squidbag

Send My Friend to Africa

This is Whitney. And Tanzania. We're trying to get them together.

As I sit here eating mango, my good friend, Whitney Flatt, who has helped with my mental health on more than one occasion, and who is, in all likelihood, one of the most giving people you will ever meet, should you be damned lucky enough to actually meet her, is trying to scratch together enough - well, scratch, to finance a trip to Tanzania, where she will speak Swahili, help those in need, and escape elephants. This is what I have pictured, anyway.

How can you contribute money and not read the rest of this entry? Well, you can click your happy ass on over to her project website at 2Seeds, throw in, and move on. But you'd miss your chance to read her answers to your collective theoretical questions about her journey:

Hey, Whitney - where the heck are you going?

I will live in a small village in the Usambara Mountains just outside the city of Korogwe, Tanzania. I will be a part of what is called The Bungu Project, a project that works in most host village and adjacent villages to diversify crop output and improve market access.

Who are you working for? Who's putting this thing together?

The 2Seeds Network, and despite the number "2" in their actual name, the artist currently known as Prince is not affiliated with their work. Wish he was, though - that guy's got deep pockets.

Okay, so what are you up to over there?

My official title is “Project Coordinator,” and for the last five years, Project Coordinators from 2Seeds have been partnering with 8 different villages around Korogwe. Our goal is to undertake agricultural and market initiatives that will foster human capital development. All that fancy lingo aside, our goal is to help people live the best lives they can possibly live, ascending from the confines of poverty.

As a Project Coordinator, I will not only plant and harvest crops with these partners, but I will also provide micro-loans for projects as well as help teach basic management skills, helping my partners run their own profit and loss sheets for agricultural/market initiatives. A lot of times in development work, the old adage of “teach a man to fish” versus “giving a man a fish” has been tossed around to describe how development should work. But 2Seeds doesn’t believe that our partners are inept or that they are incapable of knowing how to properly farm their own land. They simply don’t have the capital to invest in their land and/or take risks. So my role isn’t to teach a man how to fish; my role is to be there when he desires to buy the line, the hook, and the bait and to help him consume/market his catch in such a way that helps him move from subsistence farmer to one that makes a profit and removes himself from the cycle of poverty.

So, what; there's no actual fish involved?

No.

Okay, how much dough do you need?

$8,000. This includes everything from my living expenses to agricultural initiatives we’ll undertake in my village. Any amount that anyone can throw into the hat would be great, though - even if I get a whole crowd of people at just a few dollars each, there's some matching funds to be had, so in this case, every little bit does really, truly help.

How long are you going to be gone? 12 months, August 11, 2014 to approximately July 15, 2015.

Do you really have to learn Swahili before you go?

Yes.

Really?

Yes. There’s minimal English spoken in my rural village.

Last but not least, why should anyone give you money?

You get to become a partner in something amazing and help people live up to their fullest economic potential. Plus, people always complain that they never know how their money is being used when they give to charitable organizations. But when you donate to my project, you literally become a partner in my village. I am accountable to each of my partners and will give you updates every 6 months on how your funds are being utilized.

Convinced yet? It's so easy to donate to this project at this link, that you could have done it while you were thinking about doing it. Here again, too - ANY amount. Chuck a buck in the bucket, and if she racks up a bunch of folks, it's a good thing. And you know, if you've got more than a buck, she'd like to see that, too. Ask for more details. Ask for emails in Swahili. Tell your friends, family, foodie acquaintances, and your rich uncle. She's a little less than a quarter of the way to eight grand, and I think we should show her what anonymous strangers who claim to care about other groups of anonymous strangers can do while sitting on their asses at computers.

Don't you?

Poll Position

A week ago today, I worked the polls for Rutherford County's Republican primary. Because I never had. I've been working in politics (kind of, more or less) for about 15 years now, and I got my degree in Poli-Sci; seemed like part of the package to go on in and work the polling place.

I've lurked around them on election days before - doing GOTV stuff (including once nearly assaulting a person) and getting the numbers for reporting. The first time I ever did that part, I was with Mike Basford and one of the machines broke down and we had to wait for a dot matrix printout for an additional hour. Nerve. Wracking. Nothing about these interesting election experiences prepared me for the mind-melting monotony that is a primary one month after city elections that mostly no one cares about.

I was required to be there at 6 in the morning (which is early for a loyalty oath), because I had two responsibilities, "machine operator" and "computer / printer hook-up." This second one was referred to by the registrars as "IT guy," which I found terrifying because I am not one of those. I arrived and set up tables and then took the next 30 minutes or so setting up three laptops, mice and printers and networking them to the dedicated hub that I brought with me. Once everything was active, I helped set up the actual voting booths, which took longer than it should have. The two other machine operators were well past retirement age, and this may have contributed to the delay. By 7:05 we were ready to go, with the one hitch that we hadn't actually ENABLED THE MACHINES TO START VOTE COUNTING when the first guy tried to vote. I got that fixed in about 30 seconds and we were off to the races.

'The races' were thirteen hours with 122 voters participating. I did get a lunch, read two books, and there was one printer failure (toner cartridge which required an "unvote" of one person and took 15 minutes to fix) but otherwise, this was easily the most boring thing ever. And I had jury duty the previous week. I did help a bunch of people, and had to explain more than once what the advantage was of Democrats voting in a GOP primary. The high point of my day was when an olive-skinned man named Khaled Mohammed came to vote and I, observing his name, said, "Khaled Mohammed; that must be tough to deal with here." He appreciated my empathy and told me his story, stating that I had helped reaffirm his faith in the electoral process.  Good times.

I'm glad that I did it, I'll do it again - I'm glad I'm not doing it again today.

My Wife's Head

For those of you not paying the strictest attention, it was two weeks ago today that my wife shaved her head. I am intensely proud of her for being brave enough to do it, and so I shall give you the whys and wherefores and thoughts behind it now.

Her school decided to do an event with the St. Baldrick's people, those who go around shaving heads to raise money for cancer funding everywhere. Initially, it was just a bunch of guys, and my wife, being who she is, questioned this: "Why can't the female teachers do this?" When she was given a sort of "Well, I guess they can..." kind of answer, her students responded enthusiastically. She responded to this with "There's no way I'd shave my head for less than a thousand bucks." 

They raised $435 that first day, and she came home telling me that she might have underestimated them and would likely be bald by Friday.

By Thursday, they, together with the student council, had poined up the rest, and we talked about her getting it done, since she was pretty much on the hook for it by that point. She asked me if I would come and watch it done at what was essentially a pep rally, and I had two objections: one is the carnival/exploitation atmosphere that frequently accompanies such events, and the other was the underlying current of disease tourism that I feel can accompany such things. How does a person who must shave their head feel about someone who simply chooses to do so? Apply that logic to a wheelchair or a blindfold, for instance.

Ultimately, I decided to go. At the rally, the student energy was overwhelmingly positive, and there were only three people who said objectively annoying things to me (Objectively annoying = I get someone else's quick opinion about whether the thing that pissed me off was legit or just me. Think about how often I must have to do this.) and the mood was really high and sweaty and excited, and kids went and broke out band equipment, and Christie's head got totally shaved. She was solely responsible for more than a third of what the school raised, and there were like, 12 guys who did this thing that same time she did. Heh.

[This will be the part when, should you ask her about it, she has some media imagery / social context stuff that went through her head while it was happening that she'll share with you.]

And it looks great. She has a head for this, clearly. And the tourism thing? Well, when the little girl with cancer wants to give my wife a big hug and pose for pictures and some of the high school kids are moved to tears and want pix with my newly bald wife - that argument kind of sails out the window.

So, it was for a good cause, raised a bunch of money, made kids happy, and she checks off a bucket list item just before Spring and Summer when she wouldn't want to deal with a bunch of frickin' hair anyway. Nothing but upsides. Also, it looks great. Did I mention that?

"What Are You Doing?!?"

It was never my intention to be deliberately cagey; I just underestimated how much people would care.

A couple of weeks ago, after being a shiftless unemployed student (and being out of a job for the longest time in my life since I was 10 years old) for four years, and after job hunting for about three months, I got a job. The job was with the EMS service, doing dispatch in the county where I live, and I was ambivalent about it. The money was good, the hours were rough and weird and inconsistent, and I needed to do it for a while to see if I was going to be any good at it or get anything out of it.

As it turns out, I am ill-suited for the position and I have just emailed my resignation this day. This was why I didn't really want to go into with the whole world - because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep doing it anyway.

It was a very strange experience which will fade with time - it started with interviews and more interviews and many, many documents to sign, and then me being drug-tested and told that I have weird fingerprints followed by 10 hour stretches of sitting at a desk and listening to 911 calls, typing in codes and echoing radio traffic, which was as far as I got. What I discovered is that many of the people who work in the dispatch center feel "called" to it, and get something emotional out of it. Ultimately, I was never going to be one of those people, so it seemed like it was time to quit wasting everyone else's time, so I did. Plus, there was this thing of never knowing how things turned out for the diabetic, the parking lot heart attack, the flipped over Subaru, or the unresponsive toddler. I was supposed to be able to capture satisfaction from being a link in the chain, but I couldn't do it.

This is okay. I start my job with the downtown library tomorrow, and I've got some consulting work, too. I have a couple of other applications out there, so we'll see what happens next, but in the meantime, mystery solved.

The Weekly Death

I have this English class, Research & Argumentative Writing, which is ongoing. I have to pass it to graduate in December. It is good that the University would not let me test out of this class, since I have no skill for either of its major pillars.

As part of the weekly assignments, I die a little. There is a "discussion" thread, upon which no discussions actually take place. People make statements and people make other statements that may or may not agree with them, which can often include such incisive language as "I agree." Sometimes the statements share relevant content. Even more rarely, they indicate that the poster has read and digrested the comments of anyone else on the board. Some of the posters are obviously posting from Soviet-era telegraph machines that offer no spacing, spell checking or formatting of any kind, while others are posting without the benefits of literacy. Some of these "people" have to be comment-generating robots or something, though one thinks robots would have come farther along by this point. Any dissection or deconstruction of the thread's "content" is generally not done, and if you were to say, point-by-point refute someone's argument, that would be considered aggressive and overwhelming.

Topics include softballs like "the survivability of the movie industry" and "compare and contrast yourself with someone important in your life." My fellow posters really only get into it when they can judge the morals of others in regards to marriage, gay rights, computer dating, or porn. This week's post is about honesty. The prompt reads:

"There is evidence that academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, etc.) in schools is growing. Some schools have "honor codes," which include pledges signed by their students promising to complete work honestly. What do you think about the idea of "honor codes?"

What do you think about the problem of academic dishonesty? Have you witnessed or been a victim of it?  Is it appropriate for university students to serve alongside administration in reviewing cases of academic dishonesty? Why or why not?"

Here is my post for this week:

I, for one, think dishonesty gets a bad rap.

Lying (either by direction or omission) is frequently the engine that drives progress. Our elected officials lie to us not just to get elected, but also to protect us in matters of national security, or to keep us from having information that might be harmful to our daily lives. Great histories paint with a brush of obfuscation, leaving out that which does not cast them in a favorable light, and the result is national pride, patriotism & heritage. In our daily lives, who among us does not lie to our children to protect them from awful truths, or lie to friends, family and co-workers about how "our phone was off" or "how nice that new dress is?" Lying is a fundamental part of many professions, it is simply how the world works.

That said, learning to lie at the college level is an essential skill for later life, which demands dishonesty. If one can get the answers more easily without working at it, doesn't that just make for a more efficient and quicker-working society? Why do work someone else has already done? "Plagiarism" is an outmoded concept in an age where information is free, and because of fundamental dishonesty, disinformation or misinformation has the same currency as anything factual. "Truth" is a pliable concept. "Honor codes" are all well and good in an age where honor is a fluid concept that includes lying to your fellows when you feel it is in their (or your) best interest, but even they should be malleable and adherent to situational ethics.

Of course, I may not actually feel this way. I could be lying.

Discuss.

How to Make Someone Cry

I like to provide answers for these things so that my readership can shortcut all of the trial and error and get straight to the real.

So - It's Wednesday morning, and I have arrived early for my Math class. Before my second period class begins, I have to read four sections of the abhorrent F.A. Hayek, the unholy and wiggly filth-sperm that pierced the toothed Cronenbergian ovum of Ayn Rand to create the scourge of modern-day Libertarianism. This is not reading I will enjoy, but it must be done. I am trying to read.

I have moved, in the KOM (a loud echoey building on the campus of MTSU) from a comfortable table because it is loud, the normal loudness of crowds moving. I have moved to an empty hallway outside of our classroom, for the quiet. Mmmm. Morning quiet. Me and my coffee and assigned reading. Good things, yes? No.

Classmate arrives. I do not know classmate's name, but it is well-established by previous "interactions" with her that she will talk to a fucking brick, left to her own devices. I have sat quietly and not responded, and she just keeps right on going. I have walked away, only to turn and watch her, without breaking the sentence, simply eye-seek out another person with ears upon which she can rain her lonely prattle. She is not a purveyor of conversation, this person, oh, no. She is a carpet-bomber of loosely constructed words, and on this morning, she has a litany of FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS she'd like to fucking share with me.

CLASSMATE: I can't believe I have this big stain on my sweatshirt.

ME: (briefly regards stain over open book) Yeah, well, I have to get some reading done.

CLASSMATE: Is that for a class?

ME: Yes. (angles away)

CLASSMATE: I don't know how this happened - I got a (some stupid coffee drink) with extra drizzle (a word that always makes me think of Snoop Dogg, so my brain got off of Hayek and onto Snoop for a bit, though I guess he would say "drizzizzle" and when it came back) but I guess the caramel was sitting on top of the extra foam, and I couldn't really get to the coffee at first.

ME: Wow. I REALLY have to read.

CLASSMATE: Right? So, I think what happened is that once the coffee hotness (not kidding) melted the drizzle (drizzizzle) it went down inside the edge of the cup (called a rim) and then when I took a sip it just plooped out (I may kill you) over the edge and got on my shirt. AND I burned my mouth, (not enough) and I think I'm low on gas (oh, for fuck's sake). I tell you, if one more thing happens to me today - 

ME: Let me stop you there. If you don't stop talking to me right now, I'm going to be the next thing that happens to you today. You don't have any real problems. This is a school, please be quiet and let me read now. Shhh.

And then there was crying. Which, in hindsight, seems pretty obvious.

Letter to a 2013 (Almost) Graduate

Dear Prospective 2013 Graduate;

Congratulations on your approaching milestone! As your partner in learning, the University in its infinite wisdom has concluded that your years of lost sleep, missed family and friend events, class attendance, form completion, research, humiliation, isolation, paper writing and Sisyphean task completion - which you probably thought would allow you to simply graduate with a modicum of dignity, in accordance with the course catalog as you viewed it when you started - are a crock of fresh-laid bullshit, and has elected to shrink your goal daily, making it appear as though graduation as a possibility slips away even as you approach.

Picture the University Board members lurking above in shadow, taking turns with a bottle of gin and a Pocket Fisherman, dangling a modestly improved future over you and chuckling as you choke to death on papers. We like that image.

No, simply finishing the work of becoming educated won't be enough; there's going to be some jerking you off going on, and if you don't roll over for us relentlessly fucking with your shit, well, you can always not graduate. How's that for pants-shitting terror and regret, tough guy? Feel that wave of ice that starts at your guts and permeates your whole life as you swim for the whirlpool that will inevitably kill you as the boat of your future sinks? That's the thought of not graduating after all of this crap you've ingested, so tie on your bib and get ready for the next course.

Before you can graduate, you will need to visit the Office of Hand-Holding, where you will be assigned a Babysitter. This person - who knows fuck all about you - will replace your adviser, who has likely taken an active and personal role in helping you achieve your goals up to this point. Well, fuck your adviser, they're out - here's the Babysitter. You will need to schedule appointments to sit in the same office as the Babysitter periodically. They will have you fill out forms until you actually die and then climb, re-born, from your own ink-stained corpse, and then tell you things you already know and give you bad advice before vomiting out forms that must be signed by three other people. The good news is that the the three other people know what bullshit this process is, and will gladly cooperate. No-one likes the Babysitters.

After the Babysitter, you still can't graduate. You thought you could? How stupid ARE you? Nope, then there's going to be testing. I mean, Baby Jesus and Allah Junior in the sandbox help you if you attempt to deprive the University of money by testing out of anything - we'll turn that shit into the equivalent of the Men In Black job interview combined with an IRS audit & and an invasive exam before we're done. No, this is just a circus of other regular pablum tests you thought you'd seen the back of with high school; a skills aptitude, to prove you can think, and a departmental assessment, to get us funding. One of these has an arcane scheduling hopscotch attached to it, the other you just show up for randomly, sometimes in the night when the birds crow. We will email you about both simultaneously, and with nearly identical subject lines. They might even be in the same email. You won't give two-fifths of a fuck at a rolling donut about either, but we're legally bound to cajole you to care, because, you know, of retention and funding issues you care less than lunch about.

After that, you can graduate, right? Ha and also, ha. There's still exit interviewing, robes and hats and rules and rings and shit, endless fairs and "advice," and maybe, just maybe and only if you get around to it, passing the fucking semester you're in. Also, before you even skin out, we're going to start in on you about giving us more money when you're gone; because you want to actually pay green money to us until you bleed from your soft parts, and we feel that. Before we're done with you, you will feel like a homeless person in a hamster ball, just roaming from one campus building to another, making appointments for and spending money on things you don't want.

Good luck, (possible) graduates! You're going to need it.

Debate Two

This one was more fun.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, please refer to the previous entry.

In this one, our assignment was to show up and defend "authoritarian capitalism" (essentially, Hamiltonian economics and market systems combined with Gilded Age thinking) against a team who, when handed the ideology of "social democracy" went for a kind of Socialist Democratic Utopia that they elucidated pretty well except around some of the smaller nuts and bolts. My guys took the approach of straight up Gilded Age "God Wants You to Be Rich" thinkers - essentially, Carnegie defending his empire. Needless to say, we got hammered - I was shocked by the one vote we garnered out of five - and only in part because of our indefensible ideology; we also had a drama queen on staff who may have over buzzworded "communism" & "drinking" a little bit. Anyway, here was the fleshed out bit I got to use:

"Society, morality and spirituality exhort us all to be charitable. Within the limits of what we can achieve, we are meant to give, not only of ourselves, but of our monetary and material wealth. Individuals put money in the church collection baskets, into the buckets of bell-ringers, and donate their old things to the Goodwills and the Salvation Armies in the hopes that some person with less than they have will benefit from their act of charity. Hope is a big part of this process.

Charity, performed on large, impactful scales is called philanthropy. Philanthropy literally means a “love of humanity.” In the old Greek sense, it implies loyalty and a looking after something, Being a caretaker. Virtue is required to love something in this way. Philanthropy, then, is a virtuous love of humanity, expressed as a contribution to its overall well-being within society.

Average people are not capable of virtuous action on this level. While they may ache to give to their fellows – and even follow through in a limited way, as in the above examples – they simply lack the capacity to contribute large sums of money and resources to society, instead giving where they can and making little to no observable difference. A wealthy person, someone with adequate resources for dealing with a problem, is [by contrast] capable of contributing massive funds (on a level not even conceivable by the average man) toward a solution to a problem, a remedy for an ill, or simply an improvement to society at large. The average man cannot establish a foundation that funds public radio and television or efforts toward international peace like the various Carnegie endowments. Wealthy people engaging in philanthropic acts of this kind create an incontestable benefit for everyone – and in a tangible way that widespread distribution of that same resource in the hands of many would not. Not only does the proliferate giving by the less wealthy have less impact, it can also create harmful waste and deluded ideas about what works and what doesn't.

Peter Buffet, the son of Warren Buffet, made an argument relating to this phenomenon back in July for an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, in which he referred to the widespread small-change giving practiced by people with limited resources combined with the bloated state of the non-profit industry as a form of “conscience-laundering.” In effect, it allows the disparate charitable giving to spread without doing much good, while simultaneously allowing people to go on with their lives believing that they have done a great good. Picture a yard littered with trash which is then dusted by a newfallen snow. It's pretty & conceals the trash – but only for a while.

Philanthropy can make an impact like an avalanche, whisking away a great ill in an unstoppable torrent, or like the massive snowball that picks up speed and size as it rolls downhill – the size of the movement, and the way in which it is centralized make all the difference. That said, if you're someone who claims to truly care about our society and improvement of the world we see around us, you have to support great wealth in the hands a few very virtuous men as a concept we can all get behind. For the greater good of mankind, economic power must rest in the hands of those who will grasp and wield it to make a real difference."

And the great crazy speech I never shared because the opportunity eluded me:

"Adam Smith famously spoke of an “Unseen Hand” that invisibly regulates the economy as though by a natural process; We would argue that the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few is the result of God helping those who help themselves, the result of an intervention by a “Divine Hand,” if you will. Andrew Carnegie wrote that society would be best benefited by the application of wealth not by governments or inheritance or bequests, but by the wealthy men who had the acumen and wherewithal to garner great wealth in the first place.

For them to achieve in this way, they have to have applied their gifts from God diligently and virtuously, or surely God would not have allowed them to succeed. In reality, he has placed the biggest challenges before the rich man: Jesus told of the likelihood of the camel making it through the eye of the needle being greater than the rich man making it into Heaven; unless you believe that God wants to exclude all rich men from Heaven, then you must believe that that He [the Almighty God] puts no challenges before us that we cannot handle, and thus what Christ means is that the rich man must work harder, has a rougher time of it, must contribute more, must carry the burden of the poor upon his back and truly be a boon and blessing to society as a whole if he seeks to enter the perfect and holy kingdom of God.

The Bible also says that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and assuredly, that's true, but the wealthy man does not love his money, he merely loves what it can do for mankind. God has placed the wealth in the hands of the very few for the same reason that He does not grow tropical fruit in any place except the tropics; he knows that it will only flourish when cared for properly by men of skill and virtue."

Debate One

In this American Political Thought class I'm taking, we're scheduled to have four debates in five weeks - two of them are this week, though. I had to take part in two of them, and I thought I'd post my initial arguments here with the caveat that a lot got added to these when they actually got presented.

My first assignment (last Monday) was to argue on a team and with a team for the preservation of the Union against Northern abolitionists who wanted to secede in an act of protest. For some reason, the opposition (who lost to us by unanimous vote) thought that we would show up and argue from the perspective of the Southern states. They thought we would defend slavery, not only Biblically, but as a viable economic institution. They were caught a little flat-footed, and we degenerated into some yelling relatively quickly. Here's how we opened:

"Much has been made of how terrible is the institution of slavery here today. We are agreed. Slavery is terrible, and represents a blight on the human condition. We have the utmost respect for Mssrs. Douglass and Garrison, and above all, the Bible of the Lord our God, twisted as it has been to justify this deplorable practice. It has been said that the tragedy of slavery in the Southern states – the ongoing exploitation of the people we choose to call 'slaves,' which is a mockery of tradition and which is often unfairly justified by those with property for economic reasons (which is to say, reasons that support their economics) – is reason enough for the Northern, non-slave holding states to secede from these United States, creating at least one nation with true freedom.

Which would also serve to create another nation where slaves will continue to be owned and held by their masters, and there would be no checks on their behavior. This nation would be next door, and we would have no authority over them.

If this action, this secession of Northern states, is being suggested as a form of protest against this terrible form of human misery then let me contend that it would constitute an abject failure. Protest's primary goal is meant as a bulwark against injustice. This act would be the polar opposite of standing up for justice – it would be the North running away. Simply put, this secession would constitute running away from an injustice, a disassociation with slavery, a condition that which we can no longer stomach. The act itself – secession – embodies selfishness and cowardice, and is not appropriate for a civilized nation of people. Indeed, it dooms the victims of this practice, the slaves themselves, to eternal forced servitude and outright ownership of their persons by others.

But if the secession's primary objective is to end the practice of slavery in the South? Surely we have more influence over our sister states as they stand right now; just past the Mason-Dixon line, than we would over a sovereign nation – a Confederacy of slaveholding states, if you will – which lies beyond that same border? For example, in whose opinion of your garden do you place more stock – your neighbor's, or a foreigner from another land? Should we not bring the collective resources and influence of a United States to bear upon this problem rather than step away from it and simply hope by that act it will cease?

Additionally, since we cannot physically separate from the South – this secession has no geographic consequences – we will surely also create a buffer area unfit for people, a region fraught with tension, if not outright violence. My colleague who shares my first name is going to expand on that for you. This would potentially add to the human misery in total, rather than reducing that condition; if that is your intention in secession – the increase of misery – then go ahead and secede.

Finally, if we cannot solve this problem within our borders without secession, we risk two other potentialities; one is the continued fracturing of the Union; once the North leaves the South, what stops the North from breaking up even further over internal strife? Or the South doing likewise? While this would create a number of diverse nation states true to the identities of those communities, it would erode our national character entirely. If that should occur, what kind of message to we send to the world, and into history, when the globe's only functional democracy by consent breaks in two rather than solve a problem that belongs not only to us, but to humanity? Do we not have a responsibility to solve this problem together and create a beacon by our example, like the kind imagined by our Puritan forebears, for the world to follow?"

As I said, they tried, but they came armed with a quiverful of arrows to shoot at smoke. But wait, in my next debate, I suffer justifiable defeat! Stay tuned.

Recycled Clothing Bins

You may have seen these.

They lurk in vast expanses of parking lot, that solidly paved hell unique to suburbia. This one sits roughly equidistant from a grocery store, two banks, a giant liquor store, a gas station, a Waffle House and a McDonald's.

They seem to be filled with clothing and shoes and coats and things no one wants anymore, freely donated by citizens and destined to be placed upon the backs (and feet) of the needy, while simultaneously funding non-profit organizations that help society like MADD, in this case. That's what they SEEM to be filled with, but in fact, they are filled with LIES!

The firm that runs these, American Textile Recycling Services (whose Tennessee Facebook page manages to fuck up the name of the state) is a FOR PROFIT firm that cleans out the bins, sells the stuff inside to secondhand clothing stores at a profit, and then sends a check for a small (though previously-agreed-upon and certainly not non-existent) percentage to their "community partners," otherwise known as the firm(s) without whose logo(s) you'd never have donated your old stuff in the first place. You'd have schlepped it to Goodwill or one of the religious guys.

So - drop your stuff in here, and a very small amount of it goes back to MADD. Most of it goes in the pockets of ATRS. Additionally, you take it out of the hands of people who actually are non-profits and run stuff like this. The problem has surfaced in Arizona and New Hampshire and here in Tennessee, and the only press otherwise I can find is self-generated or in the form of arguments about whether or not they're skimming and scamming. And then there's this person, who made it to the party WAY before I did.

So - short version: Don't put stuff in here unless it's nasty letters about inappropriate profit-making. If you have old stuff, consign it or hand it down, or take it to Goodwill, or a homeless shelter, or whatever. People need your old stuff. But not these people.

Thanks to Laura Dial (who never uses her Facebook page) for the heads-up on this.