The California Hunger Strike No One is Talking About
I guess because I listen to Dick Gordon’s The Story in podcast form I am well aware of the hunger strike to protest solitary confinement going on. When it began in early July there were 30,000 participants, now they are down to only 1,000. One person has died though it is not known whether he died of hunger or from suicide.
If you don’t know much about solitary confinement, you are encouraged to read this essay by William Blake (no, not that William Blake) about the years spent in solitary.
Why does this practice continue? From the sounds of things, it’s a power orgy for the prison guards who get off on exacting this kind of punishment. It would be easy to ignore what’s going on in the prison system – the victims of the prisoners didn’t have a choice to live or die, many of them, so what gives prisoners the right to a better life? I can think of a few people who belong in solitary, like Ariel Castro who kidnapped three women and held them as sex slaves. Why should he be tortured with the full extent of the law? It’s a good test to imagine whether you would consider humane treatment towards a piece of shit like that.
Poem Tuesday – Almost There
Almost There
by Timothy Liu
Hard to imagine getting
anywhere near another semi-
nude encounter down this concrete
slab of interstate, the two of us
all thumbs—
white-throated swifts mating mid-flight
instead of buckets of
crispy wings thrown down
hoi polloi—
an army of mouths
eager to feed
left without any lasting sustenance.
Best get down on all fours.
Ease our noses past
rear-end collisions wrapped around
guardrails shaking loose their bolts
while unseen choirs jacked on
airwaves go on preaching
loud and clear to every
last pair of unrepentant ears—
Cultural Evolution: Give Animals Rights
In his latest piece for the New York Times, Nicolas Kristof ruminates on two documentaries – the Act of Killing and Blackfish. He doesn’t really see an end to our ongoing ambivalence as a culture towards inhumane treatment of animals but he believes we will look back on our age and be horrified in retrospect. He closes his piece with this resignation:
May our descendants, when, in the future, they reflect uncomprehendingly on our abuse of hens and orcas, appreciate that we are good and decent people moving in the right direction, and show some compassion for our obliviousness.
I disagree with that. I don’t think we are moving fast enough. And I don’t think we should be spared any compassion when the time comes, if it ever comes.
There is a cultural shift happening that could probably be attributed to the internet; information speeds back and forth – our identities are splayed out, our morality measured by our “choices.” Capitalism supposedly gives us choices in how we spend our money – and those choices are often informed by brilliant advertising agencies. It is our choice to buy meat from a factory farm (cheaper) or from an organic farmer who raises his/her cows humanely. It is our choice to pay more to know that we are helping to make the world – and our legacy as humans – a better place. Factory farming must end. Anyone with a thinking brain knows this. But it has to start with the consumer. Unhealthy meat, unhealthy planet – those things are not in dispute. Eat meat from a factory farm and it will eventually cause you harm and your environment harm. But when it’s pushed into the realm of right and wrong people get a little more uncomfortable. Sure, all of the grossly obese Americans don’t give a good goddamned what kind of fat they’re consuming as long as it tastes good and is cheap. How do you think we got into this obesity mess in the first place? The American dream is simple: we get what we want when we want it.
But the morality of eating factory farm meat depends, probably, how willing a person is to care about those animals living like this:
I don’t know about YOU but I’d rather spend a bit more and not buy a Starbucks that day than eat food produced by farms that treat animals — our mammal relatives, believe it or not — like this.
A 2008 Mark Bittman New York Times article about feedlots and factory farming is still a must-read for anyone who has any impulse whatsoever to give a damn. I know, it’s asking a lot to give a damn. We’d much rather marinate in our indulgences and pleasures – eat our “sexy” burgers and drink our Big Gulps without giving a damn. I get it, I do. But your time on this planet is valuable. You as a member of the most intelligent species have the power to enact change, believe it or not, just by giving a damn.
The system in place, the one that keeps growing and growing, mostly unchecked, cannot be sustained. We will wipe ourselves out in our endless pursuit for food we think we need to be eating in a way we need to eat (cheap and fast):
The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”
Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.
Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
Moreove
This past June, a National Geographic photographer was arrested for taking an aerial view of a feedlot in Kansas. Now you tell me, my meat loving friends, is this where you’d like to have your latest Subway, Burger King, McDonald’s – or supermarket meat coming from?
While nothing can really compare to the Holocaust, and I would never draw that comparison, but if you’re hiding your behavior from people something is really really wrong. I can’t think of anything more horrifying, where our health and our humanity is at stake.
It Takes Two to Sext – Women Must Own Up
When it was announced that Anthony Weiner would run for office anyway, despite his being caught sexting and tweeting pictures of his apparently giant cock a few liberals, I included, applauded him. Fuck it, why should what he does in his private sexual life have anything to do with his ability to govern?
The aptly named Mr. Weiner suffers from Big Cock Syndrome. I know this syndrome well as I have big breasts syndrome. Because mine are on the larger side I tend to show them off more than the average person might. They are prominently featured in selfies. 
I feel flattered when men stare. Weiner has a big one and wants to show it off. It turns him on to show women how big it is. Hell, most of us are born with the one great trait. So I get that part of it. If he’s running for public office that kind of makes it our business? I get that part of it too. That his recent spate of Carlos Danger mischegoss reveals him to be irresponsible beyond what he’s already admitted to; he promptly started a virtual affair with a young woman who contacted him via Facebook.
Again, for private citizens, this is their business. But Weiner was fairly adamant that all of that had stopped — so when you give people your word and then break it that says something about your word, doesn’t it? Even if he said it was behind him, he said something to that effect before the new affair started.
Either way, I don’t agree with NOW’s response, as follows:
Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW of New York City said Friday that Weiner has clearly demonstrated that he does not have the judgement or maturity to be mayor.
She added that the saga brings to mind Susan B. Anthony who spent decades crusading for women’s right to vote. “She fought for our vote,” Ossorio said, “and to think that a woman would squander their vote on someone like Anthony Weiner who doesn’t take public office seriously, who is unfit and who has made a mockery of elected office, and who has done it by disrespecting woman . . . I feel embarrassed for our culture.”
But here’s the thing – if this woman had an affair with Weiner and he promised her things like a panel, or a condo or whatever – doesn’t that say something about her too? Doesn’t that say she was willing to trade sexual favors for prominence? Sure, she’s not the one running for office – she won’t be asked for the public’s trust. But still. I understand it from a political perspective, not so much from a moral one.
Also I really don’t think it’s disrespectful of women. This wasn’t sexual harassment; this was a two-way sexting affair. That heat is generated and sustained by two people, not one. If he was sending nudge photos to women without being asked, that would be one thing, but anyone who’s ever been involved in one of those things knows that usually they are a shared experience between two people. In fact, I think it’s disrespectful NOT to take into account that it is the woman’s choice. We are powerful creatures capable of making up our own minds.
Before we judge Weiner too harshly for his treatment of women we should
Female Sexuality Badly Explained … by Women
It seems to me that the modern age is offering up two vivid portraits of female sexuality in 50 Shades of Grey and HBO’s Girls. To my mind, neither is particularly reliable when trying to crack the code of female sexuality, although Girls comes a little closer in that it really nails the awkwardness of sex in your early 20s. It’s one of nature’s ironies that women come into their true sexual heat later in life, long after they’ve aged out of their 20s. If sex was always like it was in your 20s it would always seem far less preferable than sinking into fantasy, something romance novels and faux erotica like 50 Shades offers. But once sex becomes enjoyable, fantasy simply won’t do. Childbirth changes your body and makes sex hurt less. Funny how that works. Sex in film is usually simply about male eroticism – young hotties for your visual pleasure. That makes Girls stand out.
But one must remember that Girls represents a different time, a younger time, the beginning of a woman’s sexual journey – not to sound like a tweener novel.
I love it that the truth is coming out now about female sexuality – proving that we are every bit as carnal as men. True, we are dealing with things that can gum up the works, like not having any confidence in our bodies or having to live up to some kind of unrealistic ideal of what a woman should look like. Married women have to have sex with the same person over and over again. That can’t be easy. Or that fun. But remove the marriage cage and remove insecurity and remove social conditioning that divides women into the two categories of “good” and “bad” and just sit with what happens to a woman’s body when she is aroused…it is sort of sitting there, like solar energy, waiting to be tapped for its full power.
Just a little awkward, TMI straight talk for you.
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About Me
I spend way too much thinking about me.
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