Obama Courting Evangelicals Once Loyal to Bush - NYTimes.com:

“Between now and November, the Obama forces are planning as many as 1,000 house parties and dozens of Christian rock concerts, gatherings of religious leaders, campus visits and telephone conference calls to bring together voters of all ages motivated by their faith to engage in politics. It is the most intensive effort yet by a Democratic candidate to reach out to self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians and to try to pry them away from their historical attachment to the Republican Party.”

Notwithstanding the important points raised here by Ludditerobot about the Supreme Court, I do have to basically agree with Tony’s comments the other day about Obama’s shameless pandering. That, and I find anyone trying to appeal to Christian Evangelists as scary as hell. I’m thinking that we need fewer of these end-times nutjobs around rather than more, but what do I know? I actually find evolution and photosynthesis and, like, science compelling.

We don't blog much about food around here, but I can never forgo an opportunity to wax poetic about fresh fruits and vegetables (just ask Bob). 

When one mentions local food, unfortunately many people instantly conjure up images of "local grass fed beef," because most locavores are also omnivores who can't pass up a good steak - but if it was treated well before it was killed, then it's okay and it's better for you, right?  Can you feel me rolling my eyes right now?

When I think of local food, this is what I picture:

Food that is able to be picked at the height of ripeness by someone that I actually know, not loaded with pesticides, and not trucked across the country or shipped from another part of the world.  (Thank you to the Kent Family Growers for their amazing produce!)  I eyeball the strawberries in the grocery store and feel sad that someone is going to eat the sour, tasteless berries in the plastic package.   The strawberries pictured above taste so amazing that we don't ever put them into a pie or a strawberry shortcake - we just eat them as is, or on top of our morning muesli. 

I think I've actually blogged about this topic before on here, but since our archives never made it through the move to our new design, you lucky people get to read about it again.  It's just that when every summer rolls around,  I am so awed at the quality of the produce we can get, how amazing it tastes, and and wonderful it is to eat whole, fresh foods, especially after a long, harsh winter full of sad, tasteless produce.

I'm not a diehard locavore and I don't think that it's the be all end all to any food crisis, but it certainly can't hurt, and it is nice to support the local economy and eat healthier as a result.  If you are able to, visit your local farmer's market, farm stand, and/or look into joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in which you'll get a weekly delivery of whatever's in season.  It is probably too late for this year, but it's a good time to start looking into joining for next year.  It's a great way to connect into the local community, learn what is in season when in your area, expand your produce horizon (every year we get a new vegetable that I haven't cooked before), and eat healthy, whole foods.

Jenna

AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’:

“Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: ‘When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.’ This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.

The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.“

What is curious is that in talking with some young people over the last few years since 9/11/2001 — and by this, I mean college-aged men and women — very few of them have issues with the Government collecting data on them, monitoring their email or telephone, or otherwise observing them. They reason that since they do nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about. Plus, it stops the terrorists, right?

Most interestingly, many of these young people view my paranoia about personal privacy as almost a quaint, by-gone product of an earlier era, sort of the way like the Bush administration tends to view the Geneva Conventions.

Obama is a candidate who is for “real change,” as long as that “real change” isn’t really change.

To wit:

Obama’s Campaign Tightens Control of Image and Access: “At a rally for Senator Barack Obama in Detroit on Monday, two Muslim women said they were prohibited from sitting behind the candidate because they were wearing head scarves and campaign volunteers did not want them to appear with him in news photographs or live television coverage.”

And then, there’s this gem:

McCain, Obama disagree with child rape ruling: “CHICAGO - Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama said Wednesday they disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw the executions of people who rape children.

McCain called the ruling an ‘assault’ on legal system. Obama said it is wrong to flatly prohibit the death penalty in such cases if states want to apply it.”

Remind me again why this guy is the new liberal messiah?

The other day, we were at the supermarket going through our normal checkout line routine. Said routine consists of us rolling up to the checkout with a cart full of fresh produce, including things like kale, avocados, mangoes, okra, ginger, Brussel sprouts, bell peppers, and garlic, and the checkout person looking at us like we birthed an alien baby right there in the grocery store. Picking up an avocado with two fingers and a disgusted look on her face, the cashier asked us hesitantly last time we were in the store, “what is this?” (We’ve been asked the same question for Brussel sprouts, okra, ginger, and the ever-exotic broccoli.)

Considering this, it was no huge surprise when I saw this list of America’s 20 Most Hated Foods linked over at Joel Fuhrman’s diseaseproof.com. Though predictable animal foods like oysters, eggs, and liver make the list, there are also things on the list like blueberries, peas, maple syrup, cilantro, onions, cooked carrots, raisins, okra, beets, and mushrooms. Though I find this a little depressing, I’m not really all that surprised. After all, when I am stuck waiting in the checkout lines, I do get a peek at what other people are eating, and if it isn’t frozen, canned, pre-made, or microwaveable, apparently, it isn’t appetizing to your average consumer around here.

Yesterday, I had to call Sirius to deactivate an old unit and reactivate a new one. Despite their stupid voice activated menu system that had no option for what I wanted — am I the only person that prefers to press numbers rather than talk to a computer? — it went pretty well. Once I got through to an actual human, there were no problems, and everything worked as expected. My radio was activated. I was as happy as any Sirius subscriber could be, since customer service reps can’t really do much about the top-40 playlist format that Sirius adopts for every station…but that’s a different entry for a different day.

The day after my call to Sirius, I got this confusing email:

From: Sirius Radio Feedback
To: rjtorres
Subject: SIRIUS Satellite Radio Needs Your Feedback!

**** Please do not respond to this email, as this email is automatically generated. ****

20-Jun-2008

Dear Robert,

Thank you for contacting SIRIUS Customer Care.

We continually strive to provide you with the highest quality support and service, and your comments and suggestions enable us to be! tter serv

That’s the email, verbatim.

I usually ignore this kind of crap, but the illogic of the communique grabbed my attention. Let’s think it through: Sirius sends me an email that says they “need [my] feedback.” Then, the email — with 4 asterisks and bold — implores me not to respond to the email, which seems to be the primary way through which I could give them my feedback.

As you can see, the email closes rather abruptly, as if it were the final message being penned aboard a sinking ship, with a wonky, dying satellite connection to the Intertubes. I find it hard to tame my overactive imagination, and I’ve now imagined that Sirius, keen to avoid minimum wage and labor laws, has rented out a giant old cruise liner. Setting sail around the world, always in international waters, with a complement of hundreds of customer service reps chained to their workstations, Sirius runs the tightest ship in the customer service biz. But then, disaster strikes. The ship hits an iceberg, or collides with an old mine laid by competitor XM from before the merger talks. As the ship begins to take on water, the captain screams, “Quick, before we sink, get that email out to Robert!” Ever faithful to her corporate taskmaster, the chained rep types as much as she can, and hits “send,” yet the missive is incomplete. As the briny sea fills her lungs, the rep drifts off into the dark fathoms thinking, “…if only I could have finished that email…”

The more likely scenario, however, is that Sirius has failed to notice that their email system is screwed up, and some poor sap in a cubicle somewhere is sweating because the response rate on his customer service feedback instrument is 0. Regardless, if a company is going to communicate with me — particularly one that can put a fucking satellite into space and then beam radio down to me — I’d expect at least a complete email. In the absence of that, imaginations like mine can surely run wild.

Knowing that at least a few of you readers out there are Mac users, I thought I’d share a few of my most-used Mac apps. I’d be curious to hear your favorites, too, either in the comments, or on your own blogs. (Of course, I forego the obvious applications here, like Safari, iTunes, and the like…)

To start, let’s dig into where I spend most of my time on a computer: on the Internet.

Twitterific: A great app for updating my Twitter feed. I’m not the most regular twitterer, but I do hit the occasional tweet to let people know what’s up. Fortunately, Twitter has not reached addictive proportions for me, as it tends to for some.

Mailplane: As I discussed previously, I began using Google Apps for my domain, not all that long ago. While I’m pretty happy with Google’s web interface and use that most of the time, I sometimes turn to the added functionality that Mailplane provides. It does drag-n-drop attachments, has a nice plugin for iPhoto, and handles multiple accounts well (for sanity, I have work email shunted to a separate gmail account).

BusySync: Best syncing for iCal and Google Calendar, hands down. This little system pane quietly keeps my iPhone and GoogleCalendar in sync, without any bother or pain. I haven’t even begun to dig into the iCal features for local networks, and this is already well worth the registration price.

Linkinus: My favorite IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client, Linkinus has recently been updated to version 1.3, which includes a new theme that displays most photos and videos inline in the client, improved filtering of IRC notices, and a new user interface that looks far more Mac-like than any other client out there. Being an IRCop on the Serenia network and owner of the channel #vegan, I spend a lot of time in my IRC client, and while I used to be addicted to Irssi in the terminal, I’ve recently moved all of my IRC use to Linkinus.

iChat with Chax: Apple’s built-in iChat client has become better and better with time, but it still is missing a few things. Chax adds a few extra features that are really useful, like Growl notifications, a unified contact window, and a built-in log viewer.

Yummy FTP: I was a long-time Transmit user, but a few years ago, I switched to Yummy FTP for my FTP and SFTP needs. I was able to get faster transfers with Yummy, and I just like the interface better than Transmit’s. I find myself using it less, however, since Expandrive came out…

ExpanDrive: This app adds SFTP to the finder with a little red drive icon. I’m able to mount my server for web and other file work in the Finder like any other file system, and overall, it is quite responsive. I also use this to get “back to my mac” without relying on Apple’s .Mac solution. Using the dynamic dns service that comes with DNS Made Easy, I have a domain pointing to my home IP address that’s updated every 5 minutes. I then setup my router to forward all traffic on a high-numbered port to the local ssh port on my mac. Using ExanDrive, I can then mount my local mac drive via SFTP from anywhere I can get a connection. This is great for grabbing files from work — say, a Keynote presentation or an OmniOutliner file with my class notes — and it is fairly secure, using SSH-based encryption. For $29 and a few minutes futzing about with your router, you can have excellent and relatively secure access to your home mac without the .Mac fees and potential back to my mac issues.

Meerkat: SSH (secure shell) tunnels are useful when you want your connections to be truly secure. Coupled with a shell account capable of tunneling traffic, Meerkat makes secured network services simple, wrapping an easy-to-use interface around some SSH commands that I always struggle to remember. With Meerkat, I can set up a series of tunnels, and select them from a drop-down menu, or have them auto-triggered when I launch an application. Highly recommended if you need to secure your browsing, chatting, or anything else that requires a network connection.

NetNewsWire: Best RSS reader for Mac, and now free. What else can I say?

Pukka: a terribly useful little front-end to Del.icio.us that allows for very fast posting to del.icio.us. It has built-in tag completion, which is also a bonus since I’m a pretty sloppy tagger.

MarsEdit2: I’m kind of a messy blogger. I write out lots of half-posts and spew my drafty idiocy all over the place. MarsEdit provides a repository for all of this stuff, and organizes all of my blogging into one place. It has nice macros built-in for formatting, and it interfaces well with several different blogging platforms.

In addition to my online geekery, I’m also a professor and author, and use a variety of tools to improve my productivity, to organize information, and to capture ideas.

Type-It-For-Me: If you tend to type a lot of repetitive stuff, this app can save you a lot of time by defining quick little macros that can be expanded anywhere. For example, I often sign my emails like this, expanded by ‘atb’:

All the best,

Bob

In some of my other emails, I use this as a signature, which is expanded with ‘bts’

–
Bob Torres
author, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights
co-author, Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-vegan World
http://www.bobtorres.net

I have other macros setup for support emails for our podcast, other signatures, and more. I also have the program setup to auto-correct typos using the TidBITS Auto Correct dictionary. This is great for fixing some common typos.

Omnioutliner Pro: I always tell my students that outlines are the key to learning complex material, and I practice what I preach. More often than not, I show up to class with a few outlined pages on the readings for the day. I’ve used just about every other outliner out there, but settled with OmniOutliner Pro, mostly for the powerful features it provides.

MindManager: Prior to undertaking most big writing projects, I mind-map to help me sort out the big ideas I’m grappling with, and to ground my thinking a bit. Jenna and I used a mind map for Vegan Freak, and a fairly large mind map also drove the production of Making A Killing. MindManager gives me a space to visualize and brainstorm, and it lets you attach notes and files to each node in the mind map.

Textsoap: Need to clean up sloppily formatted text? Strip out weird characters? Remove extra spaces? Textsoap is invaluable for this, and a huge timesaver.

Quicksilver: In perpetual beta, Quicksilver is an application launcher and so much more. If you can think of it, there’s probably a quicksilver plugin to do it. (For example, I use Quicksilver to launch iTunes playlists, to manipulate files, to add things to my RememberTheMilk to-do lists, to search for things, and more.)

Hazel: This little preference pane performs actions on folders. I use it to keep my downloads folder cruft-free, and for a few other automated tasks. This is a powerful little prefpane!

Mac users: what are your most-used apps? Let me know!

I love Ursula LeGuin's science fiction. The work of hers that I've read almost always contemplates some aspect of the human character, and of our nature as social creatures. Most recently, I've begun working my way through The Lathe of Heaven, which has an enticing premise. George Orr is your average guy, except that he has what he calls "effective dreams:" dreams that change reality. Caught by the government for using prescriptions illegally, Orr is put in the care of a doctor who specializes in sleep disorders. Realizing that Orr has the ability to change reality, the doctor induces in Orr particular kinds of dream states which he uses to change the world. Set in the not-so-distant future, the world is rife with war and hunger following a global collapse of the human population. Wishing for a better world, and with wholly honest intentions, Orr's doctor uses the "effective" dreams to change the world, willing into existence new circumstances that he feels are for the better.

The problem, of course, is that it becomes more and more difficult for the doctor to account for all of the potential issues that spin off of his relatively simple prescriptions for the way the world should be. When the doctor urges Orr to dream of the earth at peace with itself, Orr dreams into reality a humanity forced into a peaceful unity by its need to fight off an alien race.

Orr realizes that he's being used to change the world, and in this realization, he comes to the point that, for me, is interesting in the context of social movements, including the animal rights movement. Each time Orr's doctor uses him, he creates unintended results, even with completely beneficent intentions. As Orr says:

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

And this is the essential point: all we have is means. In other words, we can dream of alternate realities, and plan for them, and even work towards them, but if we're going to work towards them, the way that we work towards them must be consistent with our principles. As I wrote in Making A Killing, we cannot sacrifice what we think is right in a principled trade-off for a better world in some distant tomorrow that may never come.

In the animal rights movement, we've largely lost sight of the importance of this kind of thinking. The bulk of the movement is preoccupied with negotiating with the industry for better treatment of exploited animals, keeping in place the essential relations of property and commodification that condemn animals to be mere instruments to human want and profit (and indeed, many of the arguments made for welfare reforms highlight the cost-effictiveness of the reforms for producers). As long as the agricultural industry can hold animals as property, it can exploit them effectively for profit. Welfare regulations may modify the way that property owners treat their animal property, but ultimately, as long as animals can be treated as property, they will never gain equal consideration.

The problem is this: fighting for welfare reform doesn't significantly reduce the desire for animal foods, nor does it significantly impact the productive relation at the heart of animal exploitation. It is thinking in which the presumed end justifies the means. Yet, as Orr points out, all we have is means. Every day that we live, we remake the world. The question is, are we remaking the world in the way that we really want it to be? Would we prefer that animals be nicely treated commodities, still exploited, albeit more gently, or would we prefer that the world be vegan, and recognize the inherent worth of animals as beings with their own subjective experience of the world?

If we want a vegan world, we have to work to produce one, and the only way to produce one is by living one uncompromisingly on a daily basis. Vegan education works to effectively remodel social relations, and to hit at the heart of the problem with animal exploitation. For this reason, our work should focus on the inglorious, quotidian work that's required for creating a broad-based movement of people who live abolition in their daily life, who work to change the conditions that condemn animals to being mere instruments and property, and who work to educate others about the importance of veganism as a lived form of protest. No amount of negotiating with KFC or McDonald's or whatever fast food restaurant will have such an impact; no amount of banning gestation crates, or producing cage free eggs will get us there. Only veganism can bring the kind of world we're after, and only veganism can be the means if we are truly serious about respecting the inherent needs of animals to live free of exploitation and suffering.

--bob

In the last couple of weeks I have come across, not for the first time, discussions about two apparently distinct issues, yet ones that have common themes. What I have found of note is not the commonality, rather that this common issue itself is left unconsidered. This unconsidered issue is the role of technology in the human universe, and the two discussions relate to concerns about human population and the production of ‘vat grown meat’. I have commented on the latter some 2 years ago—on this blog and more widespread.

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I was recently given a copy of the Julie Taymor’s film Across the Universe, having no knowledge of the plot, genre or any reviews. After starting slow this film has became one of the most memorable I have seen in some time—more striking as I am not a fan of any type of musical film at all. This has proven the be the exception.

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The site was offline for a number of hours on May 10 for updating to drupal 5.7. I also used the time to implement some new features. Many of these were back-end improvements, some you may notice. These include (since added to):

• a print friendly page link re-enabled (icon)
• a 'forward page' feature
• a list of the most popular (or notorious) posts
• a list of recent comments

The lists mentioned above are located at the bottom of the main page. I am testing the suitability of trackback URLs, which are now provided at the end of each post.

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If you haven't heard yet there is an awesome idea put forward by Hackontest, to have a competition between different oss projects in adding a feature requested by users. You can go and register your project or request a features from the projects already registered there. q;-)

These words were uttered to me recently. I think they can be quite apt a description. They were made in regards to writing a PhD thesis (something I had been trying to complete for the last 12 months). Many people I have spoken to share similar sentiments. Advisors are patently aware of this and push you to improve your work only to the point just before it breaks you. I literally reached that point a number of times in the last year…

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It has quietened down of late, though the controversy surrounding Japanese whaling in the Pacific emerged again a few months ago. Public debate was bolstered by both the renewed action of Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace (particularly Sea Shepherd volunteers boarding the Yushin Maru No.2 and subsequently being ‘kidnapped’ in January) and the Australian Governments talk of undertaking surveillance of the Japanese Fleet (Air and Sea). Criticism of Japanese whaling largely stems from opposition to eating whales based on whales being majestic creatures, bundled in with the myth of a scientific basis for Japanese whaling and the protection of endangered species. Similar arguments to the former are made against the killing of Dolphins for human consumption.

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new posts are coming—my brain has been occupied with a number other things for some time. I have many unfinished pieces (some out of date) to get to...

• weird burglary Oddly descriptive and a bit too honest

• Xyzzy Product Page my favorite pw generator. always useful.