….and covering all sorts of things that don’t qualify as news there are things going on in the country that actually need to be covered!! Perhaps to some people this is an obvious statement. Isn’t one of the pillars of democracy a thriving, independent media?
I do tend to live under a rock, but I’m betting this wasn’t covered because everyone was too busy having fits about Britney’s parenting skills. (None of this is a knock on Spears – not interested in helping drag yet another woman through the mud.) A Los Angeles community farm was destroyed in 2006 for the purpose of a warehouse for the clothing store Forever 21. Again, thanks to my feed, from brownfemipower. (I feel like I should just put together a feed of my favorite blogs in place of my own blog, because I consistently just want to link every entry I read and say LOOK HERE!!!)
The fight for the land is still on, but the farm is gone. Apparently the Mayor of LA had championed it during his bid for election, but is now staying suspiciously quiet thanks to 1.3 million in donations from the Forever 21 camp. Hmmmm….. Gotta love democracy.
When developer Ralph Horowitz bulldozed South Central Community Farm in 2006, rumors swirled that the site would be converted into a vast warehouse for Wal-Mart. But now Forever 21 — a clothing chain noted for its flimsy clothes, its past abuses of immigrant workers [PDF] in L.A.’s sweatshop district, its blatant knockoffs of haute fashion, and the fervent Christianity of its owners (John 3:16, anyone?) — wants to lay down roots on the former farm site.
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The L.A. Times piece doesn’t mention it, but Forever 21 got tangled up in a sweatshop scandal in the first half of this decade. While other scandal-plagued brands like Nike and Gap were caught abusing workers in places like Honduras, brazen Forever 21 was doing it right in downtown Los Angeles. In 2001, 19 workers, who worked at sweatshops spread throughout L.A., sued the company for abuse. (The number of plaintiffs later grew to 33.) Here’s what they charged (PDF):
Sub-minimum wages
No overtime
Worked 10-12 hours per day
Worked Saturdays and Sundays
Had to take work home
Dirty, unsafe factories with rats and cockroaches
No potable water No health insurance Fired for asking for small wage increases or for asking for the minimum wage
For three years, Forever 21 denied the charges and refused to pay the hundreds of thousands the workers say they were owed in back pay. Instead, Forever 21 counter-sued the workers, charging them with defamation. The company held fast against a national boycott called to protest the sweatshop conditions. Finally, in 2004, Forever 21 settled with the workers for an undisclosed sum. (The struggle to force Forever 21 to comply with labor law is laid out in the 2007 PBS documentary “Made in L.A.“)
It’s odd to see Mayor Villaraigosa, who won office in 2005 amid much progressive hoopla, hop in bed with such a company. But hop in bed he has, the L.A. Times reports. Villaraigosa recently appointed Forever 21 Senior Vice President Christopher Lee to the city’s Industrial Development Authority. And get this:
Lee and Forever 21 founder Don Chang were two of several business leaders who accompanied Villaraigosa on his trade mission to Asia in 2006. Six months later, Forever 21 gave $100,000 to Villaraigosa’s successful campaign to elect three new school board members. In recent months, the company agreed to give $1 million to Villaraigosa’s Million Trees L.A. initiative, which encourages residents to plant more trees.
The company also gave $150,000 to Villaraigosa’s staging of the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Century City last year, a donation so significant that Lee was given a speaking role at the event’s closing reception at the Griffith Park Observatory.
Forever 21 is threatening to leave L.A. altogether if it can’t plunk down a warehouse on the former farm site. The farmers, for their part, are urging the city to require an environmental-impact study before allowing Forever 21 to break ground on the warehouse. In place of a highly productive urban farm, they say, such a warehouse would bring in 2,400 daily exhaust-spewing truck trips to a neighborhood already choked with warehouses and semis.
even more to the point–while young promising male congressional employees hobnob and network with other men to get to the or high power senator position, young promising women congressional employees are being manipulated and fucked with by dirty old man fuckwads. or they’re marrying dirty young man fuckwads in the hopes of helping their own careers.
and queer women of color are being thrown in prison for giving the police the finger. is it any wonder that cynthia mckinney had her run ins with the law? if a black woman can’t be fucked, what good is she/what the hell is she doing at the doors of Congress?
Well. In the previous post I tried to weave a common thread through a bunch of things, but I’m not sure I really succeeded. I’m sick of this idea that freedom and democracy are about having the “choice” to own things like an SUV and about the “right” to consume an inordinate amount of the world’s resources while others pay for it in very serious ways. While narrowing access to birth control, weakening civil rights, and the torture and rape of men and women in overseas prisons isn’t a violation of any of this, as long as you can drive your choice of car and disturb places you have no business going. I feel like our idea of the concepts of freedom and choice, our rights, has become completely twisted, and I wanted to share one of the quotes that first directed me towards that line of thinking. (Favorite part bolded.)
I can only articulate my understanding of the laws that have survived and been bequeathed to me. I understand that the laws were obeyed not through armed force that was alienated from the people – such as the police, army, etc. – but rather because the people agreed with the laws. In fact, they formulated them in the best interests of the community.
Therefore I can understand democracy. The will of the people was sacred to our leaders. This is one of our strongest traditions. No Native person accepts his or her leader’s direction as a command. Conversely, only fools accept that a society that requires force to ensure proper social conduct is a democratic one. Without the voice of the trammelled and the dispossessed, democracy is but an echo in the canyons of the minds of lunatics.
I understand that my foremothers were an austere, disciplined people and were absolutely opposed to waste of any sort. Their standards of honesty were established by those people who contributed most to the well-being of the community and the nation as a whole. It was criminal to use another to enrich oneself; by this, I understand that exploitation of the land or people, in the interest of profit, was prohibited.
- I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them “abortion.” These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.
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These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. They could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They’ll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.
I know it’s a general difficulty to grasp, but please consider that I’m a human being and not a walking fetus incubator. Another more technical post about it here – HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion.
I’ve been encountering more of the “It’s my right to own an SUV” set lately when I listen to Sean Hannity’s show on the way home from work. They were lambasting Obama today because he was suggesting that – get this – people should take responsibility for the maintenance of their cars so they use less gas. Wait, what? Taking responsibility for something?? These people don’t seem to get the idea of responsibility unless they’re shoving it down someone else’s throat. (But then, apparently birth control isn’t good enough. Apologies for missing the patriarchal purity ball, but I’m not interested in abstinence.)
I love the continuous strain that runs through the show of how they (The radical environmentalists and radical left – don’t you know radical is a compliment?) are “taking away our freedoms.” They want to stop you from driving your SUVs! The environmental extremists won’t let us drill in ANWR!!! They’re stopping us from developing nuclear power!!!!! Speaking of ANWR, I found a lovely post the other day on the subject of drilling in ANWR.
Apparently their take on freedom is “I’m a well off white person and they’re not letting me consume as much as I want.” What it takes to maintain this standard of living and carry out these things is apparently inconsequential. That the planned storage site for nuclear waste is Yucca Mountain, Navajo ancestral lands? To be concerned about that would mean you’d have to think of someone other than yourself, and furthermore, people of color. Would also mean you’d have to stop being discriminatory towards Native American religious beliefs, but that’s not something we hear about in the news – especially with a “war on Christmas” to fight. ANWR Drilling would mean possibly destroying the Gwinich’in tribe’s way of life, as it is dependent upon the caribou and their migration patterns. According to the previous link, 229 tribes oppose ANWR drilling. (Shit, now I’m really being a hippy treehugger, huh?)
The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay (This had been a prison for Haitians with AIDs before its infamy – can be read about in Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power.), and Abu Ghraib on the other hand, do not factor into these people’s definition of freedom. At least some of you can sleep better at night thinking that narrowing civil liberties and torturing/raping people will actually protect one’s way of life (As always, others rot for it and bear the brunt of it – but maybe not for long at this rate.) from terrorism. And while we can’t seem to get our dander up over the violation of these living people’s rights and freedoms we’ll count every (white) fetus that has been aborted (murdered!), whether through the procedure itself or goddess forbid – an egg does not get implanted on the uterine lining because of BIRTH CONTROL! (1. There is NO scientific proof of that. and 2. THAT’S THE POINT.)
Squawking about personal responsibility is just fine when you’re trying to force abstinence on women, scoffing at those who can’t get by on their Wal Mart minimum wage or demonizing immigrants. But when it comes to your damn SUV, your American right (freedom!) to guzzle gas, and a fine cocktail of ignorance and manifest destiny, step aside.
I didn’t realize my laptop wasn’t plugged in and just lost half a post to a shut down. ANYWAY.
I promise I’ll get to slightly less boring things in the near future, as soon as I finish chronicling web site failures and hosting issues (and who knows what else at this rate!), dear loyal readers, 1 or 2 that you are. But since sleep and I don’t seem to be friends lately, I figured I’d regale you with the run in I had with luck today. (Of the bad variety.)
Among some of the things I’ve run into in the past few weeks, I had a ton of sensor gook, and it’s shown up in about 600 pictures now which makes me feel like an idiot. I kept thinking I had gotten it in the lenses only to see that I hadn’t. And then realized one of my lens’s polarizing filters is gone. Filters don’t just fall off. The viewfinder rubber piece has fallen off as well. So while these things were irritations, today was just bad.
After five years of owning my lovely Nikon D100 SLR camera I dropped it for the first time today. Usually I’m pretty paranoid and careful about my camera, but today carelessness and stupidity prevailed. I did not close my camera bag after taking a few shots with it, at which point camera hit pavement when I dragged my bag out of the car.
Ugh.
I think the sound must have stopped my heart for a moment.
Gradually continuing to untangle myself from ipower and their increasingly atrocious hosting. I foolishly registered the domain of the other site I run with ipower. I wasn’t aware of the risks or consequences involved with this at the time but I successfully transfered the domain to name.com last week. I can now proceed with moving the site to a new host without fear of losing the domain, and should probably do it soon.
Most of what I found on the web were people who were NOT succeeding and losing their domains to ipower, or last ditch efforts that involve threatening legal action and such. Never found anything that outlined how to actually transfer the domain, so I figured I’d write something up in terms of how to do it. (To be clear, I don’t know if people who let domains go to ipower or who “lost” them actually did so because of bad, unfair business practices on ipower’s part, or their lack of knowledge as to how to transfer the domains.)
I got my newest computer two years ago. It was difficult to get the larger photo files off the old one as I thought my only option was to burn CDs, and that can go wrong in all sorts of ways. I finally decided to make sure I had all 7gbs (thousands, from what I can tell) of photos off the other day and began the process of burning.
2gbs in and I need to take a break, so I leave the computer running while I’m doing other things. I get what seems to be the new windows blue screen, a kernel dump. Gotten a couple before, everything was fine, seems ok. So I reboot and I get a blinking cursor. I’m not as knowledgeable as I once was about computers, but I know enough to know this is NOT a good thing. 2 more reboots and another blinking cursor. On the 4th I get that it cannot read the hard drive.
At this point, I’ve just about panicked. A friend begins to walk me through a couple of preliminary steps to begin some sort of disc recovery and nothing seems to be working. A few more blinking cursors of death, and then all of a sudden after a few minutes of one, Windows appears. To my shock, it finally boots up. Luckily, I was able to get everything off in spite of being rather stupid about waiting 2 years to do it. I just thought it rather hilarious that it decided to give me this kind of trouble the night I began moving the remainder of things off.
The content of the blog has really begun to shift. It’s reflecting my tendency to hyperfocus on something for a period of time, only to cycle out of that and into something else. I seriously wonder if I have some sort of ADD/ADHD thing. I can’t seem to take up anything without obsessing over it, whether it’s for a few months or a few years. And while I don’t plan on moving away from writing about (or pointing to other writings about them, more often than not) feminism and other human rights type stuff, I just think I’ve needed this break for awhile.
I went to upgrade my wordpress blog to 2.5 before doing any more major theme changes so I could be sure that whatever I did was compatible with the new release. Of course, even though there was this nagging little voice at the back of my mind telling me not to use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, because I trust myself more than some automatic plugin…. I figured I’d take a shortcut, just this once.
Admin panel GONE and in its place a nasty 404!
Restoring backups of site, nothing.
Searching for a solution to the problem turns up nothing but one other person who had the same problem a month ago – with no response to their post.
After toggling a bit with it and getting nowhere, even after purging that damnable plugin off my site I purged the whole thing and did a fresh install. It went off without a hitch until I restored the old blog database. I am now getting blank pages with the main theme. I am hoping the same doesn’t happen with others.
I don’t know what’s up with this, but this past hour has been completely frustrating. I was planning on installing some flickr widgets and some homemade book “widgets” (not really, since they aren’t interactive) but as usual with computing – Murphy’s Law. So if the site is on and off disappearing and it looks like it’s been completely purged, you know why!
Edit: Ok, I should have searched for this problem following the clue I found that tipped me off to change the theme. Apparently this seems to be a known issue, and reuploading the theme fixes it. Of course, this is when my FTP program decides to start acting strange and showing the wrong files. WS_FTP how I miss you.
Edited again: Ok, the upgrade to 2.5 was totally worth it. The new admin interface, particularly the posting one, is wonderful to work with in comparison to the old.
So, as I mentioned in my last post, I’d noticed that my site was down a couple of days ago. I waited a few hours to see if it would clear up, but to no avail. At this point I emailed their technical support to ask them if they could tell me if the problem was on their end or mine and got back this gem – “you need to check the errors with your Web site by your own. If you do not wish to do so you can signup for a new account.”
Frustrated with this response, I called up to see what the problem was. Apparently my site was on a server that they shut down as part of their transition to a new, horrendously slow and aggravating platform. They could not migrate it because it is “too complex.” The customer service guy could not give me further information beyond that. My only “solution” was to backup my site, open a new account with them and set the whole thing up again. (The CS guy sounded embarrassed about this.) Also, I had to get the data off my webspace because it is going to be deleted in seven days. Here’s the kicker – I was notified about NONE OF THIS. There are certainly times when I won’t visit my own site for a week or two and it all could have been gone. I know that part of the fault would have been with me for not regularly backing my stuff up, but regardless, as a responsible webhost they should have notified me of all of this without my having to call customer support.
I was debating between staying with them and taking the “devil you know” approach (and having to deal with their terrible vdeck 3 platform with mysql/phpmyadmin speeds that make me want to pull my hair out) or switching and possibly running into worse problems down the road. Luckily, I learned a lot in the past couple of days because I found an amazing forum about web hosting that is a trove of information.
The company that can be credited for this debacle is ipower – aka Endurance International. I ended up choosing the hosting company Hawk Host, but more later.
