Adding this one to my regular reading. It's a blog about food, where it comes from, how it's made. It describes itself as "a running critique of industrial agriculture, a clearinghouse for info on sustainable farming, and a working manifesto for a liberation politics based on food."

Most recently, the auther has been a target of legal threats from Monsanto. He's standing up to them admirably. But I hope the legal battle doesn't distract from the other stuff he writes, as some of the earlier posts are utterly fascinating. Like this one about dirt, or one where he debates against a professional food critic on the difference quality ingredients play in making food "good". A lot of great food for thought, so to speak.

AP News item from last month. I didn't hear about it until now.

Three citizens of the West African nation of Mali are suing Nestle SA, Archer Daniels Midland Co., and Cargill Inc., alleging the firms and their subsidiaries benefited from child slave labor at cocoa bean plantations in Ivory Coast.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday, was brought on behalf of three unnamed "John Doe" plaintiffs identified as former child slaves.

The complaint, which alleged violations of U.S. federal laws against slavery, trafficking, forced labor and torture, among others, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

...

According to Thursday's lawsuit, the plaintiffs were each forced from their homes in Mali in 1996 while still in their teens to toil without pay at cocoa bean plantations in the neighboring nation of Ivory Coast.

The plaintiffs, who worked in separate plantations, claim they worked 12 hours a day or more, were barely fed and were subject to beatings if they didn't work properly or attempted to escape.

The lawsuit claims the three corporations, who are among the largest food producers in the world, benefited from the forced labor at the plantations because they were able to import cocoa beans at a lower price.

The companies, the lawsuit contends, are directly liable for knowingly providing "financial support, supplies, training" that could have been use to support the cocoa bean cooperatives' alleged use of child slave labor.

"It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave laborers," said ILRF attorney Natacha Thys. "They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort."

That cheap candy bar you're eating: Where did it come from? Who made it? Under what conditions? You may think you know, but do you really? What did it take for the "free market" to get it to you for a mere seventy-nine cents? This is why none of us can claim innocence.

Yet another exciting way to discover new music online. To quote the mefi description, it is "a music discovery web application that recommends music based not on popularity, usage habits of other users, or genres/categories but on the deconstructed elements of how the music itself sounds. Fruit of the Music Genome Project, music analysts have for more than five years spent 20 minutes analyzing each song in its ever-growing database for nearly 400 distinct attributes, so when you ask it, 'Why is this song playing?' It answers, 'Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features electronica influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, surreal lyrics, use of call-and-response vocals, and string section beds.'" [Note: uses flash.]

I also invite readers to check out the station I've created called Planet Hell Radio. Sweet stuff, and it keeps getting better and better with each passing song.

I didn't need more time to make my decision. Today at work, I asked the boss if it would be possible to alter my Sunday schedule to come in a couple hours later than previously. I volunteered the information that it was because I had found a church in Lincoln that I liked, and wanted to attend in the future.

Gallons: 10.702
Price/Gal: $2.629
Fuel Sale: $28.14

Not too bad, really. Next time Tobias gets refilled, I'm sure the bill will be well over $30.

Been listening to KZUM tonight. Right now, they are playing some utterly trippy mixes of ambient wackiness. It just made it even more bizarre by tuning my second set of speakers into the streaming web version, which is delayed by a few seconds from the over-the-air broadcast on the main system. I'm in one of those moods.

This morning, I attended my first service at the Lincoln Unitarian Church. This particular gathering was centered around a water communion ritual. A ceremony of renewal and oneness.

I love this:

But just as fascists instively know how to be assholes, many people instinctively know how to be kind and reasonable. So when you're arguing the obvious, appeal to people's empathetic instinct. For instance, conservative intellectuals will pull out all sorts of crazy arguments as to why rich people are inherently good and poor people deserve to starve, but you don't even have to argue against them. This is how you respond:

I don't have to argue with you. All good people instinctively know that it is wrong to be rich while other people starve. If you're arguing against that, it's because you're an asshole. There is something wrong with you. It doesn't matter what fancy words you use to support your position, because if you were a decent person you wouldn't even need to argue.

It does have a certain inflammatory charm, doesn't it? :)

Deborah Wai Kapohe's song "American Clone" has been playing a lot on my irate radio lately.

If anyone wants to instant message me, you guessed it. I'm on google talk. {my_handle_in_lowercase}@gmail.com. The latest fad. But it's a good fad, honest. At least they're supporting open standards.

Open Harvest volunteering today: I feel like I'm becoming part of the family there. With each passing week, I learn a little more. I've also started to become more self-directed. Since I've now got a pretty good repertoire of things to keep track of, I can look at something and think ok, that needs to be done, rather than wandering back to the manager after every little task to say, "What's next, boss?" (Which I suspect was starting get annoying for them as well as me.)

This morning, I downloaded and watched The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and the attempted coup against him in 2002. (His name was recently in the news again because Pat Robertson publicly advocated his assassination.)

Hmmm, I really have been increasingly lax about posting regular updates lately. Well, anyway, here's the latest.

I find myself in something of a creative slump lately. Nevertheless, since I'm not quite ready to let this thing wither into oblivion, I'll attempt to plod on.

F-in brilliant, in a poetic sort of way.

I did not know what a development was. [...] Now I fully understand the term. It means this:

Every single house one of three derivations from the same model. Accessible only by passing through a gate, but still no community. No one knows one another. More to the point -- and this is the key to development -- it is everywhere. And it never, ever stops. One travels the roads here, and every week a new piece of forest is destroyed and a new Development is being erected.

It’s the Geography of Nowhere, in Kunstler’s too-apt term. This is Nowhere. I have never been here. No one is here. There are no people. There is no life here. The people here are the Nothing Men, the Men of Nowhere.

It is Nowhere, and it is everywhere.

Virginia is beautiful. You see remnants of it everywhere. It’s more than beautiful. It’s abundant. It’s fecund. A community of real humans could survive here in peace and plenty until the end of time.

The inhabitants recognize this. They know it’s pretty. So every here-and-there they build Ooh Look! nature preserves. It’s not a viable habitat for any real population. If you suggested living on this land; subsisting here, making your living here, in dynamic interaction with the myriad forms of life who dwell here, the Nothing Man will laugh and laugh and laugh.

You would be suggesting a relationship. The Nothing Men do not have relationships. They cannot.

It’s simple mathematics.

Bonus points for the following bit of demented crash imagery:

Maybe I really am a sick fuck, but the thought of the Nothing Men reduced to eating each other, of Steve Ballmer turning over a spit for the nourishment of his former employees or customers, makes me laugh for the first time in days.

A fascinating look at the inside of congress by a reporter who went around with independent congressman Bernie Sanders and watched what happened for a few weeks. Yet another sign that the last vestiges of representative governance in the United States are on the way out.

In the first few weeks of my stay in Washington, Sanders introduced and passed, against very long odds, three important amendments. A fourth very nearly made it and would have passed had it gone to a vote. During this time, Sanders took on powerful adversaries, including Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank and the Bush administration. And by using the basic tools of democracy -- floor votes on clearly posed questions, with the aid of painstakingly built coalitions of allies from both sides of the aisle -- he, a lone Independent, beat them all.

It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best winning streak of his career. Except for one thing.

By my last week in Washington, all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today's U.S. Congress. What began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics -- the pitfalls of digging for hope in a shit mountain.

BTW, has anyone noticed that the Patroit Act has now been made permanent with nary a peep?

A quick midday bikeride, a few pounds of sweat, and I was at Open Harvest this afternoon.

As far as I can tell, the KPFK streaming server has been down for most of the morning, and shows no signs of returning. So bummer. No whore-talk today. :(

What your mother told you about not eating sugar (or should have, if she knew anything at all), it turns out, is true! This fascinating article reveals all sorts of interesting facts about this habit-forming and poisonous chemical. There is a reason this country is full of sick (or half-sick) people.

In the 1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr Weston A. Price, travelled all over the world-from the lands of the Eskimos to the South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. [...]

Dr Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was simple. People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural, unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared foods were imported as a result of contact with "civilisation", physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable within a single generation.

A man suspected of shoplifting is wrestled to the ground in a Wal Mart parking lot by employees, where he is handcuffed and held against the scorching hot pavement until he dies.

This one is just... strange. I want to think there's more to this story than what's being reported. It just doesn't quite add up.

For anyone reading this Wednesday morning, if you want to hear to something cool, tune in to KPFK (mp3 stream) to hear Sarah-Katherine whoring it up live on the air.

Time: 8:40 PST, which equals 10:40 CST here in Lincoln. For anywhere else, you do the math.

--Chiasm

"Let's face it, with most other weblogs it's just blab, blab, blab, me, me, me all the time." --deconsumption.

Guilty as charged. Here we go.

The headline says it all. Sounds straight out of a dystopian novel, doesn't it? Well, here we are. Welcome to 21st century America. Any guesses as to which activities will be declared "criminal" next?

At first, I was a bit dubious about how much ground I'd cover today. But now, I'm glad I took the journey.

Contemplations on the holiness of silence. I, too, find myself going through such a period.

After following this link off Rigorous Intuition, I read through it, scratched my head, and then burst out laughing. I can't even tell whether it's meant as a satire or not. Basically, this conspiracy theory posits that pretty much every alternative news source you've ever heard of -- everything from riverbend's blog, to commondreams.org, to Democracy Now, to Rigorous Intuition itself -- are being orchestrated by the CIA to misdirect and mislead people away from the true conspiracy behind 9/11.

Though there is validity to the idea that the spooks would employ disinformation agents masking as truth-seekers to muddy the waters -- I might even buy the idea that a few of the "alternative media outlets" are government ploys -- implicating every alternative organization reeks of paranoia cranked into maximum overdrive. Add to that a complete lack of evidence to substantiate any of it, and... well, I have to wonder if the guy who wrote the piece is himself working for the CIA as a disinfo agent. lol.

From the DARK SIDE of the Kitchen. My latest cooking concoction.... Insanity Stew.

I remember a time when rarely an evening would pass during which I didn't write here. Tonight, I thought about several topics that might make for a decent ramble or three -- some have been in the mental queue for weeks now -- but why? JP of FP writes of blogging burnout. I can relate, at least to parts of it.

Haven't done much writing here lately. It's not for lack of things going on. In fact, there's been quite a lot happening. I guess I just haven't felt motivated to write about it. Anyway, here goes.