It looks like Funes is in.
The leftist party (FMLN) has the largest presence in the legislature, but no majority, however, so changes might come to El Salvador gradually (though I'm not convinced that's a bad thing).
Sunday, March 15, 2009
El Salvador elects leftist president
How Cold War Propaganda Lives On
I've just returned from an all-too-short road trip in the southwest. One of our stops was Las Vegas. Though we were there only briefly, we were able to visit the Atomic Testing Museum near the campus of UNLV.
From the 1950s through the 80s, the heart of the Cold War, a site a few miles outside the city of Las Vegas was used for atmospheric nuclear weapons testing (meaning, above-ground, radiation could drift and kill you with the slightest shift of wind). Civilian spectators as nearby as 7 miles would watch the blasts and subsequent mushroom clouds and it became quite a tourist draw.
The history of the nuclear testing site has always been fascinating to me, especially because of the voyeuristic aspect of the story. Tourists watching with awe and amazement as weapons that they knew had caused unbelievable pain and destruction are detonated. I'd hoped for some perspective on that craziness and maybe the overall madness of the Cold War era and the arms race.
But as has happened at historical museums time and time again, I was struck by how very propagandistic the narrative at this museum was. One placard justified the arms race by stressing that this wasn't an aggressive thing the U.S. was doing by openly testing nuclear arms by the hundreds, that this was defensive posturing--after all, the Soviets were "set on forcing Totalitarian Communism on the entire world." The exhibit included a pretty positive take on McCarthyism. And in a video presentation with interviews from the dedicated workers who ran the test site, one gentleman told the audience with tears in his eyes that it was entirely upsetting to him that in the 1970s, when fears of radiation and an anti-war movement created vocal protestors at the site, "people didn't understand that my work at the site was done to protect the very rights they were using by protesting." In what way did nuclear weapons testing protect anyone's free speech?!
In another video on how important knowing the history of the testing is today, one scientist who had worked at the site mentioned that he would be afraid to live in a world where people weren't regularly reminded that the U.S. still has the power of a nuclear strike. "I think it's important that people see what nuclear weapons are capable of and remember that they have something to fear. It scares me that this history is being pushed aside in a world where we face so many threats." Are we still a nation that wants to use nuclear attacks as a threat?!
It isn't just that people who go to this museum are being subjected to Cold War-like propaganda, but that the style of thinking of the museum is so persistent in our contemporary war/peace dialogues. The unchallenged narratives of the Cold War have justified our wars in the middle east. That somehow pre-emptive violence or the threat of preemptive violence makes us safer instead of making us a target...That doing anything associated with formal "national security" is in the spirit of protecting Americans' freedoms. This thinking still persists all around us, in our museums, and unfortunately, in our text books and our public dialogues.
In better news, I was able to buy this awesome tin of "Commie Mints" at the museum's gift store. And in true Commie fashion, I made sure to distribute the mints fairly to my whole party :)
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The legacy of the "Chilean Miracle"
Under the murderous rule of right-wing military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" setup shop in an attempt to implement their economic and political ideas in a country whose right-wing dictatorship liked what they had to say.
This, apparently, is one of the legacies of the "Chilean Miracle".
If you read the wikipedia entry on "Chilean Miracle" (what the 'Chicago Boys' morons called the outcome of their neoliberal bonanza) it says, totally neutrally and non-tendentiously of course, that Chile has a greater degree of "economic freedom" than other Latin American countries. I suppose that is what commodified water is for mining copanies, more 'economically free'. Meanwhile the villages people live in wither and dry up because they don't have the buying power to purchase the same kind of 'freedom' as big mining companies.
I feel like their are some good anti-capitalist metaphors here, although I'll leave it to others more eloquent than I to explicate and spin them out. There's something to the life-sustaining properties of water, and the image of business elites fighting over resources (while poluting them in the process) all while the majority of people see their lives drying up before their eyes.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Gender norms start in the womb.
I work with small children. Despite this fact, I regularly get pangs of baby-lust. I am well aware that said baby is many years in the future, but I still get excited. So I sometimes peruse blogs about motherhood, so that I can learn weird obscure facts about breastfeeding, baby slings, and look at pictures of cute little booties with funny sayings on them. So sue me.
But many white, upper middle class motherhood bloggers are obsessed with strict, traditional, pink/blue, princess/pirate, mars/venus, mommy/daddy gender roles. They really, really like them. And they'll never let them go. Ever. And it's kinda terrifying.
And so, I give you a potpourri of genderstrict ridiculousness. After which I will enter the phrase "radical feminist motherhood" into google and pray that something comes up.
These are all direct quotes, which link to the blogs from which they came:
We have crescent rolls on hand because J. bought them. That's what happens when men do the grocery shopping.
Well we just hosted Bear’s Third Birthday Party and it was all out PRINCESS. (actually it was Princess & Pirates – so her little boyfriends didn’t feel weird coming to a costume party).
Since I knew I was having a girl the first time around, everything I received was pink. Pink blankets, pink washcloths, pink burp cloths, pink bibs. So, if this baby is a boy, I need some blue stuff, or this little guy will be the best dressed “pink princess.” And I need new boy crib bedding too (of course!!).
And, just for good measure, some mom as cook/servant banter:
My son is a very picky eater (more about that later). I’m open to any innovative methods that might get my son to eat new food. My husband is just as picky as my son. I wonder if this will work on him, too.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Can a manifesto be written in 45 minutes? If so, this is my Transportation Manifesto.
Miriam's post On Transportation has generated a pretty interesting thread over at Feministing, and made me realize once again how strongly I feel about public transit. I don't want to misrepresent Miriam's reflections on public transit in Washington DC, nor do I want to deny the frustrating nature of her experience with DC. buses. Her post is thoughtful, and it's certainly not pro-car. But I was pretty disappointed in the main thrust of her argument.
To give a reductive summary, Miriam essentially said: "Man, it's tough to be poor, because then you can't afford a car, so you have to take public transportation. And sometimes public transportation really sucks and makes you late for work and makes your already tough life even harder."
Yep. Public transit advocacy foiled again -- on a progressive blog. Instead of uplifting public transit as a sustainable, social and affordable means of getting around, Miriam added her voice to the chorus of millions of car-dependent people who complain about the slow, inconvenient, terrible public transit in their cities.
The funny thing is, many of my fellow Chicagoans feel the same way about our transit system. Although I sing the praises of the Clark bus, taking me through my bustling neighborhood for errands, other people say the Clark bus "makes them suicidal." Although I safely take the Red Line to points far South and far North, many people avoid the Red Line's homeless solicitors and late-night riders. Although I commute car-free to the South Side, north suburbs, and everywhere in between, many people claim they could "never make it" without their car.
So that's the difference between Us and Them? Between the public transit lovers, and the haters? I'm starting to think it's a matter of principle. And some of the principles I hold most dear are below.
1. Basics. I believe that the "one person, one car" model of transportation is bullshit. It's environmentally disastrous, it's antisocial, and it's a waste of resources. We have a massive body of scientific evidence which supports this belief, and our city and state governments need to start responding. So do we.
2. The Rest Of The World. I also believe, and have seen from experience, that the "one person, one car" is a standard to which most of the world does not adhere. More specifically, it is largely an American construct. People all over the world -- in Africa, Asia, Europe -- manage to live happy, productive lives without getting whisked around in an upholstered, air-conditioned bubble which plays the music of their choice. They ride rickshaws and daladalas. They walk places. They take high-speed rail. They wait for the bus. These experiences do not traumatize them.* These experiences do not suck. These experiences do not ruin their day.
3. Road Rage Sucks. I believe that driving a car creates dangerous beliefs and attitudes in drivers: namely, that we are in control, that we have a right to proceed quickly and smoothly, and that other people (especially pedestrians and bikers) are obstacles in our path. These beliefs are symptomatic of a fast-moving, impatient culture in general, but they create a particularly dangerous environment on our roads. I believe that these aggressive attitudes have poisoned some segments of bike culture as well.
4. Patience, Sharing and Community Rock. Conversely, I believe that riding public transit can increase your patience, increase social contact with your community, and build willingness to relinquish some control over your own transportation. Drivers and bikers need to slow down. Transit riders need to take a breath and bring a book. These changes can bring increased tranquility to our daily lives, if we allow that to happen. I know this part sounds really Zen and silly, but I think it's true.
4. This Stuff Matters. I believe your selected mode of transportation says something about your values and priorities. Not only environmentally, but also financially: how do you want to spend your money? What is most important to you? And frankly, being able to get from place to place faster, blasting the environment with carbon each time I start my car, is not important to me. I would rather wait twenty goddamn minutes in the cold for that cursed bus you're complaining about so much.
Giant Caveat: Did I mention I'm privileged to live in a place with access to these options? I know, I know, I know. When you live in suburbia (et al), it's damn hard to think of anything you can do besides drive. I'm mostly talking about my fellow city-dwellers. But I think there are changes that can be made (more carpooling, more biking, more ride-sharing, fewer car trips, more activism in suburban planning) across our country, whether in urban, suburban, or rural communities.
* One commenter on Miriam's thread, a public school teacher, sounded convinced that her students were arriving to school grumpy, tired and anxious because they have to take the bus to school. Dude. In Boston public schools, do you really think these kids don't have bigger problems in their lives than waiting fifteen minutes for a bus? I respectfully refer this person to Item 2.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Why feminists might be attracted to neoliberalism
From Nancy Fraser in this month's New Left Review:
Are we the victims of an unfortunate coincidence, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and so fell prey to that most opportunistic of seducers, a capitalism so indiscriminate that it would instrumentalize any perspective whatever, even one inherently foreign to it? Or is there, as I suggested earlier, some subterranean elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism? If any such affinity does exist, it lies in the critique of traditional authority. [13] Such authority is a longstanding target of feminist activism, which has sought at least since Mary Wollstonecraft to emancipate women from personalized subjection to men, be they fathers, brothers, priests, elders or husbands. But traditional authority also appears in some periods as an obstacle to capitalist expansion, part of the surrounding social substance in which markets have historically been embedded and which has served to confine economic rationality within a limited sphere. [14] In the current moment, these two critiques of traditional authority, the one feminist, the other neoliberal, appear to converge.There's so much more in this piece, and I'm not sure why I zeroed in on this in particular...but doesn't it make sense? Think of the defensiveness "successful" feminist writers in the blogosphere express when their social position is challenged. They always hit back with some explanation of their relative wealth that includes attributing this capitalist triumph to a triumph of womanhood as well. There's that same attraction to the notion that one is beating the big authority by making money, and avoiding apologizing for not engaging with critiques of capitalism seriously. Fraser thinks neoliberalism co-opted feminism's emancipatory goal and made feminism an accomplice in the embedding of late capitalism into our ideologies.
A few quick thoughts
1-I just don't see how anyone can think Obama is secretly not all about the free market. I mean, it's not like this one interview finally convinced me, but I just can't see how progressive can continue to kid themselves into thinking this guy shares their socioeconomic values.
President Obama: Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter. It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question. I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.If the implication of this quote isn't that Obama likens himself as more of a free marketer than his hot shot predecessor, I must be speaking a different English language.
2-Yes, it is stupid for a publication like the New York Times to even humor (see interview above) the thought that Obama is secretly a socialist (it's fear mongering, and not at all based in reality). But can we see any actual engagement with the ideology Joan Walsh is so hell bent on dismissing as a dated wim of the past, or are we all just going to snigger at the thought of creating actual justice from here on out?
3-If you never watched Showtime's The L Word and you'd been meaning to because you'd heard so much about it, please save yourself hours and hours of anger and don't bother. Sunday's finale was the most frustrating series finale I've experienced since Seinfeld and one of the most frustrating series ever. Now, it may have taken me watching the entire series to come to this conclusion, which may indicate there's something of value there, despite the overall shitty writing and shitty assassination of previously likeable characters. Okay, there is definitely value there. But I still wouldn't let a friend get involved...
Monday, March 9, 2009
Fear-mongering bullshit
From a recent controversy over a book published in the UK, this an excerpt from a recent article in the Guardian:
"This is cannabis. It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it. And this is why we have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer. You Do Not Write About Your Children...you do not ever lay out their genuine, raw problems on the page. You fictionalize them, you do not present it up-front and true...This is an emergency. True, the city is not aflame, plague is not afoot. But there are too many families whose home life has been shattered by a teenage son (it is nearly always boys) who is losing it as a result of cannabis. Maybe not as badly as ours has lost it, but nevertheless creating chaos and distress."Not exactly. The blathering continues:
"Imagine if you could wave a wand and instantly all the spliffs and baggies were transformed into bottles of gin. You leave for work on Wednesday morning and suddenly you see kids on the way to school with a quarter of Gordon's sticking out their rucksack... and if you saw that daily, all around you, you would say there's a genuine problem. Except it's worse than that. Because skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot. Cannabis remains in the bloodstream for up to 10 days and, let me tell you, the mood swings continue for every one of those days. And that's not all. In your early 20s, the legacy returns in the form of schizophrenia. Professor Robin Murray at the Maudsley Hospital estimates that at least 10% of all people with schizophrenia in the UK would not have developed the illness if they had not smoked cannabis. That's 25,000 individuals at current figures. With stronger varieties being smoked at a younger age, this figure can only rise. So tell me, Daily Mail, why are you treating this story like "a bit of pot"?Now I think that drugs are very serious business (and by the way: alcohol is most definitely a drug). But for precisely this reason, we should refrain from fear-mongering non-sense and hysteria when discussing drug use. I don't doubt for a moment that this couple's child was smoking unjustifiable amounts of pot, which contributed to his allegedly withdrawn, lifeless, callous, careless, directionless behavior. I don't doubt that it was an extremely difficult time for the family and I understand that in order for him to recover from his afflictions he needed to lay off smoking for the time being.
But none of the above has anything whatsoever to do with: 1. The actual effects of the drug on different individuals, 2. how the drug should be controlled (if at all) or regulated, 3. the alleged 'problems' with Tetra-Hydro-Canibinol as such. Yet spreading misinformation about 1-3 is the raison d'etre of this couple, this appears to be why they have written their book and began their foray into the public.
I find it very interesting that the author compares pot to gin. Now alcoholism is a serious matter. Moreover, alcohol is a potent drug which we all know is abused in multitude ways. As a society, we should be extremely weary of the ultra-commodification of alcohol such that its consumption is encouraged as though it had no consequences. From an early age, we must be educated about how to drink responsibly. Some people, given their tendencies,backgrounds and psychological state, probably shouldn't drink at all.
But these days nobody ever suggests that the way to deal with this problem is to make alcohol consumption a criminal offense. The suggestion isn't even worthy of assembling arguments against; its a non-starter. But why, then, do sensible people have to expend so much energy making the analgous (and extremely-plausible case) that cannabis should be dealt with in a similar fashion to alcohol? Well, one reason has to do with trash like the above-quoted article.
Let's consider more closely the bit in the article about Schizophrenia. Combine this with the pervasive "concerned parent" tone that targets other "naive on-the-fence parents" who simply might not be aware of the "horrifying truth" about pot. Now what's going on is that they are suggesting that we accept urban myths as scientific facts. THC is a mild hallucinogen; if you have a family history of schizophrenia or a predilection toward various kinds of mental illness, its true that taking hallucinogenic drugs can exacerbate what lurking problems you may have. (By the way, every prescription drug has an extensive list of risk-factors which suggest whether or not you should take it... were pot legalized presumably similar research could be conducted in order to head-off rare adverse reactions). But this is a far-cry from the non-sense claim that cannabis "makes you more likely to go nuts!". This is false. The author's personal history does nothing in the way of changing this medical fact.
I completely agree that the "its just pot" attitude must be more critically examined. People should figure out extensively what the hell they are putting into their bodies. Addictive behaviors should be dealt with, not tabled because "pot is no big deal" or "alcohol is no big deal". But this doesn't mean that we should discard the unreflective "its just alcohol" or "its just a few drinks" or "its just pot" with hysterical non-sense like "these are devilish substances that should be locked away and banned, lest our society turns into complete chaos!!". Moreover, the last thing we should do is stigmatize and criminalize (and incarcerate) people instead of creating ways that they can easily get access to help if they need it.
While we're at it, let's debunk a few other falsehoods in this article:
"Except it's worse than [gin]. Because skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot."Alcohol and caffeine have psychotropic effects as well. True, neither are mild hallucinogens, but the effects the former has on mood, motivation and behavior are every bit as severe (if not worse) than cannabis. Pot is not simply "worse". Teenage alcoholism should be dealt with in the same way that pot over-consumption should be.
"It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it."Again this is false. It doesn't have these effects on everyone. In fact the nature of the drug (psychedelic) means that it's effects are extremely dependent on the psychology of the person taking it. The effects and first-personal experience can vary wildly, because people are wildly different. There are some people who will become extremely anxious and have terrifying panic attacks. Some will hardly feel as though the drug has any effects. I'm not saying that we can't make any generalizations about the effects (especially bodily effects)... but let's make sure that we're making scientifically sound generalizations. Moreover, let's be clear that we're making generalizations. Lipitor commercials, after all, do not say "this drug will have the following identical side effects on everyone".
"cannabis creates chaos and distress".Hysterics. This is about as good of an argument as "homosexuality will undermine civilization and create social chaos".
"Cannabis remains in the bloodstream for up to 10 days"Not precisely. Some metabolized form of THC probably does, but this does not necessarily mean that there are marked effects. Cannabis (i.e. the genus of psychoactive flowering-plants), however, should not ever literally float around in your bloodstream unless you've done something terribly wrong.
"With stronger varieties being smoked at a younger age, this figure [the number of teen smokers] can only rise."This "stronger varieties" non-sense is a favorite talking-point of the anti-pot crowd. I cant remember how many times I've read Gordon Brown or some other high-ranking official blathering about how the "street-pot" is getting stronger every week. I wish they were right. Perhaps then smokers wouldn't have to ingest as much tar just to get blazed!
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Guardian: Expose of British Lap-Dancing Industry
From The Guardian: An expose of the lap-dancing industry in the UK. Here's an excerpt:
"Lucy began lap dancing when she lost her job as an office temp. It was quite simple: she needed to pay her rent. "It felt like a desperate decision," she says. "It was a case of: I can't do anything else. But also I'd fallen for the myth that lap dancing is a good way of making a lot of money very quickly." She applied for, and got, a job as a dancer in a supposedly upmarket club. At the end of her first night's work, however, she went home having earned nothing at all. More alarmingly, she now owed the club some £80. Like the vast majority of lap dancers in the UK, Lucy was self-employed. Not only was she required to pay the club a dance fee every time she wanted to work, a sum that could vary from £10 to £80 (Friday nights were most expensive, because they were most popular with customers), but she also had to give the club commission on every dance performed (nude dances cost punters £20, of which she kept £17.50; on slow nights, she might perform only once or twice, or not at all).Read the article in full here. Again, I must issue another "IOU" on commentary until a later date when I have more time to post.
"Reimagining Socialism"
From the most recent issue of The Nation:
Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now,"Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? The following essay will, we hope, kick off a spirited dialogue, with four replies in this issue and more to come at TheNation.com. --The EditorsRead the essay, authored by By Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr., here.
I'll post on this when I have more time to read it carefully and respond.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Watch'em squerm.
From the Financial Times:
Pointing to Mr Obama’s tax hits, the US Chamber of Commerce on Friday described his budget as the “most redistributionist in modern American history”....Martin Regalia, chief economist at the CoC, said [of his organization's take on the Obama budget]:“I would prefer not to mention the views of our members, which contain too many expletives for a family newspaper.”I'm inclined to think that the amount of CoC expletives provoked by a piece of legislation is directly proportional to how socially-just the legislation is.
MORE Perry Anderson on Italian politics!
Haven't read yet, but plan to comment sometime thereafter.
Here it is.
I'm interested to see how the experience of the Italian Left in the 20th century can shed light on current electoral developments in our country. More on that soon.
While I'm posting about Perry Anderson, check out the following other goodies:
- This video-interview with him at UC, Berkeley.
- His article in NLR "On the Conjuncture" which appeared last Spring and dealt broadly with the world-political situation and prospects of the Left at that moment (what's amazing to me is how dated this piece has become in the short period of a year!).
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Fox's Dollhouse... and Subjectivity
Well, my blogging has been light lately, and I wish I could blame it on extreme productivity in some realm of my life. But no, mostly I've been watching TV.
Among my new TV interests is Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Yeah, it's a show on Fox. Yeah, it's some fairly trashy drama. But it's also really entertaining and well...thought provoking? To the extent that some cheap scifi drama can be thought provoking.
Here's the premise (trailer after the jump, for those who want to know more): A business for the super wealthy rents out human beings as play things. I guess it's a little more complicated than your run of the mill sex business. For one thing not all of the clients want sexual partners. And for another, the workers themselves aren't remotely conscious human beings with even the slightest amount of agency. They're what the employees of Dollhouse call "Actives," humans who have had their entire memories and personalities and consciousnesses(?) erased from them. They're blank slates. Then when a client needs a person for some task, the techs at Dollhouse download a pre-fab personality onto the Active to fullfill the client's needs.
So here's an observation about the show, related to some discussions we've been having here lately.* The experience as a viewer is really interesting, considering this is a show with characters who are also blank slates at times, in other words, characters who become non-characters. When we see these Actives, most of all our main Active called Echo (cute name for a hollow person ready to be told what to do/say, right?), in their Tabula Rasa state, it's hard to feel much for them. They're hardly human. They aren't subjects, and it's hard to relate to them, to humanize them, to care at all about them as characters.
But when they're activated, when they have a personality embedded, even though as a viewer we know this is a total fabrication/construction/artificial, we do care about their fate. That subject has to be created to evoke any care about the fate of the human body in question.
What adds more intrigue to this show is that the main active, Echo, seems to be gaining some independent consciousness or something. She's having flashbacks while in her activated state and hallucinating about herself before she had her mind wiped by the Dollhouse. Now obviously this fact adds some interesting twists to the overall plot, but I think it adds some other questions. CAN a personality be wiped? Can the "subject" be removed and replaced so willy nilly? From a narrative standpoint, can Echo only be our main protagonist because she is experiencing this ever-increasing consciousness? Would we fail to adequately sympathize with her if we didn't even have the hope that deep down in this "doll" was a static, anchored person?
I can't help but think about our conversations about subjectivity in this context. Do we need a constructed subject to be driven to create a just world in the first place (not just to fathom the idea of activism, as was discussed in previous posts, but to have any motivation to improve human conditions)?
...and more importantly, how many seasons will it take for Echo to become a full human? 'Cause I don't how many episodes I can handle of her in this limbo stage...so frustrating to see her on the brink of agency!
*Does this post seem like a stretch? It probably is. I'm probably guilty of grasping for any intellectual worth in pop culture just to justify the hours I spend consuming it. But hey, is that a crime? One must take extreme precaution to avoid crippling cognitive dissonance.
ISO on the Obama Budget and Republican red-baiting tactics
From SocialistWorker.org (read the full editorial here):
[...]Re: DeMint, McConnell, Huckabee, et al: what a bunch of fucking morons. Need we even elaborate that thought further?
The Obama budget represents a decisive break not only with the Reagan-Bush drive to cut government spending on social programs, but also with Bill Clinton's Republican Lite strategy of reducing spending--most notoriously, the abolition of the federal welfare system--and emphasizing so-called "micro-initiatives" over major reform.According to David Leonhardt, the effect, if Obama's budget made it through Congress, would be "to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years."
And to the Republicans, that means one thing: Socialism.
The alleged evils of redistributing wealth and providing help for the most vulnerable have become--like during the election, when John McCain put his campaign in the capable hands of Joe the Plumber--the chief talking point for conservatives.
"Earlier this week, we heard the world's best salesman of socialism address the nation," said South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, referring to Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress.
Right-wing dingbat and former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee insisted that the Obama administration is in the process of establishing "socialist republics" in the U.S. "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," Huckabee declared.
[...]
What do you do with used cooking oil?
Recycle it. Well, that is if your city has facilities where you can take your used cooking oil. LA and SF do, unsurprisingly, but I cannot find anything similar for Chicago.
Its something we rarely talk about, but its puzzling: what should one do with a large amount of cooking oil (particularly after deep-frying) after cooking? Pouring it down the drain is about the worst thing you can do... but why send it to a dump when it is (literally) full of potential energy upon combustion?
This is worth taking a look at.
Given the potential energy locked up in the chemical bonds of used cooking oil... why are large municipalities letting it go to waste? Use it to power buses!
Apparently in London McDonald's is already doing something like this. Chicago is VERY far behind other cities of comparable size and stature when it comes to recycling.
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