Wednesday, January 30, 2013

more on guns


PRI's The World reported today that the NRA was arguing to keep gun laws as they are in this nation by using Switzerland as an example of "unlimited" gun ownership.  The World did a good job at interviewing a Swiss man who actually was a victim of gun violence in Switzerland. They did not dwell on that, and he did a great job at pointing out the historical differences between how the two cultures view guns and come to own them.  Unfortunately I can't find a link to the interview. 
Of course I had to comment on it:


Hi, I can’t find the story to leave a comment, so figured I’d send it to you:

I enjoyed your story on how the Swiss own and use guns.

As to the NRA’s comparison of American gun culture to the Swiss one, I can only paraphrase:

America, I visit Switzerland every year. I’ve known Switzerland since I was a kid. Members of my family live in and some are buried in Switzerland. America, you’re no Switzerland.

The two cultures are so different that arguing for unlimited gun ownership on that basis is beyond ridiculous. The arguments put forth by the NRA against any background check of anything and anyone seem emptier as minutes tick by. Unfortunately, their lobby is too powerful, so we will go on our “shoot ‘em up” merry way no matter how many hearings the senate conducts. It’s just who we are... for now.

Sincerely,
...

Addendum: next day: ...shootings yesterday, more shootings today in America; this time in a middle school.  Like I said in my previous blog entry about guns, it seems to be a daily occurrence lately.  And I am just talking about shootings reported in the news, the ones that happen on top of a background of unreported gang shootings which we just take for granted.  Nothing like this happens in Switzerland. Whatever their faults, and the Swiss are not faultless, shooting people and kids daily is not one of them.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

It's the Culture, Stupid



Gun violence in America…  What can be said?  Honestly, not much.  It’s too complicated, intractable, and at this point in history, moot.  Some countries can deal with their guns, but their ability to do so is cultural; our culture just can’t do it.  And there is no changing this culture.  You can’t even get Americans to accept the perfectly reasonable metric system, much less grow a healthy gun culture.


Yesterday, I forwarded some incredible pictures about other parts of the world to a couple of friends.  To one I prefaced the email with “some unbelievable pictures from parts of the world that defy my comprehension”.  A lot of the pictures involved what I can only describe as over-population: lots of people per square meter of space.  One of the friends I sent them to, knowing how I can rant and rave about the stupidity of the masses, responded by telling me that I was lucky to live in what I often think of as “this little-populated hell hole” because otherwise I would explode….  I had to concur that there could be worse places to live in…


… And because it was late, and there had been another bloody shooting in America, the word “explosion” prompted this:

 ... speaking of exploding: what's with all these fucking shootings in america--- these fucking cowards gotta go spend time in some of these places... I can't believe it lately, it's like a sick joke: every day some fucked up person shoots people for no reason... was in the studio today listening to the news of one more shooting and I truly started believing god existed and was just "having a good time”--- it's the kind of shit a God would think of as a joke...  ok, I'll stop babbling- I'm only making sense in some very weird alternate universe... it's late and I should be in bed...

So yeah, every day, some sick joke…  This morning, I wake up to find out that the joke has become nuanced.   I woke up to the news that yesterday’s shooting in Texas resulted from the altercation between two people.  Both were gravely injured, as well as, a bystander maintenance person at the college where it happened…  The nuance is that the reporter made it sound like this shooting was ok because these two people actually were having an argument, unlike in the spate of shootings we have been having, where the targets were chosen randomly. 

Y…eeee…sss ...an argument can be made for this shooting being different in kind from some of the many others… And mmm…aay…bee .... in some very weird abstract moral scale, random shootings are more reprehensible than “shootings for a reason”....  But let’s get real here, these two guys (I assume they were guys) were having an argument in a college: a place purported to deliver higher education, though, like whatever argument they were having, that is entirely debatable....   But what kind of argument could have possibly engendered such violence?

“You asshole, Popper is right!”
“Fuck you it’s Wittgenstein all the way!  Take this!” Pop, Pop

Ok, I would venture that the argument was not over two dead Austrian philosophers who hated each other.   But when the fuck is it alright to pull a gun and shoot another person during an argument, whatever it might be about, in a public space, in a supposedly civilized country?! 

Seriously, the, what to my ears sounded like a, most cavalier attitude displayed by the NPR reporter towards this “reasonable” shooting … and here I interrupt to stress NPR, a most liberal of stations, making the reporter’s attitude even more perplexing… Anyway, the NPR reporter’s cavalier (or maybe she was just relieved, because disagreements are "easier" to comprehend than random violence) attitude this morning just further confirmed that something is seriously amiss in the good ol’ US of A.  

Like I said: intractable and moot.


Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Yogurt and Plastic



Recently I have started making my own yogurt.  “Why?” one might ask, as my husband did, twice, recently.   Not because I am the clichéd “granola eating”, wholesome, Luddite, vegetarian zealot type.   And not because it is cheaper either.  I use organic milk, which tastes like something, as opposed to the one not labeled “organic”, which tastes like nothing.  It is more expensive.  Add to that the energy it takes to make, and I doubt that my yogurt is cheaper than store bought; but I confess to not having done the math.    Better tasting or not, I really buy the organic milk in the hopes that the “organic” cows are treated more humanely than the industry standard.  Hope does spring eternal, and I pay for it.

One day I was half-listening to the news on the radio when I half-heard a report about the consequences of America’s new infatuation with Greek yogurt.  In order to thicken Greek yogurt, one needs to strain the whey off of it, and it takes 3 gallons of milk to yield 1 gallon of Greek yogurt.  In order to feed America’s appetite for it, I can’t even imagine how many 1,000’s of gallons of whey are being produced that need to be disposed of (!)   Apparently, the whey from yogurt does not have enough protein to be used effectively in animal feed, so disposal is indeed a problem.  In such quantities, it is not a food, it is a pollutant, and its dumping in waterways would result in fish kills.  Again, holding to the idea that hope springs eternal, I choose to believe that American Industry, unlike that in other parts of the world, is acting scrupulously when it comes to disposing of such waste. That day, I stopped buying Greek yogurt.

Last Sunday, my husband saw me making one more batch of yogurt; and having forgotten the answer I gave him the first time, he again asked why I had chosen to start making it.  I love yogurt and eat it every day.  And after the report I heard on Greek yogurt, I started thinking of the hundreds of plastic containers of yogurt I have bought over the years: one or two big containers a week.  That’s a lot of plastic.  I decided to make my own yogurt in order to stop buying plastic containers, at least where yogurt is concerned.  You see, I think of the dead plastic zones in the middle of our oceans all-too-often, and it hurts me to think of all the wild-life that dies as a result. 

I explained my reasons to my economist husband, and he smiled that “you must be kidding/are you nuts” economist smile of his; a smile prompted by reasoning that as an economics degree wielding wife of an economist I fully understand.  In the big scheme of things, my stopping to buy 80 or so plastic containers a year puts no dent whatsoever on human plastic waste, and barely puts a dent on my own consumption of plastic.  The plastic continents in the middle of our oceans will keep growing whether or not I stop consuming plastic yogurt tubs.  When The Ranting Economist looks at me with that cost/benefit analysis smile of his, I bring out the econ jargon and tell him that “I derive utility from not consuming plastic tubs with my yogurt. I am getting benefits exceeding my costs, even if I'm not making a marginal bit difference.”  Hey, there’s just no arguing with “Because I feel like it.”

Last week, on that same Sunday, we went shopping at WholeFoods.  We go there because they claim their meat is humanely raised; and yes, that impacts the utility I derive from eating meat.  I don’t love Whole Foods, in fact, I mostly dislike it.  The produce, like most produce in America, looks tired, limp and dead; whether their fruit will taste good when you try it at home is a crapshoot; and finally, things are too expensive and I am sure too much of it ends up in the trash. The place is just too big and just too corporate to merit the name “Whole”; but it has good, tasty, and hopefully humanely treated meat, so we shop there for it.   What struck me last week as I first walked in, other than the usual unappetizing exhaust blast of cooked fish cum rotting food smell that overwhelms one as one walks into the place, was the sheer amount of plastic enveloping EVERYTHING.  For one of those weird super clear moments one gets every once in a while, I was overwhelmed by all that plastic and felt paralyzed.  Whole Foods is supposedly the food industry’s answer to the food industry’s abuse of the environment, and at that moment, that felt like a cruel joke.  But soon the “little shopper” in me took over, my moment of clarity dimmed, and my paralysis cleared; I was off and running.

I am a 21st century American capitalist pig; or what the art critical establishment calls “neo liberal” these days.  I do go to the supermarket and I do buy the plastic enveloped food they dish out, I even shop at (horrors!) Wal-Mart.  And whether I spend time thinking about the destruction of the planet or not, I am surely helping to destroy it just like the next guy.  I know I do have some choices and could mostly limit myself to buying locally.  I sometimes do; but it is costly and inconvenient, the food isn’t that good, and even the local guys hand you the food in plastic bags.  I do often wish we would go back to the days when things came wrapped in paper and in glass containers; but I know glass is heavy, and transport costs affect food costs.  But when I think of such costs, I do wonder about how much we, as a species, actually value our planet; and the evidence seems to point to “not that much”...  Or maybe it is futile to think of “we as a species”…

 …Heck, I’ll just keep making yogurt.



quote of the (to)day

Peter Plagens, AIA Jan 2013

Tuesday, January 1, 2013