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lwfern's Journal
From http://www.pennyexperiment.com/i-just-boug... / I still find it hard to believe that I did this. Lucky Supermarket was having a cereal promotion this week (still good until Tues) where if you buy 4 boxes of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks, Corn Pops, Fruit Loops and Corn Flakes, each box is $1.39 or $5.56 for all four. I had a lot of left over Blinkie coupons for $0.70 off 1 box of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks, Corn Pops or Fruit Loops. I also had a ton of $1.00 off 2 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes coupons (one reader asked how she could help and I said I could always use cereal coupons and she sent me loads). I did the first transaction as 4 Fruit Loops using four $0.70 off of 1 coupons. This brought the price down from $5.56 to $2.76. I paid this out of pocket, but received a $3.00 catalina coupon (the ones that come out of the register) for my next purchase. (snip) I didn’t have a chance to take photos of everything because I had to house sit tonight and was running late, but here are some of the boxes in the dining room and my room (there are more in other rooms):  I will spend next week driving these to the local food banks in my area (It took 5 carloads to get it all home) and these boxes of cereal will be added to the Penny Experiment food purchased master list. Someone pointed me to the penny experiment last month. Jeffrey Strain began with one penny in Nov, 2009 that he picked up on a sidewalk, and is working to turn that into a million dollars in food donations to food banks. Right now he's at $17,379.21. I got inspired by that post and decided to give it a try. In the last three weeks, I've been able to collect/donate $248.06 of food. It cost me $16.81.
 Spc. Brian Bowman grew up in Waveland, Indiana, and graduated from Southmont High School in 2004. He was serving as a medic in the United States Army, based out of Fort Carson, Colorado. Brian was one of four soldiers killed as a result of an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan. He was 24 years old. Brian is survived by his wife of just over two years. January 3, 2010
 Lance Cpl. William T. Richards of Trenton, Georgia, best known as Taylor, is a 2008 graduate of Dade County High School where he stayed under the radar in a positive way by not getting into trouble. But he is certainly remembered as a happy student who connected with his peers as well as the staff. In his leisure time he played in a small blue grass band in the Trenton area. Prior to joining the Marine Corps he was employed at Case’s Ace Hardware in Trenton. He served in the United States Marine Corps and had been in Afghanistan since March of 2010. He leaves behind a wife, Emily and a daughter Kayden, mother, Barbara Pouliot and father Steve Richards. He died at age 20 (yesterday) while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. photo and text from: http://freedomremembered.com/index.php/lan... /
 Dumaw had completed previous tours of duty in Iraq, but this was his first tour in Afghanistan. He had planned to return home in a few months for the birth of his son, due in September. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/jun/...
 "When Russell Madden signed up for the Army two years ago, it was with one purpose – to provide medical care for his son. Four-year-old Parker suffers from cystic fibrosis. “Where he had been working he had no benefits or anything like that,” said Madden’s sister Lindsey Madden, “so he joined because he knew that Parker would always be taken care of no matter what.” Knowing that he was willing to literally put his life on the line so that his son could have a better life,” he said. “I don’t know what more you could do.” While overseas, Madden would use a Webcam to see his family and play guitar for his sons, his sister said. “He made up songs, not real songs, but funny songs, just to make everyone laugh,” Lindsey Madden said. “He was a riot, always singing and dancing.” http://news.cincinnati.com/article/2010062... June 23, 2010
 (2007 photo)  The body of a North Tonawanda soldier killed in battle last weekend is carried across the Tarmac Friday at Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. A group of U.S. Marines transferred the remains of fellow Marine Timothy “Win” Serwinowski. His stepbrother, David Urban, is seen in blue helping to carry the casket. Urban is currently serving with the Air Force in Iraq. (June 25, 2010)
 DiLisio, 20, of Macomb Township, died (May 30) from a single gunshot to the head while patrolling on foot outside his camp in Afghanistan's Helmand province. ... He volunteered for the patrol even though his superior told him he could "take the day off," said Ketelhut, who said she has talked with Delisio's fellow soldier Mark Wold, who was with him when he died and is accompanying his body to Michigan. ... "The family was against this from the beginning," she said. "We fought tooth and nail to keep him here, but he wouldn't stay. He had this drive. He was a fighter with a big heart." ... DiLisio, who graduated from Dakota High School in Macomb Township two years ago, joined the Marines in August 2008. "He wanted to join when he was in high school but no one would sign for him," Ketelhut said.  A Marine carry team carries a transfer case containing the remains of Lance Cpl. Anthony A. Dilisio Tuesday at Dover Air Force Base, Del. http://www.voicenews.com/articles/2010/06/...
About General McChrystal: "In the wake of horrifying news of unintended civilian casualties, in a war where the US is already intensely unpopular, Obama has picked a leader who can be directly linked to the worst images and incidents of prisoner torture and abuse under Bush." http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... "McChrystal ran Task Force 6-26, which became temporarily famous after the killing of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, a boogyman figure cultivated by the US military and media complex. What made TF 6-26 infamous was their activity in Camp Nama, Iraq: torture. Massive, systematic, sustained torture, by special operators, under the supervision of Stanley McChrystal, this deceptively soft-spoken officer. The camp in Baghdad was used almost exclusively for the torture of detainees. The torture went on before, during, and after the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Detainees were killed by their torturers, members of the most elite units in the US armed forces. Almost in celebration of the activity of the camp, placards were hung that said, "No Blood, No Foul," meaning if you don't make them bleed, you can't be charged with the crimes you are committing." http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... ------ To clarify: I am not pissed off that people want him gone. I am pissed off that the board is lit up about him NOW, that people want him gone NOW, not because of his history of obscene human rights abuses and torture, but because he criticized the white house.
(snip)
That was a P-4 ("personal for") Memo from General McChrystal passing along to POTUS (President of the United States) that the phony-baloney story about the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death could not hold up. The memo was sent less than a week after Pat was killed; and when you read it carefully -- if you can understand this bastardized legal-military-publcity-speak -- it says not only that the author had been involved in the concealment of the circumstances, that he had himself participated in the fraud as one of the approving-signatories for a Silver Star award with demonstrably false statements about the incident.
(snip)
Obama has his sights on Pakistan -- nuclear Cambodia, for Vietnam-analogy fans -- and the nomination of McChrystal means that Special Operations will run the show (as they did in the early phases of Vietnam).
(snip)
McChrystal ran Task Force 6-26, which became temporarily famous after the killing of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, a boogyman figure cultivated by the US military and media complex. What made TF 6-26 infamous was their activity in Camp Nama, Iraq: torture. Massive, systematic, sustained torture, by special operators, under the supervision of Stanley McChrystal, this deceptively soft-spoken officer.
The camp in Baghdad was used almost exclusively for the torture of detainees. The torture went on before, during, and after the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Detainees were killed by their torturers, members of the most elite units in the US armed forces. Almost in celebration of the activity of the camp, placards were hung that said, "No Blood, No Foul," meaning if you don't make them bleed, you can't be charged with the crimes you are committing.
(snip)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/mc...
Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution: "for any speech or debate in either House, they {a Senator or Representative} shall not be questioned in any other place."
The historical significance of this: it was the reason the Supreme Court ruled that Mike Gravel could not be prosecuted for entering the classified Pentagon Papers into the Senate Record. (Gravel vs. The United States Government). This was instrumental in letting the public know JFK's illegal involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and was critical in ending the Vietnam War. (It's noteworthy that Gravel did not withhold the information from the American public for the sake of protecting other democrats, no matter how high up they were - he did what was morally right, not what was politically expedient for party reelections.)
The current significance is that we should not be giving a free pass to those in Congress who know about the torture and what had been approved. Whether or not the documents were classified, whether or not they were "sworn to secrecy," Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution provided them with a means of entering this into the Congressional Record. Senators have done it before, and preventing international war crimes is a valid reason for them to have done it again.
For those of you not watching the women's rights group this week, Triana mobilized the DU women to shut down an anti-woman hate site. I don't know if other sites were involved as well, likely so, but while his blog was still up he was posting about DU specifically trying to shut him down. Sample quote from (former) blog: Go to the local women's group office and liquidate it (kill the feminist women there). Wear a dark suit and drive an expensive car (these are more likely not to be suspect). Continue destroying the people who have helped to destroy countless of your fellow Men untill you are killed. Go from women's rights organisation's office to women's rights organisation's office, maybe throw in a few domestic violence shelters and abortion clinics if you wish. DU thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... Thanks, Triana!
Enemy Women, Part 1: Left Behind
When I was discharged from the army, one of the many things I was relieved about was that I would never again, as the lone female in my unit, have to share transportation with the rest of the guys when we were on travel. I would never again have to listen to Howard Stern on the way to work. I wouldn’t have to sit, leaning against the back window staring into space, while the men bonded over classic commentary like this:
I just wanna take that piece of ass body, put tape over her mouth, and do things to her. . And then like, I reach in, I yank out her vocal cords and then she just orally satisfies me by the pool. Oh, she’s totally a mute Kim. And she’s totally nude. . And then I break her legs and position them in the back of her head so that she’s sitting, and they’re permanently fixed like that.
I would never again end up standing in a crowd, waiting for them to give me a ride home, while women line up to have cold water dumped on their tee-shirts, and my co-workers line up to help rate them.
As a woman in the army, I learned not to complain about those things. I watched as a civilian woman was denied a job interview in our office, because the LTC in charge checked her personnel files and found out she’d filed an EEO complaint once. He wanted people that could work as part of a team, not trouble-makers. I nodded in sympathy when he explained this. I could have spoken up; I could have made a stand and any of those particular things would have been dealt with. But I also knew if I did that, the attention would be directed at me instead of those other women. Men have a way of knowing how to yank out a woman’s vocal cords without ever having to touch her.
Interaction and Inaction
Not so long ago, there was a blog post circulating around the internet, which began:
Memorandum for Record: Military Spending Concerns
FROM: SPC Freeman, Milo; US Army, Iraq
TO: Senate Democrats, Republicans, and “American Idol” viewers across the nation.
1. You. Punk. Ass. Pantywaisted. Bitches.
It continued on with a fine anti-war rant intermingled with a bunch of stupidity about congress finding their testicles. It traveled around various lefty sites, and landed in an anti-war forum that I visit. An equally irate rant appeared from my keyboard echoing the language in the original essay, beginning with:
At the risk of pissing off every member of the peace movement, who apparently are all unanimously embracing this post at the moment, let me just say that as a “pantywaisted bitch” who has been searching for my testicles for decades now without any luck, I am not going to be following suit here …
One of the responses, from an anti-war activist whom I personally know:
Audrey, and all feminists who would wish to have everyone be politically correct when voicing their opinions on (this) group. Get a fucking grip! This isn’t about you! or your pantywaistes. Your acting like little bitches! . In fact to see (it) on this group makes me want to puke. .So stop being a pantywaiste bitch and get over it.
... Continued at: http://stangoff.com/?p=523 This grew out of a post I originally made here, How Women Activists Are Silenced, so there's some repetition of themes. The comments I quote, with the exception of the Stern comments, all occurred in June, after I posted the initial rant.
... Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent - her attackers not only verbally assaulting her ("fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat") but also posting photomontages of her on other sites: one with a noose next to her head and another depicting her screaming with a thong covering her face. Since she wrote about the abuse on her website, the harassment has increased. "People are posting all my private data online everywhere - social-security number, and home address - a retaliation for speaking out."
While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world - cat-calls, for instance, or being "rated" on our looks. It's all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web - the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.
(snip)
Jill Filipovic, a 23-year-old law student who also writes on the popular blog, Feministe, recently had some photographs of her uploaded and subjected to abusive comments on an online forum for students in New York. "The people who were posting comments about me were speculating as to how many abortions I've had, and they talked about 'hate-fucking' me," says Filipovic. "I don't think a man would get that; the harassment of women is far more sexualised - men may be told that they're idiots, but they aren't called 'whores'."
(snip)
One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was "posing" so as to "make breasts as obvious as possible". The post, titled "Let's take a closer look at those breasts," ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn't possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have "worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too". All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/stor... The emails began, the countless pages of hate accrued beneath the mail slot. The death threats mounted, the graphic descriptions of what they would do to me when they found me continued to escalate. I tried to call for help but everyone kept telling me that the locks on the door were secure and that there was nothing to be done for me.
But the thing is that I didn’t feel secure and the locks didn’t feel safe and I knew that it would only take one of them to get through the door. Despite everyone telling me that the screaming men were harmless THEY were saying that they weren’t harmless. And who you gonna believe? The man who is holding the snarling dog at bay? Who is telling you that he’s actually a pussycat? Or the snarling dog who is snapping at your legs and threatening to rip your throat out if it gets loose?
I believed the dog.
It was only after the death threats reached a level that began to involve my children that I finally balked. I could no longer hear the gentle scratching of the other women writing in their own books, all I could hear was the screaming and violence outside this small space. The violence that I desperately wanted to shield the others from. http://bitingbeaver.blogspot.com / Both of these predate the recent issue with Cindy Sheehan. I saw Ann Wright speak last night. She said Cindy was also getting these sorts of emails - the kind that are reminiscent in tone of lynchings - those that not only disagree with her position, but spew misogynistic hate speech and threats at her. Every day, her inbox was flooded with these. Her friends had convinced her to stop reading her mail. There was a woman at the event last night passing out fliers to women, trying to get women to run for office. I handed mine back, with the "you must be ought of your mind" look that I suck at hiding. There is a special kind of hatred reserved for women who speak out. It's ugly to witness on DU, and I witness it every day here - as I do on nearly every blog I visit, with a few notable exceptions - and it doesn't matter whether those blogs are political in nature, or tied to graphic design ... it just doesn't matter. It targets women who are republicans, who are democrats, who are spouses, and pundits and independents. It ties hatred to every aspect of their physical female bodies, from Laura Bush to Janet Reno to Chelsea Clinton to Ann Coulter. We hold up men who are long time civil rights leaders as heroes, persistent enduring never tiring heroes who are always at the forefront of the struggle, and we embrace them. I have seen threads here canonizing men who made their fortunes specifically from the degradation and exploitation of women. And when women speak out, they are allowed their 15 minutes of fame, MAYBE, or maybe not, maybe they hold a sign at a protest for 5 minutes, and then they are accused of being a whore - and their sexuality is attacked - and I am not even talking about Cindy Sheehan here. What I'm getting at is that Cindy Sheehan is not unique. This is part of a system, and it's a system that encourages men AND women, on all sides of the political fences, to attack women AS women, to threaten them, to demean them AS women, in order to get them to shut the hell up. The abuse that Cindy has put up with - and I'm going to call it abuse, because it goes beyond "criticism" into flat out vile sexist abuse and threats designed to terrorize women who speak out - is rampant, is consistent with women's experiences once their voice starts to be heard, and is tolerated as "normal" - as a normal part of political discourse. For every woman like Cindy who is silenced - even temporarily, as I hope it will be - there are a hundred other women, maybe more, who are silenced, who won't run for office, who will avoid the spotlight, because they don't want to hear the nonstop sexist bullshit hatred and threats that comes with the territory.
All of these photos are from today, the first two standing in the same spot, but turning 180 degrees. Before I post these, I'm going to quote part of undergroundpanther's thread: Core Principles Of The Democratic Party:
5. Natural resources of our country and the world are held by individuals and institutions, public or private, in stewardship. As a democratic society, we must conserve and maintain the natural environment as a sacred trust owed to those now living and those to follow.
conservatisms CORE principles:
#4 Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
Basically this says, If you own it, you can do whatever you want with it. Other people who don't own it have no say in what you do with your property, lest their objections interfere with owners' or plunderers' property owners "freedom." http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... When we bought our house, the entire lawn looked like this:  Piece by piece, we are converting it to this:  That doesn't show the vegetable garden or the fruit trees. This is how the pawpaws I planted look at the moment:  I'm puzzling over which values each of these photos represent. My gut tells me the second and third photos should represent core democratic values - stewardship of the land, restoring it to something that supports the natural ecosystem and grows food locally without chemicals, thereby reducing fuel consumption and destruction of the land. My gut tells me that first photo of the lawn that destroys rather than supports the ecosystem is NOT representative of the core democratic principles. Local government policies tell me I'm wrong. I think I may be technically violating an ordnance with the meadow. Some cities (not mine) have ordnances against growing your own food - which means my pawpaws (also a native plant) are illegal, although a nonnative species like Japanese Maples which are harm the ecosystem by replacing native plants is legal. Something has gone wrong, politically, when communities don't even just rule by benign neglect, allowing everyone their own freedom in maintaining their yards, but actually mandate destruction of the ecosystem, and punish those who are acting as responsible stewards of the natural environment. Something is wrong, politically, when people are outraged at the idea of a meadow on a suburban lot, but don't show an equivalent amount of outrage when a community mandates lawn that are 6 inches tall or less.
The problem with liberalism is that it reinforces white male nationalism, without acknowledging this. So everyone is treated on paper as if they come to the table with identical histories and opportunities, but in reality, they are not equal. Liberalism whitewashes the real world problems of racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism by pretending they aren't existing forms of power. On paper, liberalism says, everyone has equal rights. So we're all good! In reality, we don't all have equal rights and opportunities. Look at what a black woman makes, on average, compared to what a white man makes.
The further left my friends are, the more offended they are when someone refers to them as a liberal.
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