Mine Safety Czar

Arianna has another update on the safety of our mines. It turns out that Richard Stickler, the Mine Safety Czar (aka Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health), could not get confirmed by the Senate (twice!) when it was in Republican control because of his poor record in mine safety. An industry executive, and not a mine safety expert, Bush went around the Senate and appointed him anyway in a "recess appointment" when Congress was out of town.

Worst. President. Ever.

Du siehst, ich will viel

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

-- Rainer Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
trans.by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

[Rilke is a well-regarded German poet, 1875-1926, a contemporary of Nietzsche (but obviously, no follower)]

tenosynovitis

I went to the doctor again this morning for a follow-up to my tenosynovitis. I reported that it felt about 50% better, but that it is not yet back to normal. He recommended that I have a second steroid shot, and I accepted that recommendation. This one hurt more than the last. It's also the last steroid shot that I can get. According to the doc, the steroid not only reduces the inflammation, it also weakens the tendon, and any further steroids risks breaking the tendon, which would be a far worse problem than what I have now.

I don't have any further follow-up appointments. Basically this is either going to work, or I will have to have surgery. So the doctor basically said that if he doesn't hear from me, he'll assume it works, and if he does hear from me, it will be because I choose surgery. I'm very unlikely to choose surgery for reasons I explained before. So, I'll just keep this brace on and see how things go.

The Milky Way Galaxy Psalm

Look up at the night sky, Abraham was told,
and contemplate the vast expanse of stars.
Look up at the night sky, children of Abraham,
and adore before the sacrament of stars.
Look up at the Milky Way, winding its white way,
starry eyed that this is no lazy lane of lights
but a cosmic circus-carousel spiral galaxy
that every 230 million years turns round once.

In open mouthed awe I pray in wonderment, O God,
for your whirling dervish dancer of a galaxy
has only circled twenty times since our sun's birth,
only ten times since oxygen was invented,
moving less than one hundredth of a turn
since ancient humans stood up straight.

for me, to look up at this milky way of stars
is to see the silver stream of stars as Mother's Milk,
and so to gape in a dwarf's prayer, my God,
for the heavens are immeasurably full of your glory.
-- Edward Hays, Psalms for Zero Gravity

Huffington: Why Are So Much of the Traditional Media Neglecting a Vital Part of the Utah Mine Collapse Story?

This is, what, the 4th mine collapse we've had in a year? Together with the story of the collapsed bridge, amongst all the heroic stories of rescue, there seems to be very little motivation to explore WHY these mines are collapsing (contrary to corporate claims, seismologists say there was no seismic activity), WHY these bridges are falling, and WHAT anybody is going to do about it.

It seems that when you scrape just the top layer of the story you find that, as I wrote about earlier, that tens of thousands of bridges have been duly inspected according to law, found to be UNSAFE, but nothing happens. And, as Arianna writes, the Utah Mine, and other mines, have been duly inspected, and found to have had 324 safety violations, 107 of them "significant and substantial." But nothing is done about it. Year after year after year, nothing happens.

Eventually the mine owners get fined. And they apparently are willing to pay those fines and continue operating as usual. Is paying the fine cheaper than fixing the problem? And if so, doesn't that mean we're actually putting a price on workers' lives? Why aren't the mines shut down? Why aren't the bridges closed? Why is "commerce must go on!" more important than people's lives? Why is fixing bridges not in the budget, but the war and tax cuts are, acceptable?

And why doesn't anybody seem to care?

I'm pooped!

It's been an exhausting day. My work load today has been about 5x more than usual, plus I've had trouble with two different systems, including some unscheduled server moves. Very tense and high-energy. I need a beer. And a nap.

Compline

My favorite prayer time is Compline. And there is no finer compline choir than the Minnesota Compline Choir. They broadcast every week on Sunday, except during the summer when they take a break. I still like listening to the old broadcasts during the summer.

Here is their last broadcast: Listen.

You ARE the weakest link - Goodbye!

Chapel Hill, North Carolina – John Edwards today released the following statement in reaction to President Bush’s announcement that his senior advisor, Karl Rove, will resign at the end of the month:

"Goodbye, good riddance."

A crack in the dam: Refrain from Discipline

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) decided to encourage its bishops to refrain from or demonstrate restraint in the discipline of rostered ministers in committed same-gender relationships. [Read the text of the resolution.] While the assembly deferred outright elimination of its policy that prohibits LGBT ministers from living in loving, lifelong family relations with their life partner, asked the church to prepare for such decision at its next assembly in 2009.

Emily Eastwood, Executive Director, Lutherans Concerned/North America said, "Today this church moved one giant step from the punitive rejection of partnered LGBT ministers to the willing tolerance of them. We see this decision as interim. Full inclusion and acceptance is still down the road, but the dam of discrimination has been broken. This is a great day for LGBT clergy who will walk into their pulpits tomorrow knowing perhaps for the first time that this church values their gifts for ministry more than the policy that would exclude them. The church is on the road to acceptance. The end of exclusion is in sight. With this decision the voting members signaled a desire for policy change, but the need for two more years to bring more of the church along."

The ELCA policy that prohibits loving, committed, lifelong, same-gender relationships for LGBT ministers remains in effect. Therefore, Goodsoil and its partners and allies will continue the efforts to help the Lutheran church recognize the eternal truth that God has known all along: that LGBT people are part of the wondrous diversity of creation, God's children, followers of Christ, and gifted as are all others to serve the mission of the church in outreach with the message of the Gospel.
Phil Soucy
Director Communications LC/NA
communications@lcna.org
www.LCNA.org

Next-Generation Comic Book Scam

Do you remember those advertising scams that you'd see at the back of comic books when you were growing up? They promised see-thru xray glasses and so forth. My favorite was the one that went like this: "Earn money working from home! Send $2 to find out how!" And if you sent the $2, you'd get a pamphlet from them telling you that the way to make money working from home was to make copies of the pamphlet and sell them by putting ads in the comic books like the ones you answered telling people that they could make money working from home.


Well, the modern-day political version of that is this:

GOP PACs used as slush funds

Here's how the scam works:
1) Form a legal PAC with a neat-sounding name like "Preserve America's Future" or "American Family Association" [snark] or "Focus on the Family" [double snark]
2) Create flyers with some important sounding urgent cause that requests immediate donations to fight the evil menace.
3) Rent a small list of people to mail those flyers to
4) When the money comes in, send one small nickel to the [insert cause here], pay off your mailing bills, and (this is the important part!), pay yourself a hefty salary
5) With the leftover money, repeat steps 2-4 with ever increasing mailing lists and ever more alarming situations
6) Here's the best part: You get to include your family members (including 9-year old Bobby) as "consultants" whom you have hired to give you great advice on how to raise even more money for your cause!
7) Here's an even better part: You get to make as many of these PACs as your imagination can manage, and you get to take a salary from each of them. Oh! And, if you put yourself onto the Board of Directors of said PAC, you can get a double salary!

And it's all totally legal. Isn't Capitalism great?!


P.S. If you're smart, you can save mailing costs by doing everything over the Internet! Just as Don Wildmon!
P.P.S. While political PACs that "fight" for lower taxes or better firefighter equipment are great, the best selling ones are the religious ones that promise to fight in God's Army on your behalf against the great Satan of [abortion, homosexuality, sex education, Hindu prayer in Congress, gun control, etc.]

Morning Invocation

Glory be to God who has shown us the light!
Lead me from darkness to light,
Lead me from sadness to joy,
Lead me from death to immortality.
Glory be to God who has shown us the light.

Baker Wetland & Sunset

I have been wanting to visit the Baker Wetland, so we finally paid a visit this evening just before sunset. Really, it wasn't all that interesting. Other than dragonflies and mosquitoes we didn't see any wildlife at all (we saw more 'wildlife' in the cows in their pastures on the way there).

The fungus was a bright spot in the trip. Dean spotted it. It's strange, fungi are creepy weird things, but they can be really pretty to look at sometimes.

So after we made a quick trip through the boardwalk, we went straight home and I contented myself with a few shots of the sunset from our deck, which was both extraordinary and also completely ordinary for Kansas (I don't know any other state that gets such fantastic sunsets and lightning storms as Kansas).




You can see all the pictures in this entry in full size on my webshots album:
http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/560264750LpdZSW

Where Is God?

Helix Nebula, aka The Eye of God Nebula

Today in church, we had a guest preacher, from Church of the Resurrection, who spoke about "Where Is God?" In contrast to the common view that God is somewhere "up there", usually looking down disapprovingly waiting to cast lightning from his baleful eye, she told some personal stories about meeting God in the person of a homeless woman she met in the basement of a church cathedral, a blue heron that she met while napping in the country, and an amusing answer to prayer when she asked God to show her something "different" and within a minute saw an armadillo for the very first time.

This is a very prominent Benedictine motif, namely that we see the face of God in the stranger, in all who are “other” and "strange," and in Creation itself. The Rule of Benedict Chapter 53 says, “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ…let all humility be shown to the guests…let Christ be adored in them as He is also received.” Indeed, it is so important to make strangers feel welcome as Christ that Benedict orders that fasts be broken for them (unheard of in that time).

Sunday, Sunday

It's been a pretty quiet weekend. Dean has been sick most of the weekend, with a terrible headache that started Friday evening and didn't stop until Sunday late morning. His migraine medicine wasn't helping very much, and it was making him dizzy and loopy. So we really didn't do much at all on Saturday. Finally, Saturday night I suggested that he take plain old Tylenol and that seemed to work. He had a headache again Sunday morning just before church, and again Tylenol seemed to help. Which is weird because usually when he has migraines, Tylenol doesn't do anything.

Earlier this afternoon, we went to see Bourne Ultimatum. I love the Bourne series. There's just something about the storyline, of a violent man who is increasingly disturbed by the kind of person he sees, and is on a quest to find his true self. And the action is pretty much non-stop. Most action movies have lots of "dull" spaces, but the Bourne series does a very good job of keeping me on the edge of my seat.

Bush Considering Increase in Corporate Welfare

"President Bush said yesterday he is considering a plan to cut tax rates for US corporations..."

This crap makes me so mad it makes my eyes cross.

Let's see, we have a record deficit, we're spending billions in a war, millions of the working class have no health care, but King George is going to hand more money to corporations (and thus to wealthy shareholders)?? Dems get blamed as being "tax and spend", but King George's plan is "spend and spend" and let America's children pay the bill after he and his corporate buddies get richer.

How much more evil can it get?

Last night Dean and I were going to go see The Bourne Ultimatum, but Dean had a migraine headache and wasn't feeling good enough to go, so we stayed home. Dean looked for audio books to listen to when we go on vacation, and I did laundry and watched The Bourne Supremacy (the second movie from 2005) on DVD. I had forgotten nearly everything about the movie, so it was very exciting.

I also finished my latest Hercule Poirot book, The Labors of Hercules, which so far has been my favorite. Basically they are short stories where Poirot duplicates the labors of hercules (with obvious modern metaphors) as a challenge. Dean downloaded a summary of the ancient myth of the labors of hercules so that I could more easily match the book to the myth.

Today I need to get a haircut, finish doing my laundry (my second least favorite thing to do next to taking out the trash), work on reading Integral Spirituality for Souljourners and work on our vacation itinerary. I also want to visit the Baker Wetlands some time this weekend, preferably near sundown when it won't be so hot and I might get decent pictures.

The picture is Dean's cat Sinclair, which I took the night before last.

Email Lists - Pet Peeve

Welcome to the latest edition of Uman's Pet Peeves.

I'm on several subscription-based email lists (like Yahoo Groups), and lately there have been lots of people who are trying to unsubscribe, and are too stupid to figure out how.

I simply don't understand how people can be smart enough to subscribe to an email list, but not smart enough to unsubscribe. How can you be smart enough to ride the up-escalator, but be too stupid to ride the down-escalator? How can you be smart enough to open a door, but not be smart enough to shut it?

Most of the email lists I'm on give explicit instructions on how to unsubscribe at the bottom of every single email. One of my lists includes a monthly reminder message whose primary purpose is to explain to people how to get off the list. And still people can't get off the list!

But that's not what peeves me. What peeves me is that it's always someone else's fault. They claim that they never signed up for the list (often explaining that they've been on it for years and describing exactly how they got on it in the first place). Or they claim that nobody ever told them how to get off the list (which is really funny when their complaint is immediately followed by the standard system-generated message explaining exactly how to unsubscribe). Or they complain that the list members send too much email (um, then why did you sign up for something explicitly designed to send you more email?). Or they complain that they really aren't computer literate, like that's our fault -- not to mention that it falls into that trap I mentioned before...how can you be computer literate enough to subscribe to a list, but not literate enough to follow nearly the same directions to unsub?

Whatever the excuse, it's never their own fault. It's always somebody else's. And that peeve's me.

This has been Uman's Pet Peeves. Good night.

Recycling Redux

A few days ago, I wrote about wanting to recycle more. A few days after that, Dean and I bought 3 crates, 1 for cans, 1 for paper, and 1 for plastic. So far, the plastic is the getting the fullest, but I'm also stunned with how much paper we get (mostly junk mail).

Today I read about the scourge of plastic bags at Salon in this great article:
Plastic Bags Are killing Us


My favorite idea: Ireland has created a 22c tax on every plastic bag. As a result, use of plastic bags have gone down 90%. Attempts by other countries have frequently been thwarted by grocery lobbyists disguised as conservationists.

It's also interesting to read how people turned to plastic because they thought they were saving trees. In fact, the plastic is a worse option--first because a lot of companies chop down trees to get to the oil that makes plastic, and second because trees are a far more renewable resource than oil is.

I used to get a plastic bag even when all I bought was one tiny little thing. Lately I've tried to not get a plastic bag whenever possible. I have not yet gotten the courage to take a reusable tote bag to the grocery store, but that's probably going to be the next step.

The only recycling center I know of for plastic is in Lawrence, and they don't take much. Only Type 2 HDPE bottles and plastic bags. But the Type 2 HDPE butter tubs aren't taken and none of the Type 4 bags I get in packaging material is acceptable either. It's a bit frustrating.

I also didn't know why the plastic bags at the Wal-Mart have to be put into their own bin, but this article explains why.

Still, progress is happening in this household.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Some disciples came to see Abba Poemen and said to him: "Tell us, when we see brothers dozing during the sacred office, should we pinch them so they will stay awake?" And the old man said to them: "Actually, if I saw a brother sleeping, I would put his head on my knees and let him rest."

Confederate States of America

Last night, whilst Dean was watching Top Chef, I watched The Confederate States of America, a mockumentary produced by Spike Lee. The premise was what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. The movie was both disturbing and funny (as it was meant to be).

In the mockumentary, France and England aid the South against the North, and win the war. Many people don't know that France and England nearly did aid the South (for economic trade reasons).

In between fake history (like Abe Lincoln captured and tried for war crimes and eventually exiled to Canada), news, commercials, and the Chattel Shopping Network (where you can buy slaves over the telephone), there were real racist products and places that were interspersed throughout. Only, you didn't realize they were real products until the end of the movie, when they showed it to you.

For example, Niggerhair Cigarettes and Darky Toothpaste were marketed well into the 20th century, some as late as 1980. The Coon Chicken Inn was a restaurant shaped as the head of a man in blackface. The entrance was his mouth. This restaurant operated until the 1950s.

And still today there remain racist products -- Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben's rice to name just 2. See a brief slide show at Slate.