The Serpent's Wisdom

A certain wing of the media has gone out of its way to make some, let us say, interesting claims and speculations on the origin of Swine Flu.



That's right -- they are claiming it was created by terrorists, who then spread it around in Mexico so that illegal immigrants would bring the flu to the United States. It's the right-wing trifecta.

But then along comes science to rain on their parade of hate and xenophobia.

Within days, the genome of the Swine Flu virus had been mapped -- and it tells an interesting tale. A/H1N1 is indeed a primarily swine-borne flu virus which is a direct mutation of a swine flu virus which evolved over the last ten years in United States. See also here, at the Aetiology blog, some technical stuff about the relation between the new A/H1N1 and a previous strain of flu seen in Ohio in 2007.

So maybe that's why Mexicans are dying and not U.S. residents -- because there's already been widespread exposure to the virus here, and so many of us are already naturally immune.

The Humane Society of the US is pointing to the operations of Smithfield in North Carolina as the ultimate point of origin for A/H1N1 in 1998. They mention, interestingly, that "More than five years ago, in 2003, the American Public Health Association, the largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, called for a moratorium on factory farming" because of the risk to public health presented by factory farming. How so?

Last April, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production released its final report. The prestigious, independent panel ... concluded that industrialized animal agriculture posed "unacceptable" public health risks: "Due to the large numbers of animals housed in close quarters in typical [industrial farm animal production] facilities there are many opportunities for animals to be infected by several strains of pathogens, leading to increased chance for a strain to emerge that can infect and spread in humans."

Specific to the veal crate-like metal stalls that confine breeding pigs like those on the North Carolina factory from which the first hybrid swine flu virus was discovered in North America, the Pew Commission asserted that "[p]ractices that restrict natural motion, such as sow gestation crates, induce high levels of stress in the animals and threaten their health, which in turn may threaten human health."

So, to put it in plain language, cramming thousands of pigs together, where there is not adequate ventilation to prevent them from breathing in ammonia from their offal, which in turn is not adequately drained, is not just a factory for cheap pork but a factory for superviruses. And public health researchers have been warning us about this danger for years now.

Tristero has a lovely compendium of writings at Hullabaloo about Smithfield and why their factory will never become a popular tourist destination.

So, yeah, the culprit is not terrorists or undocumented immigrants. Imagine that.

Honestly, i felt great after watching his big speech. I dared, for a fleeting moment, to even have a little bit of hope. But i should have remembered never to listen to anything any politician says and watch only what they do. What the White House is actually doing is, to say the least, distressing.

Obama is again defending Bush's human rights abuses and seeking to expand them. From Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

Remember the jokes about conservative radio hosts doing nothing more than reading off a daily set of talking points faxed to them by the Bush Administration? Read this and weep: the White House has established a group called "Common Purpose" which is basically tasked with guiding (or if necessary strongarming) progressive organizations into promoting the administration's agenda.

The Treasury's being plundered by Wall Street, unions are being forced to accept concessions, military spending is up, the war is being expanded, the White House is fighting harder than ever before against human rights and privacy, and the overall impression that's starting to form in my mind is of a brewing disaster.

So the "big news" yesterday was that Jesse Jackson got caught on tape making an offhand and crudely-phrased comment about having a desire to figuratively castrate Barack Obama. Not because he hates him or intends to withdraw his support, but because he's frustrated about his handling of African-American issues.

And then, as is the custom in our day, Jackson had to show contrition in front of the cameras and release a carefully and artfully-worded apology, and Obama's campaign had to release a similar artfully-worded gracious acceptance of the apology.

I would love to know how Barack Obama really responded when he first heard of the comment. Did he laugh his ass off? Did he blow his top? Did he roll his eyes and groan? Did he wave his hand and say, "Fshaw"? I think that spontaneous reaction would have told us quite a lot about Obama's personality and character. His artfully-worded press release delivered by a spokesperson tells us nothing. But we'll probably never know.

Our media is full of words carefully crafted and chosen by professional spinmeisters and wordsmiths -- with the effect that they mean nothing.

I'm left thinking that a lot of the meaning in what we say and do comes from the spontaneity of it. A world without celebrity handlers would have more of a jagged edge, but it would be more genuine and human. The handlers who smooth everything over afterwards are not, i think, doing us a service.

That's not to say i think civility is meaningless or a waste of time -- just that sometimes people blurt out a thought that reflects part of where they're at rather than the considered opinion of their entire mind. When it happens, we should let things fall into place as they will.

An Oxnard junior high student who was shot in the head by a classmate earlier this week was declared brain dead Wednesday, and the 14-year-old male suspect now faces a first-degree murder charge, authorities said.

Lawrence King, 15, was declared brain dead by two neurosurgeons about 2 p.m. at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy Ventura County medical examiner. King's body remains on a ventilator for possible organ donation, he said. He was shot early Tuesday in a classroom at E.O. Green Junior High School.

... The teenager sometimes wore feminine clothing and makeup, and proclaimed he was gay, students said.

"He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails -- the whole thing," said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. "That was freaking the guys out."

from Oxnard student declared brain dead (thanks to transnews for the link)

And, a two-for: because it's necessary to always mention a prostituted woman's profession, and to always describe a transwoman has having an obsession for high heels. These things are newsworthy when someone is slaughtered.

A transgendered prostitute was stabbed to death in the Bronx Saturday by a customer who was apparently surprised by the hooker's true sex, police sources said Saturday.

The victim - a 25-year-old man who dressed like a woman - was identified by sources as Talib Stewart, who often went by the feminine nicknames of Nesha or Sanesha.

Stewart was stabbed multiple times inside a Belmont apartment building about 6 a.m. Saturday, police said.

A 37-year-old man was later arrested inside the second-floor apartment, police said.

Though the suspect's identity was not immediately released, the sources said he was the prostitute's john who became enraged when he learned his partner was not a woman.

Stewart, more than 6 feet tall, was known to wear stylish, provocative outfits with towering high heels, neighbors said. Stewart also apparently had undergone surgery to give him larger breasts and other female characteristics, neighbors said.

from Cops: Ex-con slays Bronx transsexual 'hooker' (thanks again to transnews)

But, never forget that we are the ones who are "killing our culture". I guess she means we're doing so by rudely getting in the way of the knives and bullets of straight men and bleeding all over the culture.

I spent a good part of the morning being offline while having my work computer "refreshed" - i am very happy with the new one! It just sings along.

While i was waiting for this to be finished i went to the Holyoke center to get a new work ID card with my new name... yet another small piece of the transition taken care of. I looked at teeny snowflakes falling and pondered transsexual transition as an analog rather than a digital process.

I came back and still didn't have my new computer yet, so i read a fairly good chunk of Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, which i finally started reading yesterday. Her primary ideas are elegant and possess considerable explanatory power, but i think i will wait until i am done reading the book before i comment on her primary thesis.

One chapter of the book contains a description of what her childhood experience of gender was like, and it is more similar to mine than any other transsexual account i have ever read. It is fascinating to contrast Serano's account against the typical "woman trapped in a man's body" narrative most people are familiar with. (Consider, for example, Jan Morris's account as given in her famous transsexual autobiography Conundrum.)

For Serano, awareness of her femininity did not start with a sudden realization when she was young that she was "really a girl." Instead it percolated up from her subconscious, as through pores; dreaming that she was a girl, taking on a female persona while playing alone, seeing the rightness of it when looking in a mirror and seeing herself as female. All the while, throughout her childhood she did not really question the fact that other people perceived her as a boy.

This is what happens when you are young and your feelings lead one way while everyone around you is in a conspiracy to say or do something else. You don't learn to 'pretend' to go along with it. You internalize it so deeply that it permeates your conscious thought. The external world reaches in and rewrites your own thoughts so that even your own self is invisible.

Finding your own voice in the face of that is tremendously difficult. It takes a lifetime. It takes years of knowing what feels right and yet not being able to consciously or outwardly admit it. This state of dissonance can become one of the most painful things imaginable.

Serano uses the term "subconscious sex," the meaning of which is best captured in this sentence: "Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female" (p. 80).

My own experience is remarkably similar to this. Reading it in print, though, had an effect not unlike the long struggle it took to give voice to the cognitive dissonance of subconsciously knowing i'm female while trying to make it work somehow as a male. Transfolk face a parallel struggle in learning to discern our own voices from the words continually put into our mouths by the non-transgender mainstream, particularly by the media and its depictions of us.

Transfolk are vastly outnumbered by non-trans folk. Far more things are said about us by people who are not trans than are said by us about our own experiences. Consequently it is hard for us to even know what authentic transsexual narrative even sounds like.

In the chapter titled "Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels," Serano did an excellent job outlining the way producers of media pieces about gallae hyper-focus on images of us putting on makeup, shopping for shoes, or obsessing over clothes. These images are sought out even when gallae resist being depicted in that way:

What always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and codirector of the TrannyFest film festival, has experienced several such incidents with local news producers. When Virago was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community, a newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender activists for an article. However, the paper was interested not in their politics but in their transitions: “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” A few years later, someone from another paper contacted Virago and asked to photograph her “getting ready” to go out: “I told him I didn’t think having a picture of me rolling out of bed and hustling to catch [the bus] would make for a compelling photo. He said, ‘You know, getting pretty, putting on makeup.’ I refused, but they did get a trans woman who complied, and there she was, putting on mascara and lipstick and a pretty dress, none of which had anything to do with the article, which was purportedly about political and social challenges the trans community faced.”

The media only ever shows trans people, and gallae in particular, in very particular stylized ways, which have the effect of reducing us to a harmless caricature. This is true even when the subject is something as serious as the fantastically disproportionate number of transgender youth who wind up living on the streets. So it's no surprise that people who are not trans, even people who know someone who's trans... and even trans people ourselves, come to believe that this is what being transgender is all about.

The media has, until recently, forced gallae into taking on this voice by refusing to print or publish even our own accounts that differed from this narrative they've assigned to us. This cherry-picking has compounded the problem. Many gallae have felt compelled to cooperate, under the theory that at least some media exposure is better than none at all. Finally now, now, we are cultivating the ability to speak for ourselves authentically, with less risk of non-transgender editors slicing off those bits of our narrative that don't fit their preconceptions.

Just like the media, the medical community also tells us to shut up so they can speak for us.

Being buried under the misappropriation of who and what we are only makes it harder for us to find our own voice. It reduces us. Our images are not only misappropriated by the mainstream for its own amusement, but we are silenced so effectively that even we don't know who we really are.

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

Where in the world is Ruben Israel? (most recent sighting: Chicago Pride)

Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress? (thanks the_alchemist)

Keith Olbermann: Dick Cheney is a "rogue nation" (in response to this latest lunacy, Rahm Emanuel has proposed cutting Cheney's funding from the Executive budget, and meanwhile others are asking, "What about his claim of executive privilege on the oil-industry-meeting-notes?")

H.R.2824: To sever United States' government relations with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma until such time as the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma restores full tribal citizenship to the Cherokee Freedmen disenfranchised in the March 3, 2007, Cherokee Nation vote and fulfills all its treaty obligations with the Government of the United States, and for other purposes.

The Australian government has deposed the limited self-rule of Aboriginal townships in the Northern Territory.

An interesting essay and comment thread on Feministing about the perception that street harassment of women is largely being done by men of color.

Edit to add: Only two people in the House of Representatives voted against a measure preemptively charging Iran with genocide and including the statement, "Whereas Iran has aggressively pursued a clandestine effort to arm itself with nuclear weapons...." Those two are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Who wouldn't love to see these two team up for a presidential run?

We are getting ready to move, and that includes throwing away old furniture. Yesterday we harnessed the awesome power of gravity in a startling act of Ninja Couch Defenestration. (Okay, so not technically "defenestration," but "deporchistration" doesn't have the same knack.)

Yesterday, a gunman at the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, identified by the police as student Cho Seung-Hui, shot 32 people dead and injured many others before killing himself.

I've seen this described in numerous places as a "tragedy."  I do not personally believe that "tragedy" is an appropriate word to describe this.  Nor would i approve of "calamity," "catastrophe," or "disaster."

Atrocity, yes.  Monstrous, cruel, heinous, vicious, villainous, ruthless, brutal, bloodthirsty, yes.

But my objection to words like "tragedy" is that this serves to bury the fact that this was an intentional act, an act of deliberate and malicious harm of one human being against others.  Words like "tragedy", "calamity," "catastrophe" and "disaster" all imply the workings of fate, or accident, or the gods, or evil stars, or some other great external overwhelming force -- not a human being.  They imply that what we need is catharsis and closure, not examination and scrutiny.  In fact i'm already seeing hostility towards those who might ask why this happened, as if it is not our place to wonder.

I think what causes this reaction is that events like this traumatize us, and our first instinct as survivors is to appease, to not stir trouble.

Violence is not caused by a great external overwhelming force, not even violence on an unimaginable scale.  It is caused by something that we (most of us) have the power and will to overcome.  Examining violence with the goal of understanding it and lessening it will not bring on the wrath of the gods; it is something we must do.  And there is no better time than the present, because there is violence right now, everywhere, in your community, in mine.

This isn't to pick on anyone in particular, FWIW.  It's the media that sets the tone for things like this, and they are plastering the word "tragedy" all over the place.

The other day i posted this link to a video of the Mooninite guys refusing to talk to the press about anything other than haircuts. There's a lot to learn from this, not from what they're saying but from what this event represents on several levels.

The first is the nature of advertising in the future. The 'paid spot' in media presentations -- commercials during TV programs and ads in magazines and newspapers and on billboards, and that sort of thing -- is becoming a thing of the past. They'll still be there in abundance, of course, but mostly as reinforcement more than anything else. The thing is, they just aren't effective anymore; we go around them on TiVo and simply ignore them when we can.

What advertisers want now is to embed their message into the viral information networks of the internet, into the culture itself, so that you cannot have a cultural experience or interchange without receiving a paid advertising message. They've already been doing product placements in movies, TV shows, and video games for some time now. And now, i've seen the future and the future is 'guerrila marketing.'

See, for advertisers the holy grail is getting their product widely seen as 'cool.'

In fact, i've been pondering the nature of what it means for a person or thing to be 'cool' or 'not cool' for quite a while, and i keep coming back to the relationship between popular culture and advertising. Most attempts to brand a product as cool are just darn predictable: a cartoon character with sunglasses and a leather jacket telling kids to buy a particular brand of cereal, that sort of thing. Every now and then, though, an advertiser hits paydirt and product awareness takes on a life of its own. When this happens, the promoter just has to sit back and watch consumers gleefully do their product placement for them. If people are posting in Myspace and YouTube and Livejournal about how great and cool they think a product is, their work is done.

By that measure, the success of this Mooninite thing in Boston is immeasurable.

The other thing i saw in that video was the first stirrings of a new form of dissent against the news media. I don't know if it was a genuine display of youthful rebellion or whether it was a contrived attempt to simulate youth rebellion (i kinda lean towards the latter) but either way i sense a large and growing current of discontent and distrust among young people for the mass news media.

And who can frickin' blame them? The news media are polished, professional manipulators and liars. Anyone who has ever been to an event -- especially a protest -- and then watched news coverage of the event afterwards knows what i mean. They've been spouting crap for years, and in the name of "getting both sides of a story" have been lending credence to discredited ideas that otherwise would have died out years ago, like Intelligent Design and global warming doubt.  The news media rely on the fiction that they are without agenda, when a critical examination of their viewpoint shows a distinct tendency to reinforce the corporatist, classist, white supremacist agenda.

The thing is, nothing happens very far from a blog these days. People who witness or experience events firsthand are writing in their blogs about it -- or, even more impressively, posting cellphone video of it -- and this news spreads virally. Speaking from direct experience brings a dimension of meaning lost in accounts by the news media. The Mooninite guys didn't need sympathetic coverage by the news media (you can clearly hear threats from reporters of unfavorable coverage if they didn't take the conference 'more seriously,' by which they meant, going along with the reporters' script) because they knew every kid with a Myspace was going to post a link to the video -- and that THIS form of information exchange is what really counts these days.

There is always a place for objective coverage, but we are finally balancing this out with a much needed infusion of subjectivity. (For the record, i wouldn't want only subjective news to spread either, but we've really needed this.)

Articles in the mainstream media about the state of middle-class finance in the US are exceedingly rare, but here's one:
2006 personal savings drop to 74-yr. low

People once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression more than seven decades ago.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.

Notice how the article comes with an illustration of people looking at TVs and expensive recliners, as if to imply that people are spending more than they're making in order to have fancy electronics and stylish furniture. They certainly wouldn't want you to think it was because people were buying groceries and paying for rent and utilities using credit cards, and doing so because their real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages have stagnated or even decreased while costs of living have risen.

The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only four times in history — in 2005 and 2006 and in 1933 and 1932. However, the reasons for the decline in the savings rate were vastly different during the two periods.

Vastly different? That remains to be seen. Maybe we're looking at a difference in the way we count the unemployment rate. Unemployment was much harder to count 75 years ago, because day labor was very common.  Currently, the unemployment rate is listed as the percentage of the labor force which is out of work. But the labor force is a contrived figure which, at the present, only includes 66% of adults of working age. If the "unemployment rate" is 5%, that means (100-66)+5=39% of all adults of working age are not presently employed.  In some areas, like New Orleans before Katrina, the actual rate was closer to 50% of all adults of working age not employed.  (Who knows what the figure is now?)  Is the spending of this 39% included when the spending rate is calculated? 

During the Great Depression when one-fourth of the labor force was without a job, people dipped into savings in an effort to meet the basic necessities of shelter and clothing.

Economists have put forward various reasons to explain the current lack of savings. These range from a feeling on the part of some people that they do not need to save because of the run-up in their investments such as homes and stock portfolios to an effort by many middle-class wage earners to maintain their current lifestyles even though their wage gains have been depressed by the effects of global competition.

Or maybe it's the fact that almost everyone in the middle class lives paycheck-to-paycheck.