Let’s Not Talk About It

My recommendation for nuclear waste disposal: up Kissinger’s ass.

@Dodgerblue:
I thought that was where Nixon was buried.

heh
I am not a flat earther. I just think you will fall off if you sail far enough.
thats all.

Perhaps too parochial to be of interest to anyone Outside the Beltway, but might Marion Barry’s nearly 40-year career in DC politics* finally be coming to a fittingly ignominious end? One can only hope:

D.C. Council Member Marion Barry personally benefited from the contract he obtained for his former girlfriend and directed earmarks that “provided substantial financial benefits to some of his close friends and supports,” [sic] according to a report by attorney Robert S. Bennett.

In the report, Bennett stated Barry violated “D.C. law, council rules and policies and procedures” and recommends his findings be referred to the U.S. Attorney for possible criminal charges.

Barry responded that he did nothing wrong because the council had no written procedures outlining whom a council member could give a contract to.

*I’d call it a “reign of terror,” but in his defense it seemingly wasn’t all bad.

@mellbell: The bitch set him up.

@mellbell: Like this would ever get him booted out of office.

@SanFranLefty: Damn, your reactions are so fast.

@rptrcub: I know, it’s not exactly his first trip to the principal’s office, but I’m so tired of all the slaps on the wrist, and I haven’t even lived here a full four years.

I guess its just coincidence that every time a black politician is elected in my area, he or she is soon prosecuted for failing to use the more sophisticated methods used by white politicians to direct contracts to their girlfriends and supporters.

@Prommie: Takes time for any new guy to get up to speed.

@Prommie: It’s not like there are no whitey politicians/evangelists who’ve been caught with their hand down some man-whore’s pants while their noses snuffed up some illicit powder.

I say fly free!

Just don’t pulpitize from your pompates, then ye will not be judged.

@redmanlaw: As a Native ‘Merican, and thus mythically invested with a more profound connection to The Land than “us”, I’d like to know what your take is on the way we feed ourselves hegemonic democracy empire.

Why can’t “we” man up and kill/grow our own food? Why can’t “we” figure out how to maintain our commons in a state that benefits the community? Because that would be fucking communism, or even worse, socialism?

At what point does long-term survival become politically incorrect impossible?

Also, Unicorn urging us to build more “safe, clean” nukular power plants? Because the Chinese are doing it? Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. This is the best of all possible worlds, now that we have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in the Congressional Majority. Yeah! Go USA! We’ll find some place to bury that waste where it will be safe and untouched for hundreds of thousands of years, hey, the Egyptian pyramids are still standing after 5000 years, what more could you possibly fucking want?

@Pedonator: Oops, I think I posted this in the wrong thread.

Also, redmanlaw, I’m absolutely not attacking you as espousing any particular set of views, I just thought it would be interesting to get a take on a modern redman’s views about how our peeples feeds itself. Among other things.

@Pedonator: Now that you mention it, since Barry’s for nukes, surely the Repugs will filibuster them.

@nojo: Or Dana Perino or Karl Rove will post a back-handed compliment in the National Review. In order to justify more torture and extrajudicial detentions as a necessary evil in the War on Terrism.

@Pedonator: Putting aside the Dances With Wolves stuff, I tell people that working for a living is easier than growing your own stuff or hunting it down. A cash economy will do that to a society. As recently as WWII people here and elsewhere grew all their own food and put it up. People had fresh or dried food, never saw out of season produce from elsewhere except maybe for an orange at Christmas.

I try to kill my own meat but I’m so busy or something doesn’t come through so that I don’t get to spend as much time as I want or need to during hunting season. It’s going to be at least a week this year. By the time it’s all said and done with all the expenses added it, it’s so much cheaper to buy even an organic farm-raised beef than to go hunting and come back empty handed like I did this past fall. If the food distribution collapsed tomorrow, all the game around here would be wiped out in two weeks.

Our family is as guilty of patronizing/perpetuating industrial food production despite some token purchases around the edges, some eggs here and there, some bread or whatever. It’s how we live now.

@redmanlaw: Yeah, I wouldn’t be doing much in the kitchen without my weekly trip to Whole Foods and/or Trader Joes. Or my CSA subscription. Shit, some of the stuff they give me goes straight to the hopper because we don’t know what to do with it or we “just don’t have the time”.

I just wanted to get your take on it. I admire hunters who actually hunt for food. In a way.

I’m perpetually amazed at situations like I encountered recently, with my step-mom in Oklahoma, who claimed not to know how to prepare vegetables. Her mom certainly knew how to prepare vegetables, since that’s probably what made up 75% of their diet.

People just don’t fucking realize how the meat-at-every-meal diet is a very, very modern convenience. And that, only for those of us lucky enough to happen to have been born in the good ole’ US of A, growing up after WWII. It really is an entirely different food culture.

And I’m fascinated about how much that says about the rest of our living arrangements.

@Pedonator: I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about her family’s year-long experiment of raising almost everything they ate and/or very local locavore consumption. Quite thought provoking, though quite difficult for a regular person (i.e. not a work-at-home writer with 20 acres of land in a temperate climate) to achieve. But she doesn’t present it as an all-or-nothing proposition.

AND: Westminster Kennel Club!! My favorite time of year!

@SanFranLefty: I loved that book. And especially because it isn’t preachy. Just as Michael Pollan’s books aren’t preachy, but they expose to most of us the ugly underbelly of how most of our food comes to table. And how it is completely unsustainable.

I’m not against all technological wonder-solutions: I’m still waiting for my cloned liver (not to mention my flying car), but I don’t care for texting and twitter.

But the current zeitgeist seems to assume that technology will somehow provide for all of us, all projected 9 billion of us by mid-century, and at ever-increasing levels of prosperity. I just don’t see it happening. Dare I ask, do we learn nothing from history?