Yet another blog for spewing. This one may end up with a lot of religious and social content.

2010-01-18

Triviata

I want to scream about food, contaminants (additives) and health. I am still seething about the changes they have made to tuna packaging. The tuna "in water" isn't anymore - it's packaged in "water" and "vegetable both" (which contains soy)! I don't know about your reading, but I read water plus "broth" as just "broth", albeit more diluted.

So the food manufacturers adulterate and lie, once again. They also sneakily reduced the can size to 5 ounces, instead of 6. Of course the price didn't go down. They think that no one will notice, or care that they get less tuna adulterated with the 7th most common food allergen - soy - if they don't change the big print on the labels.

They should have to call it Tuna in Soy Broth

If you want tuna without soy, you have to carefully read the labels, and pay much more. Fuck, if you want anything without nasty soy, you have to pay more.

Now some magazine has named fucking Mosnato company of the year? What are they smoking? They want to patent the entire damn food supply, so that they get a cut of every calorie consumed, no life without paying Monsanto. Problem is, their shit is toxic, and is causing a rise in previously rare diseases.

Corporate rule is a fucking scary thing, and unless we start actively fighting it now, we will be slaves to immortal, amoral sociopaths seeking only profit, to be amortized, used and then discarded when we cost more than we can generate in revenue for the corporation. If you don't understand the horror of this, look at the history of Haiti under the French slaveholders.

The Lwa of Vodou and The Devil™

Let me make one thing very, very clear for all you hate filled cretins out there: The Lwa of Vodou are not "The Devil™" of Christianity and Islam. Sorry, that dog doesn't hunt.

Oh, yes, any deity, demigod, helping spirit, angel, etc. that you don't recognize is "The Devil™" in your book, but the fact that you say it just doesn't make it so. I get so damn sick of your narrow little binary thinking that I want to puke. Hell, some of you shitheads see even the Catholic saints as "Demons™". I say you are all so full of shit your eyes are brown.

It is a matter of argument whether the lwa are gods, demigods, helpful spirits, "angels", or what. I will leave that to the Vodou practitioners to declare. But from what I've seen, Vodou is pretty damn Catholic, to the point of making me not want to practice it.

So a bunch of revolutionaries praying to God and the lwa before fighting for their freedom from brutal slavemasters is not a "Pact with The Devil™", I don't care how you try to spin it.

The reason Haiti is so poor? The fucking French made them pay REPARATIONS for having dared to win their freedom from brutal slaveowners. They won, and the fucking French extorted reparations for over a century. Between that and US shenanigans because southern bigots were afraid of a free black nation near our borders (afraid that our own black slaves and/or lower class might get ideas), they've been robbed blind.

The only "devil" involved in Haiti's poverty has been white.

2010-01-15

Haiti and Hate

I am saddened by the tragedy in Haiti. I saw some of the first pictures, of people just lying there, smashed, of the presidential palace pancaked. We had some mild, but very noticeable shakers in the previous week here in Northern California, so it really feels like we've dodged a bullet.

They say earthquakes don't have "seasons". Well, with the amount of headline making shaking that has been happening just in the last few months, I might well argue that.

There is one thing that never seems to go out of season, though, and that is right wing hate.

It starts with the crap from Rush Limbaugh, the renowned OxyContin addicted Republican policy godfather and radio host, who had the gall to criticize the President for reacting quickly to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, with hundreds of thousands dead, but not jumping up and down yelling "Panic" over a foiled attempt by a guy to blow up his underwear on a plane. Oh, where's our priorities? He intimated that the President doesn't care about the country because he didn't panic and fret about a guy who tried to light his dick on fire, and failed, but gets serious about the dead and dying! Oh, wait, those guys are black and foreign, I guess he should ignore them?

Then it piles horrendously deeper with the sheer excrement from evangelical bigot Pat Robertson spreading the hackneyed myth that the people of Haiti have a 'pact with the devil' for their freedom from the french many years ago (I guess because in right wing mythos, black people can't win anything on their own merit and strength.) He goes on to explain that the earthquake is his "loving" God's "punishment" for that deal with the devil.

Wow, that's such an inspiration to come and worship his god, huh? Worship him, or he's gonna wipe your country off the map anytime in the next several centuries. I just adore worshiping a deity that has a cosmic gun to the head of me, my countrymen, and our descendants!! What's a few hundred thousand casualties when you're talking about saving souls, huh?

Sounds like the very definition of evil to me. Pat Robertson pushes a death cult, and a god of torture, murder, and brutality, who wants not freedom and fee will, but slaves and masochists for worshipers. Sheep indeed - for shearing, and your children for lambchops.

Finally, of course, phoney weeper Glenn Beck gets into the act. He adds his simpering voice to Limbaugh, crying crocodile tears over, not the people dying, oh no, but the fact that our President dared to respond quickly to a disaster in a poor black nation!! Oh, the horror!!! He hates whites, he hates the country, waaah, waaah, gimme the vicks so I can cry some too. What a piece of work.

This, people, is what the once proud conservative tradition in our country has become. Fat, drug addled, fake tears, blowhards without any compassion or humanity, who care only for their own money and power. These filthy leeches on the body politic have taken the party of Lincoln and made it kiss the ring of the godfather of pork, OxyContin abuse and bellowing, bow at the feet of a weepy whiney scared cat little boy, and worship a twisted god at the behest of a heartless bigot preacher.

Even if you, like me, have no money, give at least a prayer or well wish to the universe for those suffering in Haiti.

We, as a nation, are better than those who use the power of their money, privilege and media platform to spew hatred and division when people are suffering and dying. We, as a nation, must repudiate these freaks of the right wing, deny them their power over us and our way of life.

It is not the right that must take back the country. It is the heart.

2010-01-12

New Year Blither

It has come to my mind that I need to write more. You see, all the "A List" bloggers are prolific bastards that spew forth profound BS whether they have anything to say or not. I tend not to write unless I have some thing to say. Well, in truth, I always have something to say, I just don't think it's worth writing about. I just need to start writing it down anyway.

I write in several locations. There is here, which is my public blog. There is my Live Journal, which mostly mirrors my DreamWidth Journal - there I occasionally have public posts. I also, heaven help me, have become addicted to Twitter, and where I am http://twitter.com/Ravan_A.

What fascinates me is that I like Twitter. I didn't think I would, because a lot of the early adopters I saw were twitting about dumb shit, and didn't know how to pack their words. Turns out that many actually do - those who were journalism trained. See, I learned in junior high and high school journalism how to write good headlines and leads. 140 characters is a good lead sentence. Add a shortened link and you're done. I don't tend to write lengthy "prose" anyway, which counts against me in some places.

I have always wanted to be a journalist, but didn't like the industry. Not when I looked into studying it, and the "dues" they wanted you to pay, and not when I looked at the career opportunities even if I got a degree in it. When I learned about it in high school, it was all about packing the most information into the least space. I did manual newspaper layout and paste-up, newsletter publishing, and have since done some (not fancy software) desktop publishing. This includes writing and copy editing.

Because of this, blogging came naturally. I was my own editor, I was not as constrained to objectivity as a straight reporter would be, but I could at least write better than some of the sheer excrement that I have read out there. Some of the so-called A-List blogs that I've perused just weren't worth following - ego spew and link spam, at best.

I do have standards, however. I try, fairly hard, to have neutral and objective sources for factual data. Don't quote Fox News or AFA sources back at me and expect me to take you seriously. I try for things like the AMA, CDC, universities, and other organizations without obvious or overwhelming political agendas. Certain polls are known to be biased, by the way they compose their questions. I just point and laugh. Then again, reality tends to have a "liberal" bias - facts don't change just because your god says it's evil.

I have, I will freely admit, a progressive bias. I like real progress, I think it's good for people. My definition may be a little different than some might think. I do not thing GMO crops are "progress", for example.

I also tend to be anti-corporate - corporations are fine as long as they don't have the rights accorded to people. You start treating corporations like real people, and you unleash soulless immortal sociopaths on the population - you can't kill, or even really punish, a corporation, they have no ability to have a conscience, and they have the ability to assemble unlimited power without any accountability to the public (and little to the stockholders).

I used to submit stuff to WitchVox, but they changed their submission guidelines to require 1000 - 3500 words. "Essays under 1000 words will not be considered for publication—we are looking for more than off-the-cuff commentary." My reaction? Well La Di Fucking Dah! WitchVox won't be getting my stuff any more - I usually write short and sweet, not long and turgid. I won't pad to meet length. Yes, this is really a problem for me - half of my entries in this blog are well under 1000 words, but are not "off-the-cuff" commentary! Even some of my longer ones are only 965 words. Assholes!

So this entry has covered, several subjects: why I write, locations online where I write, what my background in writing is, what my bias and standards are, where else I've submitted and published but don't any more. At under 800 words. See the problem?