Claire at Feministe asks an interesting question- Is such a thing as a feminist population policy possible?

My short answer is yes, but only so far as educating and providing work opportunities as well as voluntary methods of birth control work together to make women choose to have fewer children. Notice the word choose.

I hear from a lot of well-meaning quasi-progressives who are worried about overpopulation. Almost exclusively they mean too many brown people in poor parts of the world. But a family of 8 in a third world country uses less resources than a family of 4 in this one. Hell, my poor family of 2 uses half what the average American family of the same size uses. Amazing what poverty does for your carbon footprint score.

But I don’t actually think we have an overpopulation problem. I think it’s a red herring of an argument. What we have is a resource distribution problem. Canada is not overpopulated. Europe is depopulating. The only reason America isn’t facing problems with a dropping replacement rate is because of immigration. And immigration, since the very earliest humans, has been our way of dealing with societies who have gone over their carrying capacity (along with war and new technologies, the first diminishes population and the second expands carrying capacity by increasing productivity). We have scientific proof the the first humans walked out of Africa in search of a better life and managed to spread themselves literally around the globe, not in one fell swoop but in groups over tens of thousands of years.

The crisis (or crises) we are facing right now won’t be solved by the immediate forcible sterilization of every woman of child bearing age ( or every brown person in India). We have a petroleum based society that is at carrying capacity coupled with the devastating weather patterns brought on by global warming (which happens to be caused by our petroleum economy). There is only one solution to both those problems, and fewer babies ain’t gonna change the weather anytime soon.

New technologies might though. The faster we can get ourselves off the gasoline standard, the better. And replacing it with some other non-renewable, global warming causing technology just shifts the problem slightly.

Kid and I hiked up to the local Death Apple (our fond pet name for the local grocery store) this morning. We’ve been shopping there so long that even the produce guy knows us.

First lucky news of the day- I found 5 bucks on the ground. I asked the guy standing closest to it if it was his, then asked the deli people if they saw someone drop it. Nope. Since claiming a random 5 bucks is really hard to do, I kept it. Hey, at least I tried to give it back.

Then for about $35 bucks plus the dregs of my fridge, I think I managed to come up with about 6 days worth of dinners. Not bad. Not bad at all. Of course this means nearly another week straight of eating pork roast, leftover porkroast, and fried rice made with leftover pork roast. But wevs. It’s food.

And my favorite clerk, June, was working. I love her. She’s been there forever and she probably knows more about my family life than anyone else. She’s watched the Kid grow up and tells me how his sweetness reminds her of her own grown up son.

Today we were talking about the mayor’s new 20 cent grocery bag charge. Starting in January, people who don’t bring their own bags will have to pay for each plastic bag they use. Now I am pretty good about bringing my own bags, mostly because I have fancy nylon bags I got for a buck each in Paris that stuff into tiny packs. I can carry 3 in my purse easy. But Kid never remembers to bring a bag. Those 20 cent charges are going to kick our ass.

The thing is, the bag plan was rushed (and I mean RUSHED- like 2 months or less) into law. Meanwhile, there is no work, homelessness is rising, food and fuel costs are crippling, food banks and shelters are stretched way beyond their normal overburdened capacity. No one is rushing through any programs for that though. The mayor is spending all his time getting restaurants to eliminate transfats, busting nightclubs for being nightclubby, and finding ways to make buying groceries more painful.

Sweet.

This is what comes from having fauxgressives in power. A whole lot of hot air blown into places that won’t keep the people sleeping on the street warm at night.

Pink shoes

This is a pink boot shaped money box 🙂 I would SO wear those fucking boots 😀

From Ouyangdan comes this little meme.

Who are the famous people you would put on your free pass list if you have a significant other (or if you are a confirmed singleton- who make for fantasy drool fodder)?

We’ve become excessive Doctor Who fans in the Royal compound, so the first two should come as no surprise.

1) David Tennant (aka The Doctor) cause he’s known around the set as “David 10 inch” uhm and he is absolutely filthy minded. Video is short but prolly not work safe.

2) Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper. She fights aliens and keeps Capt. Jack from becoming a complete blow hard.

3) Clive Owen- nuff said. (And this ends our lovely tour of the UK. Sorry to leave you out, Ireland)

4) Joe Wilson AND Valerie Plame. A diplomat and a spy. Both super smart and super hot. Get me to the fainting couch!

5) Javier Bardem, who has the best facial profile in the history of the world. Even as a scary murderer with a really bad haircut in No Country For Old men, I loved him.

6) Lisa Ray and John Abraham (separately). Both took major risks to appear in Deepa Mehta’s film Water and both are so insanely beautiful to look at on screen that I found it hard to blink.

Oh there are many many more and the list changes all the time (though Javier and Clive have been rocking it for a very very long time.) But this will have to do for now.

I’ve shown you mine, now you have to show me yours.

The Kid and I have gotten hooked on the Sarah Jane Adventures after running through all of Doctor Who.

When I told (13 year old male) Kid the Sarah Jane started out as a feminist (and still is) he whooped and hollered like I just told him summer vacation had been extended till Christmas.

That’s my kid.

(BTW- the Sarah Jane Adventures are very much a kids show- but as far as kids shows go, this is the only one that hasn’t made me want to tear out my eyeballs and puncture my eardrums. )

I’m in the donut hole of a major depressive episode. Sorry kids, but writing through this kind of fog is difficult. So posting will be sporadic at best.

In the mean time- Glen Greenwald is talking about Blue Dog Dems (or DINOs) and how for the first time ever congress is less popular with the party that elected it than it is with the minority party.

Huhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I wonder why that is (No, actually I don’t).

In 2000, Naderites warned about the two parties becoming so alike as to eliminate any real choice between them. I think they were wrong in 2000, but I think they are dead right now. I look at my current available choices for president and I don’t see either McCain or Obama as people who will do a single damn thing to improve my life, my child’s life, or the lives of my friends and neighbors. I look at my choices for governor and I see the same thing.

I don’t know what it will take to wake the Dems up from this Republican-lite zombie state. But I am a parent, and I know that rewarding bad behavior encourages bad behavior. Voting for either McCain or Obama would be like giving my kid a video game for not cleaning his room because at least he didn’t make it more messy.

We voters are the parents of this country. It is our responsibility to set it back on the right path when it has gone wrong and to reward it when it has gone right. We forget that sometimes. We get so caught up in the competition and the arguing between each other (like moms and dads on the verge of divorce) that our neglected child goes off and does things like break the constitution or steal candy from all the other kids in the UN sandbox.

It is time for some tough love for our politicians. No money, no votes until they get back in line and do what they are told. Both the major parties are acting like spoilt children who know their overworked, overstressed, underpaid parents haven’t got the willpower to deal with their screaming fits at the end of the day. Little Georgie has been bullying everyone. Little Barry want to spy on everyone and has been picking on all the girls. Little Johnie obviously hasn’t been studying his geography.

While I am generally not one for corporal punishment, the entire government needs a solid spanking and a time out, and November is the only time any of us overburdened parents will have the chance to do something about these belligerent children.

Perhaps what we really need is the Supernanny

The ruined remains of Chernobyl have become a source of several
environmental mysteries. Rapid adaptation of rodents, the swift return of nature
and now extremely happy fungi that seem to be feeding on waste
radiation.

According to the research of some folks at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine, Cryptococcus neoformans is converting radiation into fuel. This could
mean that fungus is the solution to two of our greatest environmental problems,
lack of fuel and too much radioactive waste.

All we need to do is surround our nuclear waste with this radiation-eating
fungus and then harvest it every once in a while to produce some kind of
bio-fuel. I doubt we have enough radioactive waste to feed enough fungus to run
America’s automobile fleet, but that’s hardly something to complain about. It
looks like melanin (the same melanin found in human skin) plays the roll of
chlorophyl in this ‘radiosynthesis.’ After taking in the radio waves, the
melanin starts off a reaction that allows the fungus to grow.

The scientists speculate that the fungus could be used for bio-fuel farms in
high-altitude areas with low-light and high-radiation. Or they could be food for
astronauts on long-haul, nuclear-powered missions. In any case, now we know that
life will continue even if the light of the sun disappeared, because fungi in
Chernobyl will continue to eat left-over radiation for centuries. And isn’t that
just the beginning of a wonderful sci-fi novel

.

Hat tip

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/677/

I probably don’t need to explain why this is incredible. The question that follows is:

“yeah, but are they sentient?”

ON a serious note, please consider the idea of mushrooms that eat nuclear waste. Petrol dependency? What petrol dependency?

When things are really bad, like now, this sort of cloudiness comes over me. I go from insomnia caused by worry and fear to hypersomnia, or over sleeping. It’s nicer in dreams than it is awake. I’d rather be in my head than out of it, and sleep is one of the best excuses for not coming out into the world.

I once had a therapist who thoroughly didn’t get this. She thought that spending so much time in my head might actually be a good thing for someone who wants to write. But it’s the opposite really. Writing takes a kind of defenseless honesty, and this fugue is neither defenseless nor honest. It’s the brain’s reaction to continuing hopelessness. When there is nothing to hope for and no way to change circumstances, my brain fights back by creating perfect worlds inside itself where I can get lost. Perfect worlds don’t make for compelling fiction. There is no conflict. That’s the point. Peace.

In my head is the perfect house. I can tell you every detail, from the worn silver gray of the wood floors to the most useful arrangement of the kitchen cabinets. The house itself is walled off from the rest of the world by the tall bushes in the garden, safe and private and free from the noise and distractions of neighbors and landlords who want their rent money. The phone doesn’t ring with bill collectors. The fridge is actually full of food, something that hasn’t happened since last Thanksgiving. In real life I dream of filling up the fridge, then worry that as soon as I did the power company would shut us off again and a month’s worth of groceries would be lost.

Sometimes I get tired of the house and instead I go adventuring. In my head I have gone to Florence and Greece and Barcelona and Buenos Aires. I become obsessive in packing strategies (not that different from real life actually) but I plan out the perfect travel wardrobe. I imagine being able to stretch out in first class on airplanes and walking among 3000 year old ruins in shoes that never hurt.