| (no subject) |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|05:50 pm] |
go see "no end in sight". its a decent documentary.
i don't know which was worse, the decisions and actions the documentary covers regarding the war, or the fact that there were only four people in the movie's audience, only one of which was below fifty years old (that being myself).
why is no one interested in this? why aren't more people talking about this? my guess: feelings of futility, lack of informational transparency and at-home distractors. thirty second tv ad spaces have been sold for over two and a half million dollars, how do you transfer any information to a public in thirty seconds, and who has that much to spend? what results is the growth of trivial media, an uninformed public, and ignorance towards international and even domestic crises. even longer news programs have to be worried about the effects on profits their newscasts have, and hindrances to the presentation of uncomfortable issues are a natural economic development because of this.
I can't count how many times ive heard "i dont remember" as a given response by an elected or appointed official as to why they made an unjust or ignorant decision. in a democracy its the peoples role to provide surveillance of elected officials. we should start paying more attention. |
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| a smart bit of criticism. take time to read it if you care about things. |
[May. 31st, 2007|07:22 pm] |
so, the doha development round of world trade organization negotiations (essentially a meeting of trade nations including the developed and developing world) will expire tomorrow unless congress decides to renew the talks before midnight tonight.
what does this mean? well, not too much, but its a foreboding sign. The round negotiations fill the purpose of solving trade disputes, most notably between the developing and developed world, but between any two trade partners, really. The DOHA rounds are expiring because the US and the EU can't get their act together about agricultural subsidies. The developing world (mostly india, brazil and china) is complaining (rightuflly so) that they have a comparative advantage in land and therefore a comparative advantage in agriculture. Unfortunately, they cannot use this advantage to further develop their economies because the US and the EU have extremely regulated agriculture markets that are protected against foreign competition.
What does this mean for us? well, primarily, if you have any sense of decency you would feel that the developing world could just use a break (granted if the developing world DOES industrialize all of a sudden, then we've got some serious environmental issues at hand, but thats something else entirely). Secondly, many argue that our agricultural subsidies are necessary to protect our economy blah blah blah, BUT, the DOHA rounds would have helped us get over this need for protectionism: the US was bargaining for more open markets from the developing world, what the developing world wanted in return is the end of the subsidies.
What are subsidies? government money given to farmers, either in the form of buying excess products or in direct payments. the excess products the government buys are put in grain silos that sit and rot. tax money is used for this purpose. lots of tax money. tax money that could go to more valuable things like, oh... helping to develop environmental business sectors or research? many say that US farmers who had to get loans out to pay for their land would go bankrupt without subsidies. there are a few things wrong with this, one, if the US is as market friendly as it says it is, then it should let the market decide who does or does not stay afloat. Personally, i don't agree with that, but a lot of extremely wealthy farmers (and farmers offspring, ie my economics professor who only owns a bit of land but manages to get thousands of dollars of subsidies each year, even though she does no farming herself) receive subsidies that they clearly do not need to keep their business profitable.
Its been proposed to congress that agricultural subsidies should be given only to farmers who net 200,000 or less on their farms each year. This would be a HUGE cut to subsidies. Does that give you an idea who the money is going to? |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 31st, 2007|04:12 am] |
recipe for disaster:
it is four am. I have to get up for work at eight am. I have to work from nine am until nine pm. I cannot sleep. this rules! |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 17th, 2007|12:12 am] |
more by charles simic:
Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful....
Earlier tonight, I watched the Chinese laundry-man, who doesn't read or write our language, turn the pages of a book left behind by a customer in a hurry. That made me happy. I wanted it to be a dreambook, or a volume of foolishly sentimental verses, but I didn't look closely.
It's almost midnight now, and his light is still on. He has a daughter who brings him dinner, who wears short skirts and walks with long strides. She's late, very late, so he has stopped ironing and watches the street.
If not for the two of us, there'd be only spiders hanging their webs between the street lights and the dark trees.
They wheeled out the ash blonde who believes herself already dead into the spike-fenced garden of the hospital for the insane. Her name was Amy or Ann, but she didn't answer to either one. She kept her eyes tightly shut. She was pushed by a nurse in white.
Some of it was told to me by a shivering young man who insisted that it's been raining for years, even indoors. "Coming down real hard," he said. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 12th, 2007|12:26 am] |
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In the growing dimness of the setting sun and the setting winter we sat around on concrete blocks watching cars and clouds pass. Lighting through tinted glass could make it nighttime and cold drinks made you shiver and we all sat, just speaking, just listening. Afterwards our desires caught up to us, pressed collars, ain't it sad and nine on the alarm and five on the wrist and all of a sudden we realized what we weren't having wasn't fun and what we hadn't had was necessities and wasn't that all right? For a while at least but now bound and gagged and all I can do is make the wooden bed board into the ground we stood on, shading our eyes, and looking to see if we could get a glimpse of what was on the other side of the water. |
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| final version |
[Mar. 11th, 2007|10:29 pm] |
thanks to everyone who helped me edit this. Thank you marc for your extremely detailed critique, I used many but not all suggestions, as you'll see. I always appreciate the time you put into your critiques, your suggestions are invaluable. And just so you know, I will be auditioning, as my teacher called it, for the 500 level creative writing course. No guarantees I'll get in, but I'm really hoping for it.
thanks again, heres the final version if you want to take a look at how I did it:
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| REVISED final project for creative writing |
[Mar. 6th, 2007|09:03 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | thermostat by aloha | ] |
if any of you want to read this before next tuesday and let me know if it doesn't suck anymore plz let a brotha know
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 2nd, 2007|01:38 am] |
| [ | music |
| | the wrens: hopeless | ] |
hell yes charles simic is sweet, read this:
The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm.
The apple trees are in flower. He's making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching. There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him.
It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.
AND this:
My mother was a braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.
We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|10:57 am] |
Random act of kindness for the day:
This morning I woke up an hour late, yelled fuck pretty loud, and scrambled to get to uniprint to make 20 copies of my creative writing story before class (which started in twenty minutes). I got to uniprint, tried inserting my twenty into the cash received in order to start making copies, and realized that it only accepted $1s. I asked the cashier, a middle aged woman with a kind smile and crooked teeth who was on the phone throughout this entire experience, if she could exchange my twenty. She smiled, said yes, opened her drawer, and told me she had five ones only. I cursed, and took my shit over to brennen's coffee. At the register, I explained my need for 12 one dollar bills, checked to make sure they had the ability to fulfill such a request and then ordered some coffee. I rushed back over to uniprint, and inserted two dollars. the machine did nothing. I pressed start on the copier, still, nothing. ten minutes to class, and on the verge of extreme frustration, the cashier came over, still on the phone, and asked me what the problem was. I explained, she fiddled with the machine for a minute, and then asked me what i was copying, how many copies i needed etc etc. She grabbed my story, and went to the back room. About a minute later she came back to the main room, twenty copies of my story in hand. I thanked her and began to pull out my wallet, beginning to extract the 12 dollars that i knew the copies would cost me. She handed me the copies, and put her hand up to stop me, "on the house," she said, "youve had enough trouble". |
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