new years eve is always a lot more contentious for me than i would hope. maybe some new year in the future it will work out. but i hope that you find yourselves surrounded by the people you want to be surrounded by. i'm sorry i wont be there, if i happen to be one of those people for you. have a wonderful beginning to 2004 and i will see you soon maybe

"
I die fast in this city
outside I die slow

everywhere i am is just another thing without you in it
"

years ago a friend purchased one of those very not legal tiny miniature turtles in the streets of chinatown. somehow it came to pass that she could not keep the turtle, so little turtle was handed over to the custody of my family. the poor thing, it turns out the turtle is suicidal. could it be the pressure of feeling unwanted? who knows. but little turtle got out of the tank that was eir home, and tried walking off the desk, plummeting to a certain death that wasnt so certain after all. little turtle lived.

but little turtle's fate is yet to be determined, for eir shell is misshapen beyond normalcy. we have a little hunchback turtle!

ok, the turtle isn't really a hunchback. but theres something quite strange going on with eir shell, where the body seems to have outgrown the shell but it's still attached, and is turning onto itself in some strange twisted way. when i can get ray and his digicam over here, i'll post a picture as testimony. what's one to do..

"Here's a fitting tongue-in-cheek tribute to a roller-coaster year, a time when the truth was often more bizarre than fiction. by Daniel Kurtzman, AlterNet"
(http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17451)

these two are the gems:

Four of these headlines appeared in the satirical weekly "The Onion." Which one appeared in a U.S. newspaper?

a) Bush Re-Election Campaign Creates Thousands of New Jobs
b) Bush Diagnosed With Attention-To-Deficit Disorder
c) Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry Into Battle
d) Latest Leak: Bush Orders An End to Leaks
e) Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion to Help Fight War on Criticism



Walden O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of computerized voting machines, raised eyebrows when he said he was committed to what?

a) Rigging voting machines to ensure Democratic victories in 2004
b) Helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to President Bush in 2004
c) Utilizing an electronic version of the butterfly ballot to confuse Florida voters again
d) Installing software enabling voting machines to make helpful suggestions

the cancer cluster stats in this region are frightening. for paul and mike and anyone else interested in paul's posts about the toxics in his neighborhood:

this is a website made by a local environmental justice organization that lets you zoom to maps of your community and view the top environmental concerns for that area, what the pollution source is, and how to do something about it. (http://www.ecothreatny.org/) this is a link that paul found to maps of cancer incidence; maps of risk factors, including environmental information. (http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/cancer/csii/nyscsii.htm)

love canal: what would you do if your house sat on 20,000 tons of toxic waste?

earlier this year i had a chance to work on the 25th anniversary events of love canal (http://www.chej.org/Lovecanal.html). 25 years had passed since residents won (after a long long struggle) the right to be relocated, and it had seen the growth of a movement and many a collaboration among groups that never usually work together. but 25 years also saw many broken promises made by politicians, and a growing blatant disregard by companies (like praxair) (still) releasing dangerous substances into communities.

i remember driving up to the niagara falls community for a walking tour, how creepy it looked and how it felt like a ghost town. a couple of years back, they had knocked down all the houses in a few block radius. so now, all that's left is overgrown grass with trees in what used to be front yards and back yards. the grass is so overgrown that the sidewalks are covered. you can make out driveways, but theyre all covered with overgrowth too. eery..

lois gibbs and the other love canal residents told us some pretty crazy stories, about kids playing on the street only to have the rubber on their sneakers melt, tons of birth defects whenever babies were born, spontaneous fires starting all over.

keep in mind that there are a whole bunch of ppl still living there now. the dept. of conservation/ dept. of health had put up a fence surrounding where the canal caps off, and once there were warning signs about the toxic area. but since, someone has taken down the warning signs in the area. now, the area is known as beaver creek (or some name that's really latent just like that) and theres nothing to tell you or remind you that its toxic there. which kinda explains why there are people living there now right. they let enough time pass, and no one remembers what happened..

i'd like to think there are no more love canals, but that simply isn't realistic. the very same thing is happening in hickory woods in south buffalo. and there are tons of toxic sites on the east side and in tonawanda and cheektowaga. it's right in our backyards..

we really liked the triplets of belleville (http://www.sonyclassics.com/triplets/). it was fun if only for a short while bc i fell asleep watching it. (me falling asleep says nothing about how good it is btw, it's just my narcolepsy coming through) if you have ever enjoyed something like monsieur hulot's holiday by jaques tati, run out and see this. when it comes out 6 months from now in bflo that is..

it's dark. it's animated, but it wont look like what you'd expect. the trailer: (http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/thetripletsofbellville.html). i won't reveal any more, but to say be wary of spoilers if you check out metacritic (http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/tripletsofbelleville/).

we re off. im excited to leave for ny bc i know it ll be more fun coming back to b-lo. have fun times, gang..

on the discussion about the prison workers.. i think the root of the evil lies in the prison industrial complex and the fact that people have to even rely on the prison system to exist in order to have jobs, not so much that the workers are evil. im not trying to skim the discussion by talking about the larger system, but there is something inherently messed up when you set up a society to accept the fact that prisons go up at the rate they do, and then hire people to work as guards on the 'right' side of things, to take care of people who are on the 'wrong' side.

government subsidies go a long way into encouraging certain types of businesses. its not any accident that private prisons are being built. just like the military industry. companies actually get tax breaks to form certain kinds of businesses, there is incentive for them monetarily if they set this up in their communities, and beyond that there's profit to be made. in that scope of things, the evil seems to come from higher up. especially nowadays, with the use of prison labor and the profit margins of prisons (everyone makes loot, including the telephone companies that overcharge for phone calls to the family). but this is what's set up, and it's as terry said, people end up facing job opportunities like wal-mart, the failing family farm or working at the local prison.

when you think of what is to be gained by building this kind of system and cycle.. the profit motive, the ideas of how to handle crimes and punishment.. the people who build prisons no doubt believe in inherent good and evil being able to be distinguished by lines that we can draw. if youre on one side of the bars, you're good; the other side, you're evil.

and when you get down to the level of guards, it prolly isn't a pretty picture-- especially in believing in these lines of right and wrong. im sure there are a lot of prison guards and executioners who do end up leaving the job. but for people who do it every day and may get desensitized to the lines of right and wrong... it makes me think of the famous psychology study which showed that having some sort of role that youre expected to fulfill can go a long way in how things play out.

the stanford prison experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/) is a very famous study done at standford u. in 1971, a prison simulation which had to be cut short because of the shocking way people fulfilled the roles. a group of college students were placed in a prison setting; half of them were told they were the guards, and the other half were told they were prisoners. within a couple of days they were all acting very much in the roles they were placed in; the guards starting beating on people, the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

while one study isn't definitive of anything concrete, it's interesting to look at what happened and at the remarks of one of the main researchers, Philip Zimbardo. The following three paragraphs are his words:

"After observing our simulated prison for only six days, we could understand how prisons dehumanize people, turning them into objects and instilling in them feelings of hopelessness. And as for guards, we realized how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde.

The question now is how to change our institutions so that they promote human values rather than destroy them. Sadly, in the decades since this experiment took place, prison conditions and correctional policies in the United States have become even more punitive and destructive. The worsening of conditions has been a result of the politicization of corrections, with politicians vying for who is toughest on crime, along with the racialization of arrests and sentencing, with African-Americans and Hispanics overrepresented. The media has also contributed to the problem by generating heightened fear of violent crimes even as st
at
is

ti
cs show that violent crimes have decreased.

There are more Americans in jails and prisons -- both men and women -- than ever before in history. According to a recent Justice Department survey, the number of jailed Americans more than doubled during the past 12 years, with over 1.8 million people in jail or prison as of 1998."

again, this one study is not necessarily indicative of anything concrete. but i have to ask, or wonder.. how does drawing distinctions of what's right and what's wrong affect how people act, what happens when we create a prison society where we're putting them up at rates faster than we put up schools? and rachel's point about the army and getting money for an education.. this is where our society's priorities are fucked, and i think it's more of what's being offered out there rather than the fact that people definitively believe they may enjoy being prison executioners or in the army.

hope i see you all before its time to go home for yuletideness. been extremely hibernatory as of late. but december holidays always means old friends returning to buffalo for short stints. tomorrow is here. oh janet!

here, take a sec and visit this (http://www.afa.net/petitions/MarriagePoll.asp) for the anti-gay American Family Association's petition. they're gonna present the results of the poll to congress. i've been seeing this in a bunch of places, but m cho's blogger site tells me.. "they were trying to show that 99% of the populace were against gay marriage." -- help skew it the correct way..

and here's a damn funny 30 sec ad called 'bush sucks' (http://www.bushin30seconds.org/vote/view.html?ad=868Y6N35o8EMDwVLpq1.JXZpZXctMTg0)