... On a more regular basis.

Since my last post was about the election, I can say that I've been feeling a lot less stressed out. The phrase "President Obama" has a happy ring for me. I know in reality, he has no magic staff that can undo global warming, bring back industry, start a healthcare system, and make every religious wingnut read their own books and stop killing each other. But alas, I'm part of the "reality based community" that Bushies scoffed at. I know that we have a long road ahead, and I'm just trying to tread water myself.

However, I try to tell myself: That every piece of food waste I compost is doing some good, that holding off from buying sweatshop made crap from a big box retailer and paying more for fair trade goods from a mom & pop shop must make some difference, that looking into the cause and effect of everything I do can make for a more holistic life overall.

What else? Is there a next level to go? Sure, there's the No-Impact Man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com/). But, I don't live in the East Village, can't walk to work, and even he admits that his experiment is extreme. I'll be looking at incremental steps.

So far, as a penance for buying soup from a shop that used styrofoam, I'm taking my office teabags and fruit peels home for compost. Crazy? Yeah. Remnants of a Catholic childhood? Yeah. But in trying to make up for putting something in the ground that won't biodegrade for a thousand years, I'll at least build up my soil.

Well, enough musings during office downtime...

I'm just wondering why I can't leave a simple VOTE OBAMA message in my status bar. Hmmm ... is this more Murdoch tampering with MySpace? Anyway, I hope everyone is registered and will just vote with your brain for OBAMA! Our lives depend on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?ei=5087&em=&en=76d14e551d4461fb&ex=1208923200&pagewanted=all

Why Bother?

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 20, 2008
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the "why bother" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a "sign of personal virtue." No, even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet "virtuous," when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: "Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money." So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It's hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the "split between what we think and what we do." For Berry, the "why bother" question came down to a moral imperative: "Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live."

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is "specialization," which he regards as the "disease of the modern character." Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we're producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here's the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can't imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can't imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The "cheap-energy mind," as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, "Why bother?" because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it's doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable before we've demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done — without further delay. In the judgment of James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20 years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting — not just slowing — the amount of carbon we're emitting or face a "different planet." Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the "why bother" question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I'm describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives "as if" they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to "conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day." Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It's estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we're counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you're getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way "solutions" like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we're all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can't do much of anything that doesn't involve division or subtraction. The garden's season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto."

For anyone in the NYC area:

I'm volunteering for a fun event called Swap-O-Rama-Rama! http://www.swaporamarama.org/events.htm The rules: First, you bring a bag of your old clothing, (clean, please) and $10 (for the cost of the space). Then, the fun begins; you choose what you like and remake, repurpose and recreate something new. Any leftovers go to charity.

This looks like a great, anti-consumerist event. What's different from doing just a swap, is there's something really unique created.

Meanwhile, back to my day job.

As you could probably tell, my reaction to the Tibetan situation is to still not buy any Chinese products. But their reaction to any criticism is just plain paranoid. Read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/asia/16cnn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

If I interpret the transcript correctly, Cafferty was criticising the Chinese Government, not the people. I'll be emailing the embassy at: chinaembassy_us@fmprc.gov.cn

OK, I'm a little bombastic in my profile about the China boycott. Right? Unfortunately, I'm finding it really hard to be a purist now that I'm a homeowner.

I can't control what my contractor buys. I see electrical components, switchplates, faceplates, compact fluorescent bulbs: all Chinese. I was looking for a US-made light fixture - even found a few good sources on the web - but the electrician needed it immediately, and I had to buy a Chinese one at a big box store.

Since my renovations are being done on a faster schedule, I have no idea how green the supplies are. I'm also using some pretty toxic stuff to clean my walls, and the primer and paint (at least they're water-based) smell pretty bad and left me gagging at the gym. I haven't had time to find my preferred "green" cleaners, so I'm using the Tri-Sodium Phosphate. (I have to admit, it's getting the nicotine stains off the walls quite nicely.)

Should I do an environmental and trade policy penance? I found sweatshop-free sources for my next home buys, and I'm looking into my solar panels. When I replace my non-closing windows, I can save energy, and support Habitat for Humanity. Suggestions, please.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/world/asia/04china.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: February 4, 2008
WUHAN, China — As an 18-year-old student with an interest in the Internet, Zhu Nan had been itching to say something about the country's pervasive online censorship system, widely known here as the Great Firewall.

When China's censors began blocking access to the popular photo-sharing site Flickr, Mr. Zhu felt the moment had come. Writing on his blog last year, the student, who is now a freshman at a university in this city, questioned the rationale for Internet restrictions, and in subsequent posts, began passing along tips on how to evade them.

"Officials in our country claimed that Internet censorship is done according to the law," Mr. Zhu wrote. "If so, why not let people know about this legal project, and why, instead, ban the Web sites that publicize and examine those legal policies? If you're determined to do this, you shouldn't be afraid of criticism."

Mr. Zhu's obscure blog post and his subsequent activism is a small part of what many here regard as a watershed moment. In recent months, China's censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls.

And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose to protest. Human rights advocates say the government has been broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games in Beijing draw near.

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China's Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. "I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall," said Pan Liang, a writer of children's literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend's blog was blocked. "I was really annoyed at first," Mr. Pan said. "Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children's literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier."

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a historical allusion to mock his country's censorship system.

"Many people don't know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an invisible great wall," he wrote. "Can blocking really work? Kangxi knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are needed to guard those thousands of miles."

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall's restrictions, was no less philosophical. "I don't know if it's better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried," wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. "I don't want to be silent, even if everyone else shuts up."

The Chinese government seems particularly wary of video-sharing sites like YouTube, and has recently tightened regulations on domestic Internet providers in ways that are aimed at controlling such services.

Others, meanwhile, have gone beyond launching Internet-based responses like these and taken more direct action. One such person is Du Dongjing, 38, an information technology engineer in Shanghai who sued a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the service provider's unacknowledged restrictions on Web content.

In this case what initially angered Mr. Du was the surprise blocking of his own business Web site last February. The site markets personal finance software, and had no editorial content of any kind. When the service provider failed to explain why the link went dead, Mr. Du took the phone company to court.

His lawsuit was rejected by a Shanghai court in October, but the case has been heard in appeal. "The Americans have an expression, 'You can't fight City Hall,' " Mr. Du said. "However, I believe that with the help of today's Internet, the mood of the public, I can win this case. I can even make a contribution to improving Chinese democracy."

Even as anticensorship activism spreads, views are divided about whether a grass-roots campaign can prevail. Some see strong continued popular resistance to the limits imposed by tens of thousands of well-financed government technicians operating powerful computers and predict a breakthrough.

Yuan Mingli, who created an anti-Great Firewall evasion group because of his love for Wikipedia, said the government was already at work on new generations of Internet technology aimed at insulating Chinese users even more from the rest of world. But he predicted its failure. "That's impossible, fundamentally, because people's hearts have changed," he said, adding that the system would "eventually break down precisely because China cannot be completely disconnected to the outside world anymore."

For some of the anticensorship activists, creating a broader awareness of censorship is itself a victory. "If you don't know what's on top of you, than you won't fight back against it," said Li Xieheng, a blogger who wrote a program he named Gladder, meaning Great Ladder, to help users of the Firefox browser overcome Great Firewall restrictions. "It's just like many people not feeling that China isn't free. They're not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that's just the power of media control."

Mr. Li said he expected the Great Firewall to continue adapting to the tactics of its opponents. The movement, though, has proved the power of public opinion as an important limitation of the censor's power, he said. "Why don't they just take Google down?" he asked. "It's because they don't want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is something the system needs to weigh."

Fan Wenxin contributed reporting from Shanghai.

Well, I got the voicemail, while getting off the train to work, this morning from my stepmother. My dad passed this morning.

I'm relieved that he hasn't been a vegetable hanging on for months. I'm depressed that he's gone. I'm scared of dealing with another funeral. And, I'm far too sober.

I think only Auden could say it the best:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

some of my friends may know this, but I'm on a deathwatch for my dad. Twelve days ago, he had a stroke. When I got the call from my stepmother, it seemed moderate - paralysis in the left arm, physical therapy might give him a decent quality of life. Two days later, (while I was working one of my usual late Monday nights) she called again and said that he had deteriorated and was looking immediately terminal. My spouse and I flew right down to Florida the next day.

He seemed to be recovering, even knew where he was, who we all were, and ready to recover. But, part of the paralysis affected his digestion, and he needed a feeding tube - even then, the liquid nutrition wasn't staying down. Then, the damage to his brain had progressed and he backslid, started to go into a state of dementia. He kept talking about being at work, on the railroad in Philadelphia; all the while he know about all his grandchildren and my spouse, all of whom came along well after he retired.

He seemed to be stabilizing, though not improving, so we came home that Saturday. I've been trying to settle into a regular life, but it hasn't been easy. Tonight, my stepmother called again, and let me know he's in a local hospice. Although my intellectual side tells me that he's going to be comfortable, not fading away like a vegetable, and this is in accordance with his living will; my emotional side is feeling like I've been kicked in the gut.

I'm just hoping he goes quickly and comfortably, and there will be no funeral, but a celebration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/fashion/06made.html?pagewanted=all

OK, here's the part I don't get. All through this article, they're amazed that progressives are jumping on the anti-sweatshop bandwagon and that it's been the bastion of flag-waving neocons.

EXCUSE ME! I've been progressive all my life and I managed to put two and two together. When you deplete a manufacturing base, you destroy an economy. When you support a dictatorship, you destroy human rights.

Of course, there are market forces to consider: take the commercial suicides of General Motors and Ford, who have also exported jobs to Mexico. Just because a company is American, doesn't mean they have the best interests of American citizens or the world. I'd still rather buy a Prius.

Another point they don't consider is the Fair Trade movement, where imports are not frowned upon, but fair wages and working conditions are ensured.