SuperWonderBang

By now, I’m sure that everyone has heard about the pet food recall. It’s a sad thing that some folks lost their pets from the very food that was supposed to nourish them.

I think that this recall highlights an increasing problem with the food supply, not just for pets, but for us as well. That problem is the large-scale centralized processing of the food that we all eat.

As few as 20 years ago, much of the food an individual might eat was raised/grown and processed within a few miles of where he or she lived. Today, as evidenced by large-scale farming and meat processing corporations, our food is produced and processed in fewer and more centralized places. Look at the number of brands that Menu Foods, the company involved with today’s recall, produces: dog food products and cat food products.

This is not just a threat to our health because of accidental contamination, but makes it that much easier for an intentional attack on our food supply to affect a larger number of people. Accidental contamination has proven to be a bad enough issue. Remember the bad spinach and the bad peanut butter? That’s just this year.

What happens when someone or some group decides to intentionally infect all the apples with anthrax? Or else lace all the milk with botulism? They merely have to visit one or two dairies or slaughterhouses and their nefarious intent could affect tens of millions. With the smaller scales of yesteryear, they might have only reached a small regional group of people with a similar attack.

Another detriment from this large-scale factory farming comes the effect it has on the small, family farms which used to be the backbone of this country. Simply put, it is now impossible for those small farmers to compete on price or scale. They have been pushed out of the market. In addition, communities are hurt in an intangible way because they have lost contact with the source of their food. Kids these days don’t even realize that ground beef comes from a cow. A chicken is the skinless, boneless, grilled piece of teriyaki-flavored meat on their plate, not the living breathing clucking pecker.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. We seem to have reached an intractable situation where we obviously can’t go back to “the way it was” but the way forward is even cloudier. There’’s the price pressure from the consumer. There’’s the government subsidies which are in collusion with the pressure from foreign farmers and food suppliers.

Some indication of how to make progress may be found in the European system of small markets that specialize in only one or two products. There are the benefits of the growth of small business while at the same time having less capacity for cross-contamination. This is just a guess, though.

The only absolute truth here is that our food system is dangerously fragile.

I have a nice little schedule of shows set for the Spring. There’s lots more I’d like to do, but time and money preclude it.

Here’s the schedule. Links take you to buy tickets should you want to join me.

Mar. 23 - Bang Bang Bang, Modern Skirts - Exit/In - 8pm

Apr. 14 - TV on the Radio, Noisettes - Cannery Ballroom - 9pm

Apr. 28 - Drive By Truckers - Georgia Theatre - 10pm sharp

May 19 - Bright Eyes, Gillian Welch - Ryman Auditorium - 8pm

Live music has become a big part of what I do lately. Not every show is great (YMSB was a big let down), but it’s a fun night out.

Because of this, I have had to do more business with Ticketmaster than I would like. I would prefer to pay anyone other than Ticketmaster. I presume a lot of artists don”t have control over how the tickets are sold, but I see more and more artists controlling their ticket sales (like the Drive-By Truckers).

Ticketmaster as a business has a right to charge whatever they would like. My problem is how “black box” the process is. Their “convenience charge” seems to be somewhat random and in the case of those $29.50 Bright Eyes tickets, I paid $8.40 per ticket for this convenience. Then, Ticketmaster has the gall to charge me $2.50 to email me my tickets. Add to that some random $1.50 fee and a $2.50 venue charge and it just becomes absurd.

I don’t mind paying a fee to buy tickets online. I realize the ticket company has to make money, but there’’s got to be a better way. The TV on the Radio tickets were bought through TicketWeb which charged a flat $5.00 fee regardless of how many tickets I bought. That makes sense to me. It even included them mailing me the physical tickets. This is similar to what Ticket Biscuit and Baseline Ticketing are doing. It’s simple and reasonable.

This news story, about a man whose sexual offender status is causing him and his family to be forceably moved, article prompted these thoughts on the state of the legal system’s ability to deal with sexual offenders.

If all the guy did was urinate in public and that’s a sex offense, there seems to be a big disconnect between fear and reality. A friend, who lives in Hawaii, says that in his home state, “urinating in public is called sexual assault in the 4th degree. As such you would be required to register as a sex offender. One guy challenged it and the Hawaii supreme court made them take down the online sex offender registry.” This is clearly a dangerous proposition and exposes the fragility of how we currently deal with this special class of offender.

If he truly is a child molester, the issue here is that we as society do not have a way to treat these offenders. Many of them will never be rehabilitated. Even the psychiatric community agrees to that. We don’t have the space to keep them in jail. So what do we do?

Do we put all the sex offenders in a single neighborhood where no one will ever go?

The law treats sexual offenders differently for a reason. Imagine if we did the same thing for another serious crime, say murder.

Force all the murderers to register their address. Then, make sure that they don”t live anywhere near a person who matches the physical description of the person they murdered. It doesn’t make any sense, right?

But, it does seem to make sense for sexual criminals, because the law, whether it explicitly acknowledges it or not, knows that the crime is different from other violent crimes. Therefore, our old methods of incarceration and full release don’t work.

In truth, sexual crimes are signs of mental illness. Most of these people have deep-seated psychological issues that neither prisons nor the civilian populations are equipped to deal with. Yet, we ignore that and simply create a cycle of prison and recidivism.

To a lesser extent, it’s very similar to those people caught in the cycle of drug use and jail time because of that use. We know that people who truly want to break that cycle have to move away from their old using places and using buddies. Do we force them to do so? No. So, it begs the question of forcing sexual predators to move. Both are likely to commit their crime again.

It’s a hard question with seemingly no answers. That’s why the law finds itself in the situation described above.

I used to live in Georgia. I was born and raised there. I still consider it my home. Most of my and my wife’’s family are still there. So, I become really concerned when I hear that Georgia’’s legislature has decided to allow classes on the Bible to be taught in public school.

I have mixed emotions about this because I am a student of literature. I still spend a lot of time reading and thinking about literature and how it affects our lives. So, I understand how important the Bible and its themes, characters, and symbols are to a deeper understanding of western literature. I profess the Bible’’s importance as a foundational document for the study of literature, though I do not ascribe to its religious worship.

At the same time, I am deeply concerned that in the hands of teachers whose primary knowledge of and about the Bible comes from his or her religious experiences and not from his or her education experiences the line between study and worship may become blurred. I believe deeply in the separation of church and state. I believe even deeper in the dangers of indoctrinating young people with religion. They are not equipped to handle the big questions religion asks.

Within this heady brew of religion and state separation and the importance of thorough and well-rounded education, especially in the humanities, I see the state of Georgia throwing its teachers, who are notoriously underfunded and undertrained, into a precarious situation where personal beliefs are central to interpretation. It is neither fair nor intelligent to create such a path toward failure as this situation seems to do.

As a former teacher of literature at the high school level, I know full well how difficult it can be to be “neutral” on a wide array of topics while discussing things as personal as some literature becomes. How do we broach the use of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? How do we unpack Atticus Finch’s seeming collusion on hand with the racial injustice against which he fights on the other hand?

These are difficult literary questions even when something as clearly wrong as racism is involved. How then would we ever hope to study the Bible in a classroom where some of the students are likely to believe that the document is the word of God? How can we possibly go about interpreting the stories and symbols when some students will surely believe that the Bible is nothing but a literal list of dos and don’ts?

In the end, the dangerous part of all of this is not that any great injustice will be done to the students. They will be able to benefit from any discussion of religion and literature. The truly dangerous part is for the teachers themselves. How long until one of them is sued? It will take only one slip of the tongue or one interpretation, even if it is prefaced as only a possibility, to which someone takes offense.

Religion is still a part of this country for whom many people will suffer no slights. By its own definition, at least within many more literal Southern adherents, religion is not something you discuss, it is something you do. With that in mind, how is it possible to discuss the Bible within a classroom of kids and not have some of them think you are compelling them to do rather than to think?

For an ongoing project, I have been tasked to incorporate OpenID authentication. Along with that, I am also to incorporate authentication through Google, Yahoo, and Facebook credentials. Luckily, all of these services have pretty easy and straightforward ways to accomplish this. There is one problem though. It’s the paradox of choice with a dollop of confusion.

The issue lies in the fact that the authentication is also the registration. In other words, logging in can also be signing up if you don”t already have an account. It’s a nice way to do it to save the users from filling out long forms but it can cause problems.

Primarily, if the user uses Google to authenticate on one trip to the site and then Facebook on a subsequent trip, two accounts will be created because there is no definitive way to tie the two accounts together.

Sure, you could create a user in your system and create a password for them and have them use a standard login on your system for subsequent visits. However, that defeats the purpose of the single sign-on authentication service and just means you are duplicating effort.

I have been banging around for ways to handle this and for now, we’ve gone with user education. We tell the user up front to use the same service for every visit otherwise they may create multiple accounts. We also explain what data we can and cannot retrieve from these services.

The site is not launched yet, but it will be interesting to see what the uptake on all of this is. For me, the easiest to code for has been OpenID because it gives the most flexibility from a system perspective and from the end-user perspective.

I might be one of the few people who has never seen a Segway in person. Just now, I look out my kitchen window and the guy who goes around reading the electric company meters is riding one.

He let me take it for a little spin in the driveway. It is pretty cool and it seems that is job is a perfect one to benefit from the Segway. He can get around to the sides of houses easily and quickly and be on his way.

The Segway still seems a little gimmicky to me, but it is intriguing.

Today, in the shower, I looked up and noticed that my showerhead was made by a company called “Ugenex.” Now, Google tells me that the company is a subsidiary of Jing Mei Industries, but I immediately thought of “eugenics.”

I’m cynical enough to think that most Americans wouldn’t know what “eugenics” was except for a vague memory of having heard it in school before. According to Wikipedia, eugenics is “a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.” Really, “eugenics” was a failed attempt to scientifically justify racism and supposed genetic cleanliness.

It’s a dirty term filled with the same baggage as any other term that tried to justify racism. Eugenics is the faux science that lead to thoughts like “black people are a musical people” or “jews are good with money.” In practice, eugenics is what lead to ideas in Nazi Germany of breeding the super race. The genetic component of racism is the crux of the matter her.

At any rate, I was standing in the shower thinking “why would a company name itself so as to imply such a dark connotation?” In the end, I suppose it was poor translation or just a mistake, but it caused me to pause and wonder how many other folks might have looked up during a shower and thought the same thing.

It seems that the Bush administration’s silence on the killing of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has finally come home to roost.

According to this Al-Jazeera report, an “American expert” on Russian intelligence services, Paul Joyal, who had previously accused the Russian government of culpability in Litvinenko’s death, has been wounded in a shooting outside his home in Washington, D.C.

So, the Bush administration had little to say when the Russians were killing their own operatives, but hopefully, they will have something to say now that American citizens are seemingly targets of the supposedly “newly secretive” Russian intelligence services.

Hasn’t everyone realized now that the Cold War may very well be back on? Doesn’t anyone see that Iraq and Iran, especially Iran, are the battlefields of the newly frigid Cold War?

For some reason, I have found myself watching a lot of the Military Channel lately. It’s mostly because of the show 20th Century Battlefields which uses some cool computer graphics to really explain a particular battle in each show.

However, I wonder why such a channel exists. Why are people interested in hour long detailed explorations of the rifles of the Japanese army? Why would anyone want to sit and watch crane shots of German tanks while a narrator spouts statistics about its capabilities?

It’s war porn and for some reason it is mesmerizing. I suppose because there is so much danger and power in those machines and weapons that they necessarily require our attention. Everything about them is designed to kill other humans and there’s some sort of energy bound up in that.

I wonder if other countries have anything like a Military Channel.