Dress.
Ladies and gents, I am pumped for the 90s party tonight. Who's with me?
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[01 May 2009|12:19am] |
Saw The Reader.
I kind of hated it. The movie made me feel miserable, and not in a way that I liked.
Kate Winslet is still a babe though.
I've got a hot date tomorrow, and the weather is supposed to be gorgeous. I am so glad I took time off from school this spring. There is so much sun to soak in, fresh air to breathe and free time to enjoy. I think I'm addicted.
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| Hey Will Smith, what time is it? |
[25 Apr 2009|12:25pm] |
90's Party is finally happening!
When: May 2nd (a Saturday)
Where: Ze Socially Awkward Casa
When: Party Time (or half past party, if you're super fashionable)
This is a costume party, folks, so this is the time to bust out all your old flannels, skorts, LA Lights, floral baby doll dresses, doc martins, etc...and for the many of you who never actually put all those things away, simply come as you are. (haha)
There will be a costume contest, with prizes that are undisclosed at this time.
Featuring music from Chumbawumba, the Toadies, Blind Melon, and all of your other favorites!
 Be there. |
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[11 Apr 2009|04:03pm] |
This picture was on the Kiro 7 website under the slideshow headline, "Scantily Clad Britney Spears Fans Salute 2009 Comeback". Take a gander at the excellent tshirts we made!
We were also interviewed, but the video didn't make the cut I suppose. I wish it had - we were hilarious. I totally high on Britney (and drunk on alcohol). I think I may have waxed poetic on how Brit and I are like sisters from another mister, and how long I've facetiously loved her, etc.
She was incredible. Amber and I were dancing and jumping around and singing and screaming the entire time. It was so worth it.
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[29 Mar 2009|11:45pm] |
Today was awkward. Olympia is tiny.
My mother is moving six blocks from my house. Erm. But she mentioned that she wants to start volunteering at the co-op with me, so that could be fun.
School starts tomorrow. I don't want to go.
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| pc |
[28 Mar 2009|12:30am] |
| [ |
music |
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shawn mullins: rockabye |
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little dish lady!
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[25 Mar 2009|02:51am] |
I've spent the last two hours looking for this truly excellent mix tape I made when I was fifteen. Of all the mixes I've made and didn't give away, it's definitely my favorite.
I'm actually really sad about this. Maybe one day I'll stumble upon it again.
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| oh happy day |
[24 Mar 2009|11:23am] |
I found a 120GB iPod on the ground yesterday. Among other things, it contains everything Korn has ever done and Terminator the movie.
Groundscore!
Tomorrow, D and I go to Seattle for our spring gaycation. We are staying at the Ace for two nights and are going to have so much fun. I can't wait!
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[16 Mar 2009|09:14am] |
Had a dream that I found $450, and still somehow believed it until a good thirty minutes after I woke up.
Oh, disappointment. You weasel your way into my life in ever more unexpected ways.
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[15 Mar 2009|11:07am] |
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Ugh. Gross snow. Grossie grossie grossie.
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[14 Mar 2009|01:02pm] |
 
Finally got the pictures back from my classmate's project. That's me and my little sister in the pictures. I don't care how much America's Next Top Model I've watched, once I get in front of a camera I feel silly and self conscious and ridiculous. But they turned out alright.
Yesterday at the gallery show, too, a lot of people approached me and thanked me for being comfortable with my body during the dance portion of the class - made it easier for shyer folks to dance.
And I ran into a fellow Americorps alum who had seen pictures from some of the service projects I lead in Louisiana! That was unexpected and seriously rewarding.
Overall, yesterday was really good.
Now, I have a bad case of bronchitis to treat. Too stubborn to go to the doctor, so I'm making my own garlic extract (as an antibiotic) and medicinal teas to break up this mucus in my system. Hope it works!
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[12 Mar 2009|06:30pm] |
My finished exhibit. You can't tell because the room is so bright, but the uterus actually lights up.
And now, Spring Break 2009! Oh hell yes.
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