Posted from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/personhood-amendments-would-ban-nearly-all-abortions.html?hp
And while we're at it, I'd like to add a few components to this amendment:
Extended Personhood. Unfertilized eggs and sperm will also be granted special "pre-personhood" rights, as they are fundamental to building the nucleus that eventually becomes the zygote that transforms into the little person that is the image of God. Women are now required to save the results of their menses and submit monthly reports to the Mississippi Association for Christian Advocacy for Personhood (MAsCAP). Failure to do so will result in a $600 fine and 5 months in jail. Men who donate their sperm will be charged with murder.
Anti-PETA Personhood Addendum (APPA). Animal rights advocates who claim poultry eggs must now be outlawed are to be ignored by all state and federal governments. Animals don't have souls, and thus we can eat their eggs without remorse.
Incest and Rape Vital Care. If a child is created as a result of rape or incest, health officials will now make sure that that child has a complete, healthy family life by mandating that the raper or the incestful family member join in matrimony with the rapee. They will be required to live together until death do they part.
Minor Changes. All changes made to this amendment will be decided on by prayer.
26.10.11
22.10.11
#occupyWINNING
My cousin Matthew has come down from Rhode Island to attend the Wall Streets protests. He's a pretty experienced and organized activist, and his site, BeyondTheChoir.org, has some nicely developed essays and arguments for the cause. Check him out!
18.10.11
16.10.11
ROBYN MELLO HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING.
She was last seen at the site of Occupy Philadelphia, at 10pm on Friday, October 14th. If you hear ANYTHING at all, please contact me or her friends or her family or the police or ANYONE.
Robyn, I really, really hope you're okay.
Robyn, I really, really hope you're okay.
15.10.11
Occupying Wall Street, Briefly
The entire Smucker clan went to Zuccotti Park last Sunday.
Sure, we enjoyed ourselves -- the atmosphere was festive, there was a drum circle, lots of organized centers for distributing food, clothes, paint -- but it was humbling, too. It was an organized mess full of angry people, young and old, yelling and marching with no one listening but their compatriots. The policemen looked jaded; tourists watched blindly from the tops of double-decker buses (as they passed by, we screamed, "Welcome to New York!" and shook our signs above our heads). I would chance it to say that every single person in that park had something important to say, and I'm not sure if anyone was really paying attention.
Understandably, though -- it's hard to listen to a group of people with 101 demands, ideas, and complaints. Though that might be the defining characteristic of our generation, plagued with options and opportunity as we are; the Internet has allowed us to say whatever we want to say, when we want to say it, and find a group, however small, that wishes to participate in our same conversation. We've also been subject to a dizzying array of decisions that have been made -- or felt like it, anyway -- generally without our consent (i.e., George W. Bush was not an elected president). Sure, we don't have a draft, but the cost of higher education and the threat of poverty make joining the Army something just short of mandatory for a lot of people. We're living in an age of upside-down reason and backwards judgment, where some of the brightest people of our generation end up at Starbucks, and soapbox preachers can pretend to be politicians. (There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker a few weeks ago: a mama polar bear and her baby were perched on a tiny iceberg, and the baby polar bear asks, "Is Rick Perry real?")
There is so much awry that I understand the sometimes cacophonous chorus of voices screaming until they are hoarse from Zucotti Park. There is no clear to way to define what's wrong, or how to fix it. It's like getting to the end of an awful math problem and checking your math and finding your answer completely off and trying to figure out if it was your original math or the checking math that was off and the process itself is so convoluted that you just have to start the whole thing over from scratch. Except in this case, I'm not sure if there is a scratch, so that complicates things. (The people who do believe there is a scratch point -- usually somewhere in the 80s -- are typically male, and white.)
All of which makes my own stance in regards to the Occupy Wall Street protests a little interesting.
I have a great job, and I want to keep it. I work for a non-profit company that treats its employees well, whose proceeds improve the quality of higher education, and whose products help people around the world communicate with one another. I'm a straight-up, New York City yuppie who lives comfortably in a decent one-bedroom apartment with a loved one and a cat. I couldn't ask for more, or a different or better life.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I don't exactly feel like I've got any clout when it comes to complaints. But does that matter? I want to stick with the protesters because of my sentiment, not because of what I do (or what I don't do -- believe me, if I were unemployed I'd be down there a lot more often). I want more people to have jobs like mine. I want more companies to be more like the one I work for. And just because I'm fortunate enough to have it doesn't mean I should be resting on my laurels -- I need to be working (harder, if anything) than the rest of the protesters because of where I'm coming from.
The curious part about this Occupy stuff is how broad the movement is. Hell, even my dad was there, and he's been working for the Man for more than 20 years! I'm sure we could all jump ship for one reason or another, including the 1% themselves. But if we all jump, who's steering the boat? Who is in charge here?
Sure, we enjoyed ourselves -- the atmosphere was festive, there was a drum circle, lots of organized centers for distributing food, clothes, paint -- but it was humbling, too. It was an organized mess full of angry people, young and old, yelling and marching with no one listening but their compatriots. The policemen looked jaded; tourists watched blindly from the tops of double-decker buses (as they passed by, we screamed, "Welcome to New York!" and shook our signs above our heads). I would chance it to say that every single person in that park had something important to say, and I'm not sure if anyone was really paying attention.
Understandably, though -- it's hard to listen to a group of people with 101 demands, ideas, and complaints. Though that might be the defining characteristic of our generation, plagued with options and opportunity as we are; the Internet has allowed us to say whatever we want to say, when we want to say it, and find a group, however small, that wishes to participate in our same conversation. We've also been subject to a dizzying array of decisions that have been made -- or felt like it, anyway -- generally without our consent (i.e., George W. Bush was not an elected president). Sure, we don't have a draft, but the cost of higher education and the threat of poverty make joining the Army something just short of mandatory for a lot of people. We're living in an age of upside-down reason and backwards judgment, where some of the brightest people of our generation end up at Starbucks, and soapbox preachers can pretend to be politicians. (There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker a few weeks ago: a mama polar bear and her baby were perched on a tiny iceberg, and the baby polar bear asks, "Is Rick Perry real?")
There is so much awry that I understand the sometimes cacophonous chorus of voices screaming until they are hoarse from Zucotti Park. There is no clear to way to define what's wrong, or how to fix it. It's like getting to the end of an awful math problem and checking your math and finding your answer completely off and trying to figure out if it was your original math or the checking math that was off and the process itself is so convoluted that you just have to start the whole thing over from scratch. Except in this case, I'm not sure if there is a scratch, so that complicates things. (The people who do believe there is a scratch point -- usually somewhere in the 80s -- are typically male, and white.)
All of which makes my own stance in regards to the Occupy Wall Street protests a little interesting.
I have a great job, and I want to keep it. I work for a non-profit company that treats its employees well, whose proceeds improve the quality of higher education, and whose products help people around the world communicate with one another. I'm a straight-up, New York City yuppie who lives comfortably in a decent one-bedroom apartment with a loved one and a cat. I couldn't ask for more, or a different or better life.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I don't exactly feel like I've got any clout when it comes to complaints. But does that matter? I want to stick with the protesters because of my sentiment, not because of what I do (or what I don't do -- believe me, if I were unemployed I'd be down there a lot more often). I want more people to have jobs like mine. I want more companies to be more like the one I work for. And just because I'm fortunate enough to have it doesn't mean I should be resting on my laurels -- I need to be working (harder, if anything) than the rest of the protesters because of where I'm coming from.
The curious part about this Occupy stuff is how broad the movement is. Hell, even my dad was there, and he's been working for the Man for more than 20 years! I'm sure we could all jump ship for one reason or another, including the 1% themselves. But if we all jump, who's steering the boat? Who is in charge here?
9.10.11
Winter Warmer
Cooler weather means more beer! Don and I were a little more ambitious this time and decided to make a high-gravity ale -- meaning one with a higher alcohol percentage, more flavor, and more intensity. We used about twice as much grain as we would have for a normal-gravity ale (about 20 pounds of American two-row malted barley!), twice as much yeast, and added lots of spices: ginger, fresh orange zest, cloves, cinnamon sticks, allspice, and nutmeg.
What all this "twice" business means is that the yeast has more sugar to eat, allowing more of the wort (the proto-beer) to be converted to alcohol. Extra grain also means more malty flavor, since we only used the normal amount of liquid (5 gallons). The beer is already in its secondary stage of fermentation, and will be ready for bottling next week. It'll be bottle-conditioned for about a month or more, making it drink-ready by Thanksgiving.
I used up some of the spent grain (you typically strain out the grain and throw it away, using only the liquid for the beer) to make bread, grinding it up in my tiny food processor. After having been boiled for so long, the grain's starches have all been converted to sugar, making the grain sweet and chewy like oatmeal. The bread was dense and sweet, almost like a pumpernickel.
1.10.11
Iceland: Emstrur & Thorsmork
I didn't quite understand the Emstrur landscape. Some of it looked like the surface of the moon, just lava rubble and craggy cliffs; some of it was gouged-out canyons and mossy mountains; a great deal of it was just plain desert, straight-up black sand dunes complete with what looked like beach grass. We were lucky we didn't encounter a sandstorm, which are common there. Don took all of the photos on this page.
Leaving the desert and entering a hilly valley
Our first bug! (besides gnats)
We found a good spot for bouldering
This is the moon
The next day took us through Thorsmork -- or, more appropriately, Þórsmörk, named after the Norse god, Thor. It was the end of the journey: a grassy, birchwood forest, an alluvial plain, the Ejafjallajokull glacier (EYE-ya-fee-YA-la-YO-kudd'l -- the one whose snow-submerged volcano exploded last April). Don and I relaxed and took showers and found striped river rocks and made breakfast burritos with all of our leftover food. The bus ride back was dreamlike and all too familiar, making the trip seem as if it had never happened.
A view of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier
It was actually very refreshing to see trees and shrubs -- they softened the landscape dramatically!
The campsite at sunset
The springtime snowmelt sometimes floods this valley, making it a giant riverbed
Seljalandsfoss
Behind the waterfall
As if all this weren't enough, our last night in Iceland was marked by the presence of none other than the Aurora Borealis. I can only describe it using drug words and techie-terms: neon, flowing, amorphous, ethereal, ephemeral. I can't explain how a part of a visual image can move and disappear without you noticing, but somehow the Northern Lights achieved this. You would concentrate on one spot, and then suddenly -- but not suddenly, because it was all moving and shifting slowly -- it was gone. Like someone creeping slowly out of a room, inch by inch. After a few minutes of staring, I ran outside to take some pictures, but by the time I got there, it was gone.
The below video gives a pretty good impression of what we saw, except ours was a brighter green and more concentrated.
I'm definitely going back.
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