5/20/10

Poop in the Food: A Rallying Cry For Regulation

Listen, people. I know the government has done a lot of bad things. There was the war in Iraq, and all the bombings of civilians in Afghanistan, and I'm not too happy about the way the Obama administration is handling the Gulf oil spill...Let the scientists do it, Mr. President...

But this Rand Paul guy scares me, and it scares me that people agree with him enough that he was able to win the primary in Kentucky. For one thing, he has a man working as his campaign manager who's a truther, which means he thinks the government had something to do with 9/11, and now he's saying private companies have the right to deny service to people because of the color of their skin. What jackass. Sounds of racism to me. But what really gets my goat is his anti-governmentism. All of the steps forward we have taken in this country are under threat, if this guy gets elected. The government, which some people deem wasteful and bloated and filled with too many regulations, will become a shell of itself, with little power to do the things it needs to do, which is to help keep people safe and to serve as a force to balance out the corporate greed that permeates. And this is why it bothers me...

There has been poop in our food.

Let's think about that for a second...

Our food supply has been plagued with numerous E. coli outbreaks. E. coli, more or less, is fecal matter. Fecal matter is poop. People in America have eaten poop. When that happens, it's not the producers of the food who come forward with this information. No, it's the FDA. The FDA discovers the problem and issues a recall... How would this have played out if there was no FDA?

In a court battle, that would have lasted years and bankrupted the plaintiff. The food companies would say the E. coli wasn't from them, they'd say something else caused the defendant's illness, and motions would have been filed out the wazoo. Meanwhile, more people would be getting sick. Who even knows what the long-term effects of E. Coli would be?

Luckily, we do have the FDA, and we do have other federal government agencies looking out for our best interest. They're not perfect, but they do what they can. We need more regulation, not less. That should be apparent to anyone paying attention. More regulation of the food supply, of our water supply, of Wall Street, and of campaign finance. Why don't people see it? I don't know. All I do know is that one thought comes to mind when Rand Paul and others talk about less government, and how we should trust the free market and the private sector: There has been poop in our food, and that is unacceptable.

5/16/10

Koan Four

If I have a thought, and decide I want to stop thinking that thought, then who or what -- or why -- caused me to have that thought in the first place, and how can I have that thought and want to not have that thought at the same time?

Koan Three

Even the most thunderous steps I take is mere background noise in the lives of others.

Koan Two

The tragedy of the red ant is that they suffer without knowing why; the blessing of the red ant is that they suffer without needing to know why.

Koan One

What is the sound of a television shutting?

5/12/10

I feel a disturbance in the force...




Probably because there's evil nearby...


Yup, Sarah Palin, at Rosemont, just a few miles from home. Blech...Come here to support the GOP governor's candidate...Good luck...

I hope her 15 minutes wears out soon. Have you noticed? She's famous like Paris Hilton. No one really likes her...but she's famous for being famous for being a politician....


Oh, and while we're on the topic of Sarah Palin...She's so nice, that she's actually giving a speech to a non-profit dedicated to special needs kids...not nice enough to do it for free, but nice enough to show up for $100,000...

http://theimmoralminority.blogspot.com/2010/05/somebody-actually-had-to-pay-sarah.html#comment-form

Maybe it's because I'm reading The Fellowship of the Rings...But she kind of reminds me of someone...

5/11/10

Did Ronald Reagan get what he wanted?

Thinking about all of this talk about childhood obesity, I can't help but remember all that talk, when I was a kid, about ketchup as a vegetable. This was way back when Ronald Reagan was president. A good man, practically canonized by members of the right now. But what I remember is that he tried to get the USDA to classify ketchup as a vegetable. Yes, ketchup. That runny red stuff that's most made of sugar. This was the New Federalism! The brilliance of the Right Revolution! Kids would actually eat what they were given, food wouldn't be wasted, and children wouldn't have to eat broccoli, and they'd end up chubby...and then obese...and then their kids would be obese...and then our entire health care system would sag under the heft of all that extra diabetes and heart disease...

In this case, the Democrats prevailed and used shame to get the initiative tossed...At least according to Wikipedia....but I wonder...what about those school meals? Were low-income kids ever really given the chance they deserved?

The bottom line is that Reagan cut funding from the USDA school lunch program...probably to fund a bunch of penis replacement weapon systems...That's how I like to refer to the Star Wars system...

More information...

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2517/did-the-reagan-era-usda-really-classify-ketchup-as-a-vegetable

Under the Bodhi Tree, Metra Style

On my way to work today, I put aside the book I'm reading (The Fellowship of the Rings...meh) and the notebook I keep for my own writings (to which I'm sure Tolkien would say...meh) and I sat meditation, for a few moments. A few breaths after I started, I felt a rush of light fill me...it was wonderful...

Of course...I know it was just the cheap Metra train overheads, but that doesn't make the warmth, energy and comfort it brought me any less significant. After all, isn't that what light is supposed to bring us?

Who knows what depths of understanding of the universe I would have felt...if the guy behind me hadn't been talking to one of his legal clients. Oh, well...tomorrow is another day, another chance for train-riding enlightenment.

5/10/10

change is the only constant...

...so I shouldn't object to the fact that the tags in my previous post were automatically translated into another alphabet....

Wow, some people really suck...

See, this is why I have to believe in kharma...because if I didn't, if I thought people could just behave this way, and joke about someone's cancer because they disagree with them polically, I'd want to cry and give up on being a good person. What's the point when people suck like this?

um....

Does it count as meditation if you spend the whole time thinking about how you're meditating?

5/9/10

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Happy Mother's Day.

So three times today I nearly burst into tears. I love my mom so much. She did everything for my sister and me. I hope she knew how great of a mom she was. I was such a brat. Always telling her I hated her when I was a teenager. I'd storm into my bedroom, stomping on those stairs as hard as I could, and then slam the door. I sucked. And the last time we spoke...well, that's reason I cried once today. Not that I told her I hated her. But I rushed off the phone. She was giving me a hard time about a pair of denim capri pants. Denim capri pants can be awesome, mom. And then, a few weeks later...heart attack.

Tried not to get bitter today. Allowed myself to be sad, and jealous of my BF, whose momma is still alive, and who we're living with while he's in nursing school. Winced at all the "Buy a Mother's Day gift" ads I got in my email from 1-800-Flowers.com. But then I became immune to it. Today, when I went on FB, I didn't even mind seeing all the Happy Mother's Day messages. Happy Mother's Day indeed.

It's so easy to get jaded when we lose something...You just have to allow yourself to feel all the crazies you're going to feel. I don't know how you do that. Maybe the best thing you can do is not judge yourself for your crazies.

I say you...but I mean me.

5/8/10

Introduction

First of all, sorry to DietGirl and the NPR reporter who used this title first. What a strange confluence it is that I happened to come up with the same title you did. I was in the middle of a Wii Fit exercise when it happened. Well, I was doing a Wii fit exercise and thinking about how I think all the time, and how that's not very good for my brain and how I should stop doing that, and how, probably, if I wanted to stop doing that, I should meditate, and how I've been meaning to start on a course of meditation, and how I've not only wanted to begin meditating but how I've wanted to be a Buddhist, a really good Buddhist, but have stopped myself from jumping in out of a squishiness and all-around American dis-ease with Eastern thought. And then I thought, Open Up and Say Om, and the rest, I hope, will be a pleasant history for all, with the loving kindness of Google and Blogger, and my friends willing to take this journey with me, of course.

Today is an auspicious day to begin this journey. Tomorrow is mother's day, and I've been feeling sort of blue. See, two years ago -- on 10/1/08 -- a day I'll alway remember -- I lost my mom. Mommy I called her, even into my 30's. I miss her, and dealing with a loss like is the kind of thing we really need religion for.

Well, this has been a good start, I think. More tomorrow on my mom. With loving kindness, and the compassion I hope to cultivate, Christine.