Vote switching software

I keep wondering how many years will it take for the dirty truth about the Bush Administration to finally reach the street. Anyone with half a brain already knows he's a wingnut fraud, but the juicy details about stuff like this usually take generations to work free of suppression and make it to the surface. By then, of course, it's seen merely as "history" and who gives a shit about history? Only smart people.

I'm encouraged by some recent mumblings about a signed affidavit from a NASA programmer regarding vote switching software he was commissioned to write supposedly for a Republican Florida politician and long time member of the Bush family mob. Is it too much to pray for a long shot miracle that would expose the neocon dirty dealings, void the election and kick Bush and the rest of the neocons to the curb and directly to jail? Yeah....probably, but it's a cold and windy night and the house is creeking like an old boat. It's a perfect time for dreaming.

Little red notebook

I've choked on my intention to post unedited notebook entries, at least from the little red, psychotic notebook. Maybe I'll try another one later but that's it for this one. There are limits, even if only ones imposed by the ego. Now I can just go back to worrying someone will find it after I'm dead or when I'm in the bathroom, brushing my teeth.

I read from After Hours at an open mike last night and afterwards a guy asked to buy it from me. I almost said no because, it's really a beta version. I'm in the process of adding more material. It was progress for me, just to say yes. After all, more pages or not, it was a fair deal. He liked the poems and offered the cover price for the zine, three dollars. Hell, it's a deal at ten times that. It's a hand-made, limited edition filled with excellent, original poetry and interesting images. We were both happy.

Two birds on a snowy fence

What is a good beginning?

Excerpts from the little red notebook, circa 199?.
Note: As soon as I committed myself to this project I found I had many important things to do; spray fixative on some photos I'm turning into refrigerator magnets, re-feed the birds. They have already consumed large quantities of seed this morning, but hey, it's cold out. Prepare a new, bigger and better incense bowl. Light more incense. Eat some nuts. Drink more coffee. Throw left over Thanksgiving salad away. It's garbage day. Eat some tofu. Write this note.

"I'm sitting in the Deli at Rick's grocery store in Talent as the woman I'm working for shops. It's 6am. She's a nice, eccentric old lady who likes to have the store to herself and pays me $10 an hour to drive her there. I forgot my book, too groggy, so I bought this notebook and these words are the outcome.

What is a good beginning? Who is it for? Do I want to tell a story or do I care about that? I want to create an other. I need to see the myth of my life.

I've been reading Moore's Care of the Soul lately. He suggests welcoming one's questions and problems as messages from the soul; a tapping on the shoulder, a calling to notice, embrace, enter the mystery of imperfection. I've been trying that lately and it's (of course) REALLY uncomfortable. I have been feeling enormous anger, like a hand inside a glove, as though it were a body within my body, with a life of its own. It seems this anger is the primary feeling I used to, unconsciously, consider the native me. This books traffic in answers but they are merely seeds, quick planting but slow growing. I feel embarrassed for expecting so much from the obvious. One thing is certain. I am touching my limits. Feeling my limits. I have become a peculiar, hydra-headed bird, confused by looking in too many directions at once, but there is an end to everything. There's a last time for everything.

Life turning under, into memories, as though it is my only purpose
to create and distill stories.

Right now Barbara is at the cash register, so I've got to go and get the truck."

What keeps you up nights?

Asia Kennen posted an interesting comment on her blog yesterday. "What keeps you up nights? The fear that someone may read all the random scribbles in my notebook when I am not looking." Ain't that the truth! I am surrounded, haunted, by scraps and rumpled piles of notebooks harboring embarrassing notes to self, unedited bits and starts, some going back years, that will probably never receive a finishing touch; mental space junk; dark matter perpetually orbiting me as I wobble through life.

That said, this morning, inspired by her question, I picked up an old red 4x6 Mead Memo Book that had fallen yesterday from the overstuffed bookshelf defining the alcove where I sit and work on poems, when I manage to pull myself out of bed in the pre-dawn chill, and commune with my muses, as the ancients were so fond of saying. I say "muses" because I either have several or one who is a shape shifter. "Learning my Limits" is penned on the cover in grade school style print. I must have several personalities because my handwriting changes with my mood. At any rate, Kennen's question inspired me this morning to leap before I look and post the first two entries. I will do my damnedest not edit anything but no guarantees. I must do it now, before I lose sight of the fact that it is these things that stand in the way of me and highway.

This is a promise and challenge to myself. The first, As Is entry will soon follow.

Kosher Law, animal holocaust

"There will come a day when such men as myself will view the slaughter of innocent creatures as horrible a crime as the murder of his fellow man. Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. " ~ Albert Einstein

I'm still shaking. If you've got the guts, watch this just-released undercover footage taken at the Agriprocessors Inc. slaughter house in Postville, Iowa. Here's the five minute version. Or, if you're up to a larger dose of reality, watch the full length version (one half hour). There's also a New York Times article on it. Talk about hell on earth. In one scene, a slaughter house worker even kicks blood in the face of a struggling cow after he rips out her trachea and esophagus. This is all under the supervision and approval of the attendending Rabbi, who claims the cows "feel nothing"! Incredible. What ignorance. It is deeply ironic and horrifying when religious law overrules empathy. What is God if not love? And compassion?

As newspaper articles tend to disappear pretty quickly, I'm including the entire text of NYTs article below.

Videotapes Show Grisly Scenes at Kosher Slaughterhouse
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: November 30, 2004

An animal-rights group released grisly undercover videotapes today showing cows in a major kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa staggering and bellowing in seeming agony long after their throats were cut.

The plant, run by Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa, is being denounced as inhumane by the group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and by several experts on animal science and kosher practice.

But the plant's supervising rabbi said the tapes were "testimony that this is being done right." And representatives of the Orthodox Union, the leading organization that certifies kosher products, said that while the pictures were not pretty, they did not make the case that the slaughterhouse is violating kosher law.

The plant is the country's largest producer of meat certified as glatt kosher, the highest standard for cleanliness under kosher law. (Glatt means smooth, or free of the lung blemishes that might indicate disease.) Employing 600 people and selling under the popular Aaron's Best brand, it is the only American plant allowed to export to Israel.

On the 30-minute tape, each animal is placed in a rotating drum so it can be killed while upside down, as required by Orthodox rabbis in Israel. Immediately after the shochet, or ritual slaughterer, has slit the throat, another worker tears open each steer's neck with a hook and pulls out the trachea and esophagus. The drum rotates, and the steer is dumped on the floor. One after another, animals with dangling windpipes stand up or try to; in one case, death takes three minutes.

In most kosher plants, animals are tightly penned while their throats are slashed, and the organs are not torn; tearing by the shochet is forbidden under Jewish law. In nonkosher plants, animals by law must be made unconscious before they are killed.

Virtually all defenders of kosher slaughter, called shechita, insist that the prescribed rapid cut with a razor-sharp two-foot blade is humane because it causes instant and painless death. Jewish law also forbids killing injured or sick animals, so they may not be stunned first, either with clubs as in ancient times or with air hammers, pistols or electricity today.

Federal law considers properly conducted religious slaughter to be humane, and so allows Jewish as well as Muslim slaughterhouses to forgo stunning. But federal rules outlaw leaving animals killed that way conscious "for an extended period of time."

Rabbi Chaim Kohn, of the Agriprocessors plant, says the cows feel nothing, even as they struggle on the floor and slamm their heads into walls. "Unconsciousness and the external behavior of the animal have nothing to do with shechita," he said. Because the throat-tearing happens after the shochet's cut, he said, it does not render the animal nonkosher.

Other experts in kosher law were divided on the issue.

Rabbis Menachem Genack and Yisroel Belsky, the chief experts for the Orthodox Union, which certifies over 600,000 products as kosher - including Aaron's Best meats - said the killings on the tape, while "gruesome," appeared kosher because the shochet checked to make sure he had severed both the trachea and esophagus.

Scientific studies, Rabbi Belsky said, found that an animal whose brain had lost blood pressure when its throat was slit felt nothing and any motions it made were involuntary.

"The perfect model is the headless chicken running around," said Rabbi Genack.

Both rabbis said they were willing to revisit the plant and study whether tearing the throat or letting steers thrash on the ground violated Talmudic proscriptions against cruelty to animals.

The union, they said, prefers a type of pen designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in which steers are killed standing up with their weight supported. They were designed in the 1950's so American kosher plants could stop killing live animals suspended on chains, which was seen as both cruel and dangerous to the slaughterer.

But a spokesman for Shechita UK, a British lobbying group that defends ritual slaughter against the protests of animal-rights activists, said after watching the tape with a rabbi and a British shochet that he "felt queasy," and added,"I don't know what that is, but it's not shechita."

The spokesman, Shimon Cohen, said that in Britain an animal must be restrained for 30 seconds to bleed, and no second cut is allowed. Done correctly, he said, a shochet's cut must produce instantaneous unconsciousness, so Agriprocessors' meat could not be considered kosher.

Asked how prominent authorities could disagree over such a fundamental issue, he replied: "Well, we don't have a pope. You do find rabbis who interpret things in different ways."

Dr. Temple Grandin, a veterinarian at Colorado State University who designs humane slaughter plants, viewed the tape last week without knowing the location. She called it "an atrocious abomination, nothing like I've seen in 30 kosher plants I've visited here and in England, France, Ireland and Canada."

She said the throat-tearing violated federal anti-cruelty law. "Nothing in the Humane Slaughter Act says you can start dismembering an animal while it's still conscious," she said.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which also certifies the plant, said it had not received the tapes yet and had no comment.

Rabbi Kohn, of Agriprocessors, said the throat-tearing was done only to speed bleeding. Recent Federal rules for slaughterhouse inspectors do recognize "the ritual cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding" as different from skinning or butchering, which is forbidden "until the animal is insensible."

The plant is at the center of a 2000 book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," by Stephen G. Bloom, which described the tensions in the tiny farming town between residents and Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn who took over its defunct slaughterhouse in 1987.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, posted the tapes at GoVeg.com today and demanded that the plant be prosecuted for animal cruelty and decertified by kosher authorities. While the group advocates vegetarianism, it accepts that shechita can be relatively painless, said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman.

Mr. Friedrich said that after two fruitless years of pressing Agriprocessors to improve conditions, PETA sent a volunteer to the plant with a hidden camera for seven weeks last summer.

The cameraman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no trouble being hired (he was assigned to the sausage department) or filming during his lunch hours and on days he called in sick.

"I'm glad I did it," said the young man, who became a vegetarian and volunteered for undercover work two years ago after seeing a PETA videotape. "I wish people who eat meat could stand where I did and see the things I saw."

Meat from the Agriprocessors plant can end up in any market or restaurant. Because Jewish law requires that the sciatic nerves and certain fats be cut out, which tears up the meat until it can only be sold as hamburger, the hindquarters of virtually all kosher-killed steers are sold as conventional meat.