Caturday: Sisters of the Moon edition

Good morning, news junkies! I’m super-tardy, so this will be short and sweet.

• The Sleeping Brain may come undone so we can start afresh, according to this piece in Sci Am Mind.

• MUST-SEE FOOTAGE: Saudi woman stands her ground against religious police telling her to leave; tells them it’s none of their business if she wears nail polish!

• via MFAH… This day in history: American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895. Lange took the iconic Depression-era Migrant Mother photo.

• Taylor Marsh: “the Obama administration has instead led a crack-down on medical pot that exceeds anything George W. Bush did.” Apparently Obama’s “Are You In?” (drug verbiage) campaign is all smoke and mirrors…

• Romney sticks with Birther Fool. Gotta love hating this election…

• Charles Blow: Plantations, Prisons and Profits [NYT, via Reader Supported News]…I’d be remiss not to tease a little of this for you:

Lnouisiana [sic] is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

If you’ve got the time this weekend, you best read the rest.

• A bit of local news this week that has everybody here I know all smiles: Houston Hobby is on track to go international! …not only that, but our mayor, Annise Parker, has struck a deal for Southwest Airlines to foot the entire $100m bill for the airport’s expansion. Whee-haw!  You cannot understand how huge this is unless you live here or have spent time here–Houston is a very LARGE city, as in physically stretched out, and driving out to Bush Intercontinental for many of us is a mini-road trip in itself. An independent peer review commissioned by the City of Houston–of existing studies by the City, Southwest, and United–gives the green lights as well, confirming a positive economic boost/outlook in response to a Hobby expansion. If you’re interested in reading more on this, I found the following interesting take while perusing the headlines: Southwest Can Take Latin America By Storm If Houston Hobby Gains International Routes.

• Oh and before I close this… a Very Happy Birthday to Ms. Stevie Nicks! “She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness…” Here’s one of my favorite live performances of hers on youtube… “Sisters of the Moon”… absolutely mesmerizing, just WOW…

Alright. Comments, Sky Dancers. You know what to do! Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

Caturday Reads: What Happens to a Cat Dinner Deferred?

Kitty, it’s the tainted food supply causing the hold-up. Mommy has to spend extra time trying to find dinner that isn’t poison.

Morning news junkies…and cat enthusiasts! A little vintage Lolcat for you to get things started.

Also, a crazy cat lady book recommendation. Authoress Michèle Sacquin is curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France–and apparently cat historian on the side. I bought this hardcover a month or so ago at the MFAH (Museum of Fine Arts–Houston). It’s translated from French to English…I think there’s some quirk *gained* in the translation! And from what I can tell of the last page, there’s also a version out there available in Italian, which I’d love to locate along with the French. Anyhow, currently The Well-Read Cat is right here with me at my desk as I type this, but it travels regularly to and fro, between my kitchen and coffee tables and nightstand.

Now for some linky-business to go along with your morning cuppa…enjoy!

• This first one is inspiring and yet exhausting just to read:  “Tamae Watanabe, who on May 16, 2002 at the age of 63 years became the oldest woman to climb Mount Everest, smashed her own record on Saturday, reaching the peak of the world’s highest mountain at the age of 73, Kyodo news service reported.”

• Extra, extra. Corn Belt Bee Kills and Genetically Engineered Crops. Read all about it:

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE seeds, but now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ’em.”

• Ag Department says healthier food costs less than junk food. I think I’ll have to take a closer look at that study. Wapo’s writeup makes no mention of special dietary needs and food intolerances, as if the poor are immune to such things and only the wealthy’s blood and organs have time to disagree with what they consume. Healthy foods cost less, my health nut butt! Plus, frankly most of our food supply is tainted with the complicity of Congress and our government agencies, so the US Ag department’s designation of fruits, veggies, and proteins that are “healthy” is suspect to me to begin with.

• Speaking of which… After reading this Baylor College of Medicine Psychiatry provisional abstract on Vitamin D deficiency raising psychosis risk in adolescents, I propose adequate sunlight and Vitamin D3 supplements for the poor, the teenaged, and the mentally unwell. And, really just about everybody…! In fact, if you bother taking any vitamin supplement besides one for any specific deficiency you have, make sure it is D3 because D3 is the only one’s that seems to clinically make much of a difference (that link will take you to a long-ish Time Mag article from fall but one that I like to point to on Vitamin D et al. and worth the read!)

• I have no words for this despicableness:

Perryton High — located just south of the Oklahoma border — has an annual “Red Ribbon Day” in which half the students portray Jews in the Nazi era and are forced to obey any commands by students or teachers and be subjected to random discipline, the suit says.

• John W. Smart: Who Are These Bedbugs? I don’t like the source, i.e. Fox Nutsack, or its Fox Nutsack take on it. However, I’m glad John Smart gave a heads up on this story, because otherwise I probably would have had no idea Obama was inserting factoids about himself into past presidents’ bios. I’m trying to believe that compared to everything else at stake right now, this really is harmless, but it still seems a little odd, unnecessary, and insecure on the Administration’s part. They are fighting a GOP stuck in the 1800s, if that. Really, stop with the Obama vanity bios already, and give us some public sector gains to talk about. Cook this election up.

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as paraphrased by moi: Babies of Color are the Majority. Is it okay that I huzzah’d at that? Or will that get me drafted into an appletini summit (I know the WH ignoramus/advisors probably think I’m too girly for a beer summit…)? At any rate, the Texas Tribune has graphed out a nifty state map of the population rations among children.

• Five Million Underground Workers:

The “underground” is always with us. For better and often for worse, it’s how marginalized populations tend to survive —often not very well. (Think of the old, the young, the formerly incarcerated, or foreign.) In recessions – surprise, surprise– “irregular” employment grows. Consider recent stories from Greece, about wageless public “workers” swopping skills, and trading food for teaching. Austrian economist, Friedrich Schneider, an expert in underground economies, has documentd a surge in shadow economy activity in 2009 and ’10 in Europe. University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Edgar Feige has been doing his best to follow what’s happened here.

• Junior High Journalist Spotlights Violence in Schools…will Obama listen? respond? blink?

• Ok, now that I’ve covered some items holding Obama’s feet to the fire…it’s time to give the GOP the big ol’ partisan-and-proud-of-it finger. ThinkProgress has a chart that shows Spending, Taxes, And Deficits Are All Lower Today Than When Obama Took Office. Mitt the Meanie can’t bully the facts, so he will just ignore them.

• Jump Rope Physics from SciAm. Now, first and foremost I’m a bicycle enthusiast (“Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race.” –H.G. Wells), but for GoRed Women’s heart health month this past February, I also procured from Tarjay two pairs of jump ropes made all fancy for grown-ups, one for myself and one for my mom. See, I’m all about the easy cardio that’s more about PLAY than cardio, ’cause that’s just how I roll. Enter bikes and jump ropes. Throw in some Saturday morning science, and we’re pretty much in girl geek heaven.

• A Very Happy Birthday to one of my all-time favorite playwrights– The Late and Still Great Lorraine Hansberry:

The play that “changed American theatre forever,” according to The New York Times, started with a few short lines from a long poem.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Langston Hughes wrote the poem, and Lorraine Hansberry was inspired – both by the poem and by her own real-life experience – to write A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. Today, on what would have been her 82nd birthday, and we’re celebrating Hansberry’s groundbreaking work.

A Raisin in the Sun (Amazon.com)

Okay, you know what to do in the comments, Sky Dancers. Have a lovely weekend!

Humpday Link Dump and Gender Benders

Good afternoon news junkies… so here’s the deal: I wasted several hours on facebook sharing links earlier today and then realized I had enough material for a post on here, on stuff that shouldn’t wait until Saturday.

Hope y’all enjoy, or at least appreciate. Some of these links are depressing, starting with the first one…

• A story that belongs on the front page of every “American” newspaper, IMHO… Native Girls Are Being Exploited and Destroyed at an Alarming Rate [via Indian Country Today Media Network; h/t Indigenous Left on FB]

Mary G. was born from the boats. Her children were born from the boats too, all fathered through her liaisons with male customers. She has never known anything else. Like generations of Native girls and women before her, Mary and her family are inextricably tied to prostitution in the great port city of Duluth, Minnesota. Long before the term sex trafficking entered the public lexicon and began appearing in headlines, Native women like Mary and her mother Ruthie were lured into prostitution. Largely driven by poverty and homelessness as well as an underlying racism that sanctioned the sexual degradation of Native women, generations of them have sold themselves to survive.

• Go Kirsten Gillibrand!

Today I introduced the Gender Equality In Combat Act to order the Department of Defense to officially phase out its female combat role exclusion policy. The fact is, women are already serving and sacrificing on the front lines and I feel it’s important to change our military policy to reflect this. It will also make it easier for women to advance in our armed services.

• Go Liz Warren!

The battle for Wall Street reform continues. Read my op-ed on BostonGlobe.com.

http://b.globe.com/KtFdz3

• Viva la Valerie! First Lady Without a Portfolio (or a Ring) Seeks Her Own Path [via NYT; h/t Women and Girls Lead on FB]:

PARIS — Valérie Trierweiler faces an uncommon predicament.

Twice married and twice divorced, she covered French politics as a journalist for more than 20 years with no inkling that she would one day become France’s first lady, certainly not when she fell for François Hollande, a jovial, unglamorous leftist politician who hardly seemed like presidential material.

“I almost want to laugh when I think of it,” Ms. Trierweiler said in a telephone interview.

But Mr. Hollande was elected on May 6 and was sworn in on Tuesday, and now Ms. Trierweiler — whom he calls “the love of my life” — is concerned with preserving her independence while supporting her partner.

• Word up! Robert Parry: How the US Press Lost Its Way [via Consortium News; h/t Reader Supported News on FB]:

‘The US press distinguished itself in the 1970s by exposing the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. How has the media lost its way?’

• I Love Mario Batali! Batali has taken up congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s Food Stamp challenge and says he’s effin’ starving! [story via DCist; h/t Occupy Washington DC on FB]. Humor me while I get on my never-far-away soapbox for a moment to say that I firmly believe nutritious food is the right of everyone–poor people are just as susceptible as anyone, if not moreso, to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, food intolerances, etc. Having to eat the same sandwich on a fast food value menu, or any other interchangeable piece of drivethru preservative and additive loaded slime, twice or thrice a day is not only deleterious to the physical body but to the mind and spirit as well, all three of which are interconnected. A 4.44/day food stamp diet is not humane. It is a recipe for malnutrition and desperation. (Also, I’m not the least bit swayed by arguments about abuse of government aid–food stamp fraud only accounts for 1% of the program’s benefits.)
  

  Saw this on FB… made me think of the X-Files episode title “Gender Bender”

Joyce L. Arnold has two Brilliant, Must-Read posts up at Taylor Marsh’s right now:

1. Super-Powered and Halo’d, Obama is Still the One?
2. If ‘This Is Not Who We Are,’ Then Who Are We, and Who Gets to Decide?

Go Read NOW!

• Texas-sized Fuck-up… via Texas Tribune:

Carlos DeLuna always said that it was another man named Carlos who committed the fatal stabbing for which he was convicted and then executed in 1989. No one believed him. The prosecutors said Carlos Hernandez, the man who he claimed was the real perpetrator, didn’t exist.

Now, more than two decades after DeLuna’s execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of students have uncovered evidence they say proves that Carlos DeLuna was innocent, and that Carlos Hernandez not only was real but was probably the real killer. They released their findings in a book-length monograph and website published by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review on Tuesday.

“I’m convinced that no jury could possibly have convicted Carlos DeLuna beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence here. That’s absolutely clear,” Liebman said in a videotaped interview with the Tribune from Columbia University in New York. Liebman discussed the lengthy in-depth investigation that the team conducted, which he said revealed that Hernandez had a long history of violent crimes, that police worked too fast, that important leads were never followed and that, in the end, even DeLuna’s execution may have been botched. “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” he said.

• One last image to leave you with:

Alright Sky Dancers, this is an Open Thread. The comment section is yours!

Caturday: Let’s get liturgical…

…or let’s say we did, and look at lolcats instead!

Here’s your late morning-ish meow, news junkies:

• Did you know it is National Train Day? I enjoyed USA Today’s feature about 10 great places to celebrate. Here’s my favorite entry, though I went to school in St. Louis and I have to say there is a huge gaping editorial omission by not mentioning that the station has been converted into a shopping mall:

St. Louis Union Station
While train traffic has waned, this station still bustles with a museum, food court and attached hotel. Breslin says the site was a transfer point for millions of immigrants heading to the country’s interior. “It was a massive station at the height of train travel in this country. It was the Ellis Island of the Midwest.” 800-916-0092; explorestlouis.com

• In advance of mother’s day, a gorgeous Russian satellite photo of our Mother Earth.

• Mitt Romney is a creepazoid; he is geometrically, diametrically, and ridiculously opposed to… himself. I also have to add here that as glad as I am about Obama’s “coming out this week,” let us not forget that our POTUS made history by evolving himself…back to where he was in 1996. A sad commentary on the state of U.S. politics today… I still say Honeybadger 2012!

• …and Hillary 2016! (Public Policy Polling shows Hillary with a “commanding early lead” in Iowa. The LA Times sez our badass advocate-in-chief Hillary “blows the speculative Democratic competition out of the water.” Well, ain’t that somethin’.)

• Hillary honors Dorothy during keynote at the 25th annual “Celerating Women” breakfast. That is MY Madame President… Happy Mother’s Day:

“My mother had a resilience and a commitment to her family that she worked hard on every day. And I often wondered, How did that happen?” Clinton said. “When I got old enough to understand, I remember asking my mother … she said, At critical points in my life somebody showed me kindness, somebody gave me help.”

• Joyce has an excellent Queer Talk post up at TM.com right now on this week’s developments. She speaks for me–best commentary I’ve seen yet on the subject anywhere, which is no surprise as Joyce has so diligently highlighted time and again the true everyday ordinary heroes and heroines of our American story as it unfolds, with her signature focus on the grassroots work of LGBT & other human rights advocates. Read it now:

“Obama & Marriage Equality – The “Personal is Political,” but It Isn’t Necessarily Policy.

• The Fierce Urgency of the Permanent Campaign strikes again: Kaiser Health News has a helpful little round-up of reactions to the obviously politically-timed health insurance rebates which Camp Obama views as its ‘”stealth weapon’ for improving opinion of the health law.”

• Meanwhile, Mittens addresses Falwell U. Great way to shift to general election mode and not alienate more Independents. A sample of his nauseating speech, via the CNN link:

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” Romney said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life.”

Yes, the best case for this is always a big white evangelical cross. Also best case? Hoisting oneself with their own petard, Mr. Romney. We’re all morons with millions of campaign dollars to burn on idiotic campaign strategies, just like you. Seriously, you’re not going to win over the fundies who aren’t already willing to vote for you–they think you have everlasting celestial Mormon cooties, get it? The new Age fundies who don’t hate you because you are Mormon are already voting for Obama. You need to carve out YOUR own base of constituencies to reach out to–greedy and/or ill-informed “fiscal conservatives” who could not care less about social issues + people disaffected by Obama in this economy. You’re competing against Voldemort Axelrove et al. now, not the Sanctimonium “proletariat”–get it together, already. If it’s going to be a crappy election, the least you could do is not bore us to death. Occupy Politics 101, okay?

And, with that Sky Dancers, I’m off! You know what to do in the comments.