"Rice is the best, the most nutritive and the most widespread staple in the world." - Escoffier

 There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.    Benjamin Franklin

I wonder about the world food supply and the effect of global climate change on agriculture. Our corn harvest in the USA is seriously affected by sustained drought.  About 80 percent of our agricultural land is experiencing drought. I wonder what this will do to the price of milk and eggs. Global climate change is a bread and butter issue. 

I found this press release from the United Nations comforting.

19 November 2012, Rome - Global rice production for 2012 is forecast to outpace consumption in 2012/13, resulting in an upward revision of 5 million tonnes in 2013 closing inventories, according to a new forecast by FAO's  Rice Market Monitor issued today. 

"Compared to last year, world rice carryover stocks are expected to rise by 7 percent, or 10 million tonnes, to a new high of almost 170 tonnes, marking the eighth consecutive year of stock accumulation," says the RMM. "As a result, the world rice stock-to-use ratio is forecast to rise from 33.6 percent in 2012 to 35.5 percent in 2013.

I wonder how many rice farmers in Africa are beautiful women.  I love Rice. So this is good news to me. There certainly is lots to think about. So I am going to keep thinking "aloud" about it and relaying what I find. I am particularly interested in urban farming.

Learn how to cook rice and get rice recipes with pictures and directions for the beginning cook at this this wonderful blog:

Need Sandy help? Look for this sign. - Update !!!! Arson !!!!

Update: Occupy Church torched by arsonist.

A two-alarm fire has severely damaged an Episcopal church in Brooklyn, NY that has been serving  as a storage and distribution hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort, just two days ahead of Christmas. According to CBS News New York, fire department officials say that the blaze was intentionally set.

Guns: written in horror and haste. - with Update

My Father was a hunter and gun enthusiast. He had at least four guns at any given time. He was the kind of Italian guy goes boar hunting in his 60s. He was kind of dotty toward the end there at 83. He managed to get a trophy boar's head and avoid killing people.

I do not own a gun because I am bipolar. I take legal drugs. Drugs legal and illegal are a common thread through all these mass shootings. So is mental illness for which we take ... wait for it ... drugs.

I am open to gun control. We need it here in Philly. But the PoPo and the Suits never go about it in a way that will actually work. I know a way. Bust nobody for drugs, just guns. Offer a reward to anyone who turns in anyone who has a gun and carries. Does not have to be much: a hundred dollars maybe. That will take many violent felons with guns off the streets.

As long as the War on Drugs continues, so will shootings. Don't innocents always get shot in wars? This war is being waged on our streets and in our homes.

Put the money spent on interdicting drugs into mental health facilities and public health. Take a close look at legal psychotropics being freely prescribed to children and others. The legal drug pushers need attention: Merck, Pfizer, Glaxo-Smith-Kline and many more. You know who they are. They push drugs on the TV and not the street corner.

I just went to the funeral of my friend Baby D who was shot by a paranoid drug dealer. A completely senseless death. I miss him every day. Children are being shot on the streets in my city. The children we lost in Connecticut were shot with legal guns. Gun control is needed. Gun killings are only a symptom of a larger problem. If we look only at the guns, we will miss the mark. We have a large group of people in this country who are zealots, armed and into shooting Doctors. Doctors. Violence in our society is about a lot more than guns. For God's sake, stop rewarding the shooters with a public circus.

Stop dithering SCOTUS, POTUS and Congress about the War on Drugs. You started it. We need to end it - as badly as we need to end the war in Afghanistan. Both are a money sinks that provide no discernible benefit that I can see. We are dying out here in America, Bubble Folk. Poverty creates violence too. We need jobs. We need health care. We pay you to fix this shit. You are not doing the job. You are bloviating. This shit is real.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness

Asshats on Parade - Equal Opportunity

I used to be a Knicks fan long ago.  Earl the Pearl was my main man. I warned you I was old. I find politics more exciting than sports now.  And much more important in the grand scheme of things. And a whole lot more bloody.


I assume a certain level of political sophistication in my Readers. Particularly on the issues I write serious stuff about like child abuse and women's civil rights. I provide links to past history associated with today's Asshat Award to help out anyone not obsessively keeping score like me.

Today's Asshat Award is shared equally by an organization (CIA) and the first woman recipient (Karen Handel).

Karen Handel is an obsessed fruitbat. The expression of her obsession destroyed Susan G. Komen for the Cure. 

Ms Handel is now running for the Senate. And the Repubs are going to fund her to the max. Why? She carried water bigtime for their Religious Authoritarian Base and will continue to do so if elected. Have you read the Republican Party platform? Opinion at the first link and the entire platform here at this link.

This must be the Republican method of rebranding and restructuring their message. "Conservatism" will sell. It will. Sure it will.

"Rape is just another form of conception" will sound so dulcet and caring coming from the Lips of Handel instead of the Lips of Mourdock or the Lips of Ryan.

If Handel is preaching in ringing tones . . .

 "And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” - Richard Mourdock

. . . all will be right in this 12 year old girl's world somehow.

And now for the CIA and the Military. I nominated these organizations for the Asshole Award because the Spooks and the Military get too much of our fricking money for the poor quality of the job they have been doing. Don't these people have anything to do besides lying and fucking and then lying about the fucking and fucking up the lying.

Cheyney was not afraid to take down a whole CIA network. We are still hearing about Petraeus and his ride. I could care less about the sex. Petraeus let a person not in his security grade get access to his computer shit. It is like Get Smart. Only without the smart. Asshats.

Heroes of Feminism Series - Introduction to Alice S. Rossi and the Hero Margaret Sanger

Introduction to this Long Book Review of The Feminist Papers by Alice S. Rossi

Alice S. Rossi is a Founder of the National Organization for Women. I had a paperback copy of her book that I bought long ago when it and I were new. A link to her obituary is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/us/08rossi.html?_r=0

My friend Ocean was the inspiration behind this series. I will have Ocean speak for herself. She posted this statement of intent in a comment:

Click Me!

"I've read some great books on the history of the women's rights struggle in the past few years. Apparently, there were a lot of unbelievably stupid women who believed such nonsense as "women aren't interested in voting, because they have their men to do the voting for them." Some of the right-wing female fruitbats (love that term!) today are just as moronic, if not more so, than the anti-suffrage women in the 1850's.

During the summer, I came across a great collection of feminist essays at my public library called THE FEMINIST PAPERS, edited by Alice S. Rossi. I think it's well worth reading some of these essays, if your public library has a copy. Hell, I would seriously encourage ALL girls and women to read some of the great essays this book offers. I think too many women of younger generations have no idea what battles the women in the 19th and early 20th century had to fight to both get the right to vote AND to use contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Reading essays by some of these women, including Margaret Sanger, could help more young women understand that electing an anti-choice candidate would be disastrous for women. As President Obama has said, "we've been there, we've done that, we're NOT going backward, we're going forward."

From:  THE FEMINIST PAPERS, "The Right To One's Body: Margaret Sanger," by Alice S. Rossi, 1973

Quote:

"Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and  political rights have limited meaning for women.  If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives during the long period from age twelve to fifty, while they are 'at procreative risk.'  So long as sexual pleasure could not be enjoyed without the anxiety of a possible pregnancy, women seeking wider and more demanding participation in professions or politics really had an either-or choice of marriage or a career, while those who attempted the combination did so with a sense of anxiety that can be anathema to creativity in work.  Sexual abstinence has never been a banner that could attract very women or men, even in the nineteenth century, much less the twentieth.

As perhaps the greatest champion of woman's freedom to control her own life and body, Margaret Sanger has a central place in any overview of feminist history and thought.  From the first issue of her magazine, Woman Rebel, in March 1914, to the financial and organizational support she gave to research in hormonal anovulants in the post-World War II period, her life was dedicated to a passionate single-minded commitment to bring the best birth-control methods to ever larger numbers of women around the world. . . .

Sanger's vision was not narrowly focused on the dissemination of birth-control devices.  She believed that the whole modern movement toward new sex ideas was bound to be challenged by the conservative forces of society.  In her view, sex morals for women had been one-sided, purely negative, inhibitory, and repressive, 'fixed by agencies which have sought to keep women enslaved; which have been determined ... to use woman solely as an asset to the church, the state and the man.'  [Sanger 1920]"

Ocean - Editor's Note: Because the original introduction to Margaret Sanger's essay is quite long, I thought it would be more helpful to readers to quote what I believe to be the most important points.  Anyone who would like to read the entire introduction can read it in THE FEMINIST PAPERS, if it can be found at the reader's public library or online.

"My Fight For Birth Control," by Margaret Sanger, 1931

Quote:

    "One day a woman by the name of Margaret Whitehurst came to us.  She said that she was the mother of two children and that she had not money to support more.  Her story was a pitiful one -- all lies, of course, but the government acts that way.  She asked for our literature and preventives, and received both.  Then she triumphantly went to the District Attorney's office and secured a warrant for the arrest of my sister, Mrs. Ethel Byrne, our interpreter, Miss Fania Mindell, and myself.

    The crusade was actually under way!  It is no exaggeration to call this period in the birth control movement the most stirring period up to that time, perhaps the most stirring of all times, for it was the only period during which we had experienced jail terms, hunger strikes, and intervention by the Chief Executive of the state.  It was the first time that there was any number of widespread, popular demonstrations in our behalf. . . .

    The arrest and raid on the Brooklyn clinic was spectacular.  There was no need of a large force of plain clothes men to drag off a trio of decent, serious women who were testing out a law on a fundamental principle.  My federal arrest, on the contrary, had been assigned to intelligent men.  One had to respect the dignity of their mission; but the New York city officials seem to use tactics suitable only for crooks, bandits and burglars.  We were not surprised at being arrested, the shock and horror of it was that awoman, with a squad of five plain clothes men, conducted the raid and made the arrest.  A woman -- the irony of it!   I refused to close down the clinic, hoping that a court decision would allow us to continue such necessary work.  I was to be disappointed.  Pressure was brought upon the landlord, and we were dispossessed by the law as a 'public nuisance.'  In Holland the clinics were called 'public utilities.'

    When the policewoman entered the clinic with her squad of plain clothes men and announced the arrest of Miss Mindell and myself (Mrs. Byrne was not present at the time and her arrest followed later), the room was crowded to suffocation with women waiting in the outer room.  The police began bullying these mothers, asking them questions, writing down their names in order to subpoena them to testify against us at the trial.  These women, always afraid of trouble which the very presence of a policeman signifies, screamed and cried aloud.  The children on their laps screamed too.  It was like a panic for a few minutes until I walked into the room where they were stampeding and begged them to be quiet and not to get excited.  I assured them that nothing could happen to them, that I was under arrest but they would be allowed to return home in a few minutes.  That quieted them.  The men were blocking the door to prevent anyone from leaving, but I finally persuaded them to allow these women to return to their homes, unmolested through terribly frightened by it all.

    Crowds began to gather outside.  A long line of women with baby carriages and children had been waiting to get into the clinic.  Now the streets were filled, and police had to see that traffic was not blocked.  The patrol wagon came rattling through the streets to our door, and at length Miss Mindell and I took our seats within and were taken to the police station. 

    As I sat in the rear of the car and looked out on that seething mob of humans, I wondered, and asked myself what had gone out of the race.  Something had gone from them which silenced them, made them impotent to defend their rights.  I thought of the suffragists in England, and pictured the results of a similar arrest there.  But as I sat in this mood, the car started to go.  I looked out at the mass and heard a scream.  It came from a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who had just come around the corner preparing to visit the clinic.  She saw the patrol wagon, realized what had happened, left the baby carriage on the walk, rushed through the crowd to the wagon and cried to me:  'Come back!  Come back and save me!'  The woman looked wild.  She ran after the car for a dozen yards or so, when some friends caught her weeping form in their arms and led her back to the sidewalk.  That was the last thing I saw as the Black Maria dashed off to the station. "

One of these days, Grover, you are going to get it. Pow! right in the Pisser.

Dear Sir or Madam: You want to punch Grover Norquist in the dick? I congratulate you. I regret that whitehouse.gov took your petition down.

I would pay money to punch Grover in the dick. I would pay money to watch somebody else punch Grover in the dick. 

Since the government is too stuffy to arrange this or even leave the petition up, I think we could run a raffle. One dollar a ticket. Some lucky ticket holder will get One Punch. 

Think of it. We could pay off a good part of the national debt with the proceeds. Maybe Grover would volunteer. Or we could offer him part of the pot. We cannot kidnap him, tie him up and then punch him in the dick. That would be wrong. So wrong. 

It would be incredibly patriotic for Grover to volunteer. And he does care about the national debt so. Might even be the best sex he has had lately.  He has that look.  Beat me, Daddy, eight to the bar. Apology to Mrs. Grover, if any.

I wonder if the petitioner was a little whacked when creating the petition because there is a typo. One would not want to leave a typo on a petition. Well, I would not. I used to be a typesetter. Old habits die hard. This petition is even better than the petitions I talked about here.  Who knew the White House petition site was going to be such fun.

More from Dood Abides. Yes, I am a Fan.

I feel just like Abigael feels. Tired down to the ground. I cannot wait for election day to be over. Dood Abides to the rescue. LOL. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/04/1155261/-Yes-Abigael-there-is-a-Bronco-Bama

Occupy Sandy Feeds and emPowers New York City

Volunteers from Occupy Sandy and other community organizations are running a massive humanitarian aid effort in New York City. Some say they are doing a better job than the Red Cross. Details at the link below:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/02/1154537/-AMAZING-Occupy-Wall-Street-Leading-Massive-Volunteer-Powered-Recovery-Efforts-in-New-York

If you cannot get to NYC or New Jersey to volunteer in the flesh and ride bikes to power, you can donate to help care for the Folks in need at the link below:

https://www.wepay.com/donations/occupy-sandy-cleanup-volunteers

http://www.nynatives.com/content/thankfulness-occupy-wall-street-bikes-power-lower-east-side