Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
They returned the like 460 children that were taken from the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas, part of a Mormon fundamentalist sect (the FLDS church). I have nothing against polygamy or polyamory, so long as there isn't any force or sexual abuse involved. But of course FLDS communities are nothing but a playfield for sexual predators. Basically, if you're a man, you become a sexual abuser. How is it okay for these communities to keep on existing? 13-year-old girls get pregnant b/c they're supposedly spiritually married off to their like 35-year-old uncles. And you know they don't want to have sex with their uncles. Everyone knows about them, why don't we stop them???? Are we really trying to say that religion is so sacred that we have to tolerate so much harm inflicted upon others??
Saturday, May 31, 2008
I read half of Traci Lords' autobiography, the pornstar from like the 80s or so. Basically she had a fucked up childhood, raped at 10 years old by this 16 year old guy she was in love with, sexually molested by a pseudo stepfather but the only adult she could trust. Got pregnant in high school by a boyfriend, who of course turned his back instantly, and had to get an abortion. Thereafter, she essentially got tricked into doing nude modeling because she needed a job to pay for the abortion (she didn't think it was nude at first). Her stepfather didn't bother to tell her the truth of course, and told her basically that everything was good and normal. Vodka and coke lines later, she's a nude model at 15. And since she has no family to turn to or friends, she stays with the porn industry, and eventually gets pressured into softcore and hardcore films. Anyway... Sexual abuse is fucked up... Why do people do it? It boggles my mind...
Oh, and she has a terrible opinion of the porn industry, says everyone has something messed up to say about their private lives. Understandable. But then again I have heard of not so traumatic things from others in the porn industry. So yes... Getting tricked into it is pretty horrific.
And I started my internship with MAPLight, and am working on a few practice bills right now. Conservatives and industry are fucked up. I'm working on this one bill, S-MINER Act of 2007, basically a comprehensive safety bill for miners, focusing especially on coal mines. Industry says, yes we love safety, but the costs are overbearing for business (the penalties and fees for safety oversight by a separate gov't department), so it isn't worth it... It'll be a detriment to the American economy, and we'll have to lay off people. God can't you just make a little less money???????????!!! It's people's lives! The technology is there, so we should use it. More evidence of the fucked up nature of human mentalities.
Basically I'm given a few bills, and I look up all the supporting and opposing organizations for the bill, list them and the source, find out a general sense of what the organization is about, and then write a comment about the bill. It's really fascinating reading some of these things... I'll generalize more after I get through some more bills... I'm tempted to generalize right away about conservative mentality, but I shall hold my tongue.
Oh, and she has a terrible opinion of the porn industry, says everyone has something messed up to say about their private lives. Understandable. But then again I have heard of not so traumatic things from others in the porn industry. So yes... Getting tricked into it is pretty horrific.
And I started my internship with MAPLight, and am working on a few practice bills right now. Conservatives and industry are fucked up. I'm working on this one bill, S-MINER Act of 2007, basically a comprehensive safety bill for miners, focusing especially on coal mines. Industry says, yes we love safety, but the costs are overbearing for business (the penalties and fees for safety oversight by a separate gov't department), so it isn't worth it... It'll be a detriment to the American economy, and we'll have to lay off people. God can't you just make a little less money???????????!!! It's people's lives! The technology is there, so we should use it. More evidence of the fucked up nature of human mentalities.
Basically I'm given a few bills, and I look up all the supporting and opposing organizations for the bill, list them and the source, find out a general sense of what the organization is about, and then write a comment about the bill. It's really fascinating reading some of these things... I'll generalize more after I get through some more bills... I'm tempted to generalize right away about conservative mentality, but I shall hold my tongue.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Hillary and Monsanto
This post is relevant to one of the classes I'm taking this term, Regulation of Chemicals, Radiation & Biotechnology. A blogger did a lot of research on Monsanto and their connection to the Clintons. She is not a scientist, but her research hits a lot of themes that we talked about in class, and my professors certainly share in their disdain of the Clintons.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Interview with Governor Terminator
he talks about taxes and immigration. i think he's pretty right on about both things.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Agriculture Policies Etc
This is mostly in response to Yang's previous post. It's long so I just decided to make a formal entry of it.
I'm taking an Envrion Sci class right now about International agricultural policies. Monsanto apparently has been eating up all the small seed companies, and has been developing transgenic seed lines, such as their corn and canola lines that are resistant to the herbicide that they developed, Roundup. And they put a PATENT on the transgenic seed itself, not just the gene. How do you patent life??? WTf. it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, so a bunch of small farmers have found the transgenic plants in their farms and they don't even want them there, but since they use the herbicide Roundup for their main crop, they spray the weed with it, and it doesn't go away. So Monsanto finds out about it through whatever devilish means, and sues the farmer for having their product in their farm without Monsanto's permission. And of course b/c Monsanto is big and scary with nice rich fat lawyers, they often win. It's completely fucked up.
Plant biotechnology is new, and untested. And it's created for about 99% of the time in the interest of making more profit, so new plant lines are created to be compatible with herbicides, and there's also this terminator gene that makes the new seeds sterile so you have to return to the company to buy new seed every time. Anyway, so a lot of Third World countries (this concept of 3rd World btw, along with the idea of Development itself was conceived at the end of WWII) decide maybe they can improve their economies by improving agriculture, and maybe they can do that by having a Green Revolution (import Monsanto's plant biotechnology). Because Monsanto promises higher crop yields and therefore more profit for the farmer, BUT Only the large landowners who are wealthy can afford the technology package (Synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, seed, etc) and so the average farmer doesn't benefit from it. And the high yield doesn't last, since it erodes the environment, taking out more than the soil is capable of handling basically. I'm not completely clear on the bad effects to the environment, but it's definitely bad for the farmers, and makes people completely dependent on large $$-hungry corporations. So it doesn't have any good intentions, and it's not sustainable, so it isn't good for the long run. Additionally, there used to be like 75,000 different genetic varieties of plant food that humans ate. Today, there are like a few thousand, nowhere near where it used to be. And plant biotech promotes the growth of monocultures, basically just one genetic variety of, say, corn. Lack of genetic diversity is bad because if you have any kind of climate catastrophe, it could wipe out the entire species of corn since there's only one strain of it. So monocultures are vulnerable and don't last long. You need a diverse variety of agriculture to fall back on.
Also, currently because of corporate lobbying, the US government gives its farmers subsidies for using seeds from large corporations such as Monsanto. So when small farms decide to be organic, they are okay in the beginning, but as demand increases, they have a more difficult time competing against larger farms with government subsidies. This explains in part why organic food is more expensive than non-organic foods. And we don't label our genetically-modified foods because of corporate lobbying, and shushing the media, so people aren't really aware of GM foods in our market. But it's found mostly in highly processed foods. The reason supposedly is that if you have a bad allergy to a GM food, and you report it to your doctor, your doctor will have trouble tracing the source of your allergy, and therefore will not be able to create a database (for an allergy to GM food) and therefore the company won't ever get into trouble.
Anyway thats all I have to say.
I'm taking an Envrion Sci class right now about International agricultural policies. Monsanto apparently has been eating up all the small seed companies, and has been developing transgenic seed lines, such as their corn and canola lines that are resistant to the herbicide that they developed, Roundup. And they put a PATENT on the transgenic seed itself, not just the gene. How do you patent life??? WTf. it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, so a bunch of small farmers have found the transgenic plants in their farms and they don't even want them there, but since they use the herbicide Roundup for their main crop, they spray the weed with it, and it doesn't go away. So Monsanto finds out about it through whatever devilish means, and sues the farmer for having their product in their farm without Monsanto's permission. And of course b/c Monsanto is big and scary with nice rich fat lawyers, they often win. It's completely fucked up.
Plant biotechnology is new, and untested. And it's created for about 99% of the time in the interest of making more profit, so new plant lines are created to be compatible with herbicides, and there's also this terminator gene that makes the new seeds sterile so you have to return to the company to buy new seed every time. Anyway, so a lot of Third World countries (this concept of 3rd World btw, along with the idea of Development itself was conceived at the end of WWII) decide maybe they can improve their economies by improving agriculture, and maybe they can do that by having a Green Revolution (import Monsanto's plant biotechnology). Because Monsanto promises higher crop yields and therefore more profit for the farmer, BUT Only the large landowners who are wealthy can afford the technology package (Synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, seed, etc) and so the average farmer doesn't benefit from it. And the high yield doesn't last, since it erodes the environment, taking out more than the soil is capable of handling basically. I'm not completely clear on the bad effects to the environment, but it's definitely bad for the farmers, and makes people completely dependent on large $$-hungry corporations. So it doesn't have any good intentions, and it's not sustainable, so it isn't good for the long run. Additionally, there used to be like 75,000 different genetic varieties of plant food that humans ate. Today, there are like a few thousand, nowhere near where it used to be. And plant biotech promotes the growth of monocultures, basically just one genetic variety of, say, corn. Lack of genetic diversity is bad because if you have any kind of climate catastrophe, it could wipe out the entire species of corn since there's only one strain of it. So monocultures are vulnerable and don't last long. You need a diverse variety of agriculture to fall back on.
Also, currently because of corporate lobbying, the US government gives its farmers subsidies for using seeds from large corporations such as Monsanto. So when small farms decide to be organic, they are okay in the beginning, but as demand increases, they have a more difficult time competing against larger farms with government subsidies. This explains in part why organic food is more expensive than non-organic foods. And we don't label our genetically-modified foods because of corporate lobbying, and shushing the media, so people aren't really aware of GM foods in our market. But it's found mostly in highly processed foods. The reason supposedly is that if you have a bad allergy to a GM food, and you report it to your doctor, your doctor will have trouble tracing the source of your allergy, and therefore will not be able to create a database (for an allergy to GM food) and therefore the company won't ever get into trouble.
Anyway thats all I have to say.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Buy It Like You Mean It
This is a company by MIT alums for consumer empowerment. Our friend Dan Ring works there. And I know the founder and cofounder, too. Whoo
http://www.thoughtandmemory.org/
http://www.thoughtandmemory.org/
Friday, March 7, 2008
Environmental Policy Class
I am in this policy class on Regulation of Chemicals, Radiation, and Biotechnology. It's taught by these two environmental lawyers Ashford and Caldart. Law is really weird, though. I was talking with some people, and we think that laws should be computer programs. Seriously, that is the only way we're going to get it to be less ambiguous and also easier to use. There is this problem right now with law in that it's not easy for engineers since you need really strong verbal skills. I mean, mostly, it takes forever to read everything. So you have these humanities people all writing, enforcing, and challenging the laws and policies, and then you have engineers and problem solvers with common sense.
Law, especially administrative law, is wack.
Law, especially administrative law, is wack.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
AIDS
I saw this flyer yesterday for an AIDS study. It said, "Would you take a pill a day to prevent HIV?" Or something like that. And had a bunch of phone numbers you could rip off to participate in their study. I thought it was kind of a bad idea. You could be taking those pills every day of your life. I just think pharm companies or whatever should not try to make daily pills all the time. It's not the best solution. It just seems like a way they can make a lot more money, and a way to get people to be more dependent on their stuff. Anyway. I guess it's hard to get around for certain drugs. But it seems like you could have a better HIV prevention method. But I guess each problem is different. Oh well! But I just hope they've thought about the other, non-daily methods as well.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
"Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" : A Review
Last night I had the chance to watch a one-woman show about suicide for asian american females. Before the show started I had been expecting some sort of adaption of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," however I have never read the book or watched the movie so I really didn't know what to expect.
The show begins with a Mr. Rogersque opening. Wong walks around the stage in a green cardigan and puts on a pair of shoes, and then begins to talk to the audience. Wong begins a 1-hour monologue with an occasional interlude for some audience participation / heckling to talk about her personal life, her past, and her own dealings with suicide. Half the time the show is a comedy routine with Wong poking fun at race and dropping one liners for laughs. The other half of the show is about why asian american females are killing themselves, and why its impossible we the audience should expect to find an answer by the end of her one hour show.
One of her most poignant anecdotes comes about 3/4 into the show when she begins to point out how few examples there are of asian american women who have survived suicide. On one end of the spectrum she points to celebrities who never had to deal with suicide, and then she begins to detail asian american women who have dealt with severe trauma in one form or another and survived: they are all porn stars. She briefly details the lives of Asia Carrera and Annabelle Chong. The former a piano prodigy who ran away from home to escape abusive parents and would sleep with strangers just to survive. The latter a gang rape survivor who would later pioneer on screen triple penetration and who was cheated out of money she should have been paid for performing one of the first one-day ultra gang bang marathons where she had sex with over 300 men. Wong's dramatic conclusion is that you have no choice but tol be perfect, turn into a porn star, or not live.
At one point in the show she begins to delve into cases of asian american suicide. A profile will flash up on the screen, giving such details as location and reasons associated with the suicide as she begins to monologue what might have been their last thoughts. The second case is about a girl named liz from cambridge, ma who is suffering depression and anxiety from grades and sets herself on fire. To me this is immediately recognizable as Elizabeth Shin from MIT, a girl who committed suicide the summer before I arrived for my freshmen year. After the first 4 cases the profiles on the screen begin to flash by as she races to even just provide names for them. By the end, the case numbers have reached past the tens of thousands. I am not sure most people realized that those were in fact real cases she was detailing.
The most interesting part of the evening came after the show was over. I was talking with four
asian american females who had seen the show, and not a single one had much to say! In contrast, after I had seen the latest harry potter movie every asian american female was up in arms at the way Harry had treated Cho Chang in the movie.
You can find out more about Kristina Wong here:
http://www.kristinawong.com/
http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/
The show begins with a Mr. Rogersque opening. Wong walks around the stage in a green cardigan and puts on a pair of shoes, and then begins to talk to the audience. Wong begins a 1-hour monologue with an occasional interlude for some audience participation / heckling to talk about her personal life, her past, and her own dealings with suicide. Half the time the show is a comedy routine with Wong poking fun at race and dropping one liners for laughs. The other half of the show is about why asian american females are killing themselves, and why its impossible we the audience should expect to find an answer by the end of her one hour show.
One of her most poignant anecdotes comes about 3/4 into the show when she begins to point out how few examples there are of asian american women who have survived suicide. On one end of the spectrum she points to celebrities who never had to deal with suicide, and then she begins to detail asian american women who have dealt with severe trauma in one form or another and survived: they are all porn stars. She briefly details the lives of Asia Carrera and Annabelle Chong. The former a piano prodigy who ran away from home to escape abusive parents and would sleep with strangers just to survive. The latter a gang rape survivor who would later pioneer on screen triple penetration and who was cheated out of money she should have been paid for performing one of the first one-day ultra gang bang marathons where she had sex with over 300 men. Wong's dramatic conclusion is that you have no choice but tol be perfect, turn into a porn star, or not live.
At one point in the show she begins to delve into cases of asian american suicide. A profile will flash up on the screen, giving such details as location and reasons associated with the suicide as she begins to monologue what might have been their last thoughts. The second case is about a girl named liz from cambridge, ma who is suffering depression and anxiety from grades and sets herself on fire. To me this is immediately recognizable as Elizabeth Shin from MIT, a girl who committed suicide the summer before I arrived for my freshmen year. After the first 4 cases the profiles on the screen begin to flash by as she races to even just provide names for them. By the end, the case numbers have reached past the tens of thousands. I am not sure most people realized that those were in fact real cases she was detailing.
The most interesting part of the evening came after the show was over. I was talking with four
asian american females who had seen the show, and not a single one had much to say! In contrast, after I had seen the latest harry potter movie every asian american female was up in arms at the way Harry had treated Cho Chang in the movie.
You can find out more about Kristina Wong here:
http://www.kristinawong.com/
http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/
Monday, September 3, 2007
affirmative action
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118861213090515447.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
this is an interesting article about how backlash to labor union activities brought on affirmative action. that is, labor unions historically supported racial discrimination against chinese and blacks.
this is an interesting article about how backlash to labor union activities brought on affirmative action. that is, labor unions historically supported racial discrimination against chinese and blacks.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
abstinence education
there seems to be some kind of showdown in many states regarding abstinence education and abortion clinics
so i was reading this article
"To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”"
ok, but if tape is humans, then the floor and filing cabinets are sheep and goats and maybe inflatable dolls. then your marriage fails cuz you're not attracted to humans! tape is too promiscuous anyway.
a much better example: magnets! they even have male and female sides.
so i was reading this article
"To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”"
ok, but if tape is humans, then the floor and filing cabinets are sheep and goats and maybe inflatable dolls. then your marriage fails cuz you're not attracted to humans! tape is too promiscuous anyway.
a much better example: magnets! they even have male and female sides.
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