One learns something new everyday. While researching Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I found myself reading about how it was used to in the search for computer scientist Jim Gray who was lost at sea (a fact I already knew). But what I did not know was that he was lost near the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco. While reading about the Farallon Islands on wikipedia I learned that near the islands was an oceanic radioactive waste dumping site in the mid 20th century.
Between 1946 and 1970, approximately 47,800 large barrels and other containers of radioactive waste were dumped in the ocean west of San Francisco. The containers were to be dumped at three designated sites, but they a litter sea floor area of at least 1,400 km2 known as the Farallon Island Radioactive Waste Dump.
When our children’s children finally start to learn of all the things that this generation and the generation before have provided them as an inheritance they sure are going to be pissed.
This clip of Sarah Palin doing a local TV interview with turkeys being slaughtered in the background has been making the rounds.
I am instantly reminded of the lines from the a Tom Waits song Murder in The Red Barn.
And no one’s asking Cal
About that scar upon his face
‘Cause there’s nothin’ strange
About an axe with bloodstains in the barn
There’s always some killin’
You got to do around the farm
A murder in the red barn
Murder in the red barn
Now the woods will never tell
What sleeps beneath the trees
Or what’s buried ‘neath a rock
Or hiding in the leaves
‘Cause road kill has it’s seasons
Just like anything
It’s possums in the atumn
And it’s farm cats in the spring
A murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn
Say what you will about Palin and the PR disaster that this clip might present. But one thing is for certain she is true hick through and through. The casualness of the killing around the farm just reveals it more so than many had even imagined.
The interesting thing is perhaps ironically the visceral and graphic depiction of this clip and Palin’s apparent obliviousness in it will do more to promote PETA than all the naked athletes and movie stars could ever hope to accomplish.
As we go into thanksgiving turkey day I think it is a healthy reminder of all the killing we depend on but refuse to remain conscious of. Palin offers a rare unfiltered glimpse to an event that so called polite company would never acknowledge. If a PETA group tried to get footage of turkey slaughter on the major news outlets they would most likely be dismissed and railed against for disrupting social tradition and more often be ignored by mainstream media. Palin offers a rare moment to subvert that entrenched bias we seem to have against bringing up the brutal realities of our meat culture.
Now I am not particularly advocating vegetarianism. I am about 85% vegetarian in my routine diet, but I appreciate a good turkey dinner or hamburger as much as anybody. But as an ethical and moral matter I think it is appropriate that we are made viscerally aware of the killing that underlines our culture and society. This goes for animals as well as humans. Sarah Palin in the interview has done us all a great service, albeit perhaps unwittingly.
Here is some more of that viscerally provocative stuff:
One of my favorite bands Cake has decided to produce their next album entirely with solar energy. This is awesome on two fronts. One the environmental statement, but two CAKE HAS A NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS! It has been too long. Hope there are not too many cloudy days in Sacramento, lest the album is delayed.
Yet nothing will free us from these disturbances of the mind so well as always fixing some limit to our advancement: men should be encouraged not to give to fortune the power of stopping their progress, but to halt far within their highest ambitions. In this way also some desires will sharpen the mind and these, being limited, will not lead into great and uncertain ventures.
In other words… tamp it down kid. You cannot control when and what fate will do to you, but you can insulate yourself from the damage by anticipating fate limiting yourself and acting before it acts. The the limited is achievable, the limitless is anguish and disaster, elation and success equally distributed but only on fate’s peculiar and uncertain schedule.
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