Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

The massacres allowed them to take apart the systems of social assistance negotiated with the unions.

http://www.colectivodeabogados.org/article.php3?id_article=1364

[File this under 'why care' and 'what we need to do']

Michael Pollan on the Cornification of Food (AR, Boulder Colorado)

One farmer can feed 129 of us with corn.

Rather than 12, before the munitions factory converted from bombs to fertilizer in 1947.

We're putting away 200 extra calories, to take up 30 to 40 percent of

the way we're feeding the world with corn makes it harder for the world

we can sell it so cheaply because our government subsidizes the cost of production of corn

1.5 million Mexican farmers left the land

Douglas Rushkoff at the Personal Democracy Forum: Second day invocation speech video.

Some notes. Paraphrasings, not exact quotations, so I'm just putting the whole thing in brackets.

[
Personal democracy is an oxymoron.

I'm on the here comes everybody side of this discussion. But it's the everybody that matters.

It's not the network.

It's the people.

The network is just a tool for people to be people again.

The problem with branding, the problem for top-down communication, all these Renaissance era ideas

Thoughts from David Cohn's Representative Journalism: Funding Beats or Stories (cross-posted from a comment left there, with a couple typos corrected).

Key point, that people don't have to believe in "journalism" to contribute to its practice through spot.us.

This will bring many more people to get involved, which will make the funding of individual stories more independent of pressure from concentrated interests than beat-covering institutions.

It is the general thought that Amazing Things is doing well and - although we are doing pretty well, we're only making it because of your support. Some of you are members - and that helps a lot - even at the lowest level. But it is our membership - especially at the higher levels and our auction that keeps us alive.

— Michael Moran, Amazing Things Arts Center

http://agaricdesign.com/amazing-auction-enhancements
http://agaric.chipin.com/amazing-auction

Spotted on a discussion thread that turned to questions of government spying (FISA), in a comment by the inimitable Bill Conroy:

(For the record, I assume this communication is now being monitored since it likely crossed international lines over the Internet -- wish the monitors would weigh in, as long as it doesn't show up on my phone bill ... make it more interesting.)

Saul Alinsky on the radical:

In the end he has one conviction—a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite—either a dictatorship or some form of political aristocracy.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/11/195520/045/275/493981

I have nothing against the people of the nuclear industry. In fact, I think they've done a very good job not killing many of us, certainly fewer then even natural gas drilling, and despite not building a power plant in well over 30 years, still provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity.

Explaining PWGD in the context of Daniel Pepper's proposed trans-national branded organization of experienced freelance journalists:

Suppose your organization grows from 100 to 1,000 journalists. You want everyone in the network to be able to communicate with everyone else, but now you have ten times the chance that one member may be off topic, unproductively combative, overly enthusiastic, or disruptive in any other way toward the group goals of social justice and journalistic excellence in the public service.

Old red potatoes, sprouts cut off, cut thin
Baby carrots, cut in thin rounds
Strong onion, more or less diced
One zucchini, quartered and sliced in centimeter or so wedges
One yellow squash (or the thing that's shaped approximately like a zucchini), quartered and sliced in centimeter or so wedges
Tempeh, sliced thinner than usual and then cut in half (destined to be mashed up in the dish anyway)
Nutritional yeast
Turmeric
Curry powder (fenugreek, turmeric, whatever yours puts in)
Soy sauce (Pearl River Bridge)
Light salt (half potassium chloride)
Szechuan pepper
White wine

I left the Dijon mustard, turmeric, and the lemon at G's, so I substituted Nathan's Original Coney Island Deli Style mustard as close enough, Jamaican curry powder (turmeric, foenugreek, coriander, cumin, anise, star anise, pepper, pimento, cloves, garlic), and a little bit of juice squeezed from both halves of a small grapefruit (which I subsequently ate with sugar).

I wrote back to everyone and a few others:

Even more: boycott ExxonMobil because of human rights abuses and environmental destruction, as well as the economic exploitation helping to bleed us dry.

http://www.stopexxonmobil.org/

http://www.amnestyusa.org/page.do?id=1101642

ChevvronTexaco is pretty bad too.

Buy Citgo!

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

For about a year now, my mother can't get pictures developed decently.

This is a process that was perfected, worked great, cheap and available to everyone.

A little competition from digital, and suddenly no one even tries to do a good job at an affordable price of developing film photographs?

I'm not sure what the economic forces are at work here – except that with greater equality of wealth would come a greater emphasis on quality over being inexpensive.

http://coanews.org/article/2008/what-dead-presidents-can-do

Excerpts:

Dead Presidents is the story of a black veteran who -- upon returning to The Bronx after volunteering for two tours in Vietnam -- robs an armored car with his fellow vets since he can't find a living wage job that'll allow him to support a family. The acting, the soundtrack -- everything about this motion picture is perfect, but after [a romantic interest] saw it for the first time with me, all [she] had to say was, "I don't think Anthony [the protagonist] tried hard enough to find a job."

Hi ______,

Just to try to give the angle at which I come at the liberal / conservative question...

Instant Message conversation, Tuesday, February 26, 2008

prino1 12:41
i need quick help if you have a second... i am having a hard time understanding the conservative view of things

regardless of how I feel

i need to be able to explain and understad why conservatives think people are to blame for poverty

on a micro- individual level

i just can't wrap my head around it

benjamin melançon 12:42
and how am i supposed to help? the only thing conservative about me is that i don't like old things being taken down

In comments to an article on Clinton's NAFTA position:

Alexa, on February 25th, 2008 at 12:19 am Said:

[Very initial first rough start of a beginning of a draft.]

PWGD rules for being a PWGD service:
1. People rule. People who use your service can communicate with everyone else should they make a collective decision to do so. (This is why the democratically moderated communication is the base functionality.)
2. Free software (ideally, Affero GPL).

vegetable chili recipie (Cathy, 2/19/08 6:41 PM)

This comment follows up on this blog post, "the political left", and following discussion, wherein it is determined that all love blankets, and all should have blankets, but the method of obtaining them is in dispute. The original author, Mikkel, said in his last comments that yes, 'we should give them money-- by giving them a job.'

Let's give people money, by giving them a job, by making sure everyone has money.