South Park Parody of Jonas Brothers All Too Real

After I watched the South Park parody of purity rings and the Jonas Brothers, I felt a little dirty. Had I really laughed that hard at those terrible images? How shocking. I tried to tell a friend about it, but couldn’t give my full endorsement. The over-sexualized caricatures used by Matt and Trey to make their points about the absurdity of promoting  abstinence-only programs through boy-band popularity went too far. After all, these are, on some level, still elementary-school characters. Then I saw this on reddit.com:

Wow! The Jonas Brothers really do spray white foam all over pre-adolescent girls in the audience! I though it was just an exaggerated  symbol of the way bands like the Jonas Brothers sell sexuality to kids while calling it chastity. Too absurd to be real, right? Teen-age boys spraying a white, foamy substance into the faces of their screaming, frantic, enraptured fans? To promote abstinence? How could a  such a crazy and crude South Park gimmick actually be accurate?  And yet it is. Pretty fucking brilliant.

Don’t Eat the Food

In bill H. R. 875 Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, Congresswoman Rosa Delauro introduces a possible threat to any attempt to subsist independently of the agribusiness giants who have made it their business to feed us. This video also explains H. R. 875′s threat to organic farming and Delauro’s connection (through her husband) to agribusiness giant Monsanto:

Monsanto, as reported in here in Vanity Fair, has waged a war against small farmers that would be bolstered by H.R. 875′s potential criminalization of small, independent farmers. Below an excerpt of the much longer article explaining Monsantos’s hostility toward farmers and the threat the pesticide-giant poses to organic farming, seed storage and our ability to avoid GMF:

“Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.”

Donald Barlett and James Steele go on to say later in their excellent artilce Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear?:

“For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.

Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.

Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seed produced after each harvest for re-planting, or to sell the seed to other farmers. This means that farmers must buy new seed every year. Those increased sales, coupled with ballooning sales of its Roundup weed killer, have been a bonanza for Monsanto.

This radical departure from age-old practice has created turmoil in farm country. Some farmers don’t fully understand that they aren’t supposed to save Monsanto’s seeds for next year’s planting. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product. Still others say that they don’t use Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds, but seeds have been blown into their fields by wind or deposited by birds. It’s certainly easy for G.M. seeds to get mixed in with traditional varieties when seeds are cleaned by commercial dealers for re-planting. The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference. Even if a farmer doesn’t buy G.M. seeds and doesn’t want them on his land, it’s a safe bet he’ll get a visit from Monsanto’s seed police if crops grown from G.M. seeds are discovered in his fields.

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching—an “agricultural company” dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations.””

Jellyfishing, Jellyfishing, Jellyfishing!

Their environmentally devastating potential for reproduction (whatever is more than exponential) alluded to in this  article from January in the telegraph.uk.com sounds like a job for Spongebob and Patrick.

“The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.

Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: “We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion.”

The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world.

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

While most members of the jellyfish family usually die after propagating, the Turritopsis nutricula has developed the unique ability to return to a polyp state.

Having stumbled upon the font of eternal youth, this tiny creature which is just 5mm long is the focus of many intricate studies by marine biologists and geneticists to see exactly how it manages to literally reverse its aging process.”

Wow, is this evolution right before ours eyes? And if so, who am I to call one species’ great leap forward environmental devastation?

Governors Gone Wild or Political Assassinations?

When I first heard of the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, my only context for this information was the proposed boycott of Bank of America that Blagojevich promoted. In the days before his arrest, the Governor had made headlines for supporting former employees of Republic Windows and Doors.

Bank of America was refusing to  fund the factory through January in order to allow the factory to give its employees adequate notice of closure and to pay final wages and severance packages.  Former employees were in the midst of a 9 day sit-in, and Blagojevich had publicly  stated:  “We, the state of Illinois, will suspend doing any business with the Bank of America.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Governor, “flanked by union leaders, more than a dozen aldermen demanded that City Hall divest itself of funds deposited by Bank of America—and stop approving zoning changes sought by the bank and its subsidiaries.”

I had seen clips of the protesting factory workers, and enjoyed their solidarity.  I looked forward to seeing more of the protesting laborers, and the threat they posed to the status quo. B of A’s refusal to renegotiate Republic Windows and Doors debt in a way that allowed the factory to honor its obligations to hard-working employees right before Christmas seemed to exemplify the consequences of this global economic crisis and  the immorality and culpability of the financial sector.

Perhaps, I thought, the people will fill the streets, and alliances between labor and sympathetic executives like Blagojevich will allow for a public confrontation of a system that demands that the blue collar  people who are losing their homes and jobs have to bankroll a “bailout” of the banks that are foreclosing on their homes and shuttering their factories.

Instead, the day after Blagojevich called for a Boycott of Bank of America and threatened to oppose the bank’s zoning requests, the Governor was arrested for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Stories about the factory workers fighting for their wages were relegated to the dust-bin, and Blagojevich’s “crime spree” became the hot news  item. His dirty mouth, flamboyant hair, and careless arrogance inspired ire from everyone from Neil Cavuto to Rachel Maddow. Many lefties, myself included, were distracted by the possibility that Blagojevich’s graft might taint our beloved President-Elect.

Over the course of the month that has passed, Blagojevich’s antics cheapened his support of the former factory employees. Blagojevich’s efforts to name Obama’s Senatorial replacement seem alternatively tone-deaf, ego maniacal, and embarrassing. Democrats in the Senate have refused to welcome Roland Burris, not because they find Burris an unacceptable replacement for Obama (although his pursuit of the death penalty against an obviously railroaded and innocent man shoud disqualify him), but to garner public approval. The noise created by this prolonged scandal drowns out lingering questions over Bank of America’s unethical behavior, and the potential fate of Americans working for companies that are devastated by falling demand and lack of credit.

After hearing news-goddess (and moral barometer) Rachel Maddow repeatedly condemn Blagojevich, I doubted my original response to his arrest. Now that the dust has settled, I again question the timing and legitimacy  of Blagovich’s arrest, and the marked similarity of the Blago debacle to Eliot Spitzer’s fall from grace last year:

1.) Both men were taking on huge financial institutions and exposing the graft necessary to keep them afloat.(Before Spitzer was Ashly Dupre’s trick, he was known as a crusader  who took on AIG, investigated Wall Street, and demanded better regulation of the financial sector.)

2.) Both men appear to be completely guilty, yet while the crimes they committed are personally and politically devastating, they are ridiculous small-potatoes compared to the crimes committed by the billionaire grifters that  they confronted and sought to expose.

3.) Both men were effectively neutralized due to the embarrassing nature of their crimes, while the perpetrators of large-scale economic crimes against all American citizens go unpunished.

Spitzer and Blagojevich are both deeply flawed public figures, but the scandals surrounding each of them do not distinguish them from their peers. Hubris, greed, and lust are native denizens of the waters in which both men swim. What made them different, and perhaps intolerable, was the threat they posed to the corrupt and precarious financial systems that were further enriching the Wall Street elite. Sure, they were guilty of dirty, shameful, things and that made their respective political assassinations that much easier.