Anti-immigration supporters who think the USA should “boycott” Mexico have no idea what percentage of the American food supply comes from Mexico, and they must not wear blue jeans. Those are just two examples, of course. In some parts of the country, “Made in Mexico” is as ubiquitous as “Made in China” is nationwide. But there is no place in the USA that doesn’t have “Made in Mexico” produce and products on their shelves, and in some instances, “Made in the USA” actually means something more like “the final stages of product readiness are completed within the borders of the United States … but really, it was mostly made in Mexico (or China).” Don’t think that doesn’t apply to produce and foodstuffs either, because it does.

So sure, we could boycott Mexico completely and not buy anything from Mexico. More Mexicans would be unemployed, several large American manufacturers would go under — causing many Americans to become unemployed, and Americans would have to start growing enough food for their own country.

Also, the US might have to do something about it’s addiction to oil and petroleum, seeing as Mexico is currently our second largest source. But yeah, sure … brilliant idea! Let’s boycott the whole of Mexico! That will make our lives so much better!

Sorry for the outburst, but I was wandering along some strange path on the internet and ran into a wall of stupid. I’m not even going to link to the stupid. My blood pressure is already up, and there’s no need for anyone else to suffer the same.

In case you haven’t heard, and if you get your news from the TV in the USA you may not have, there is all sorts of unrest in Iran following the recent election. I don’t have time to find and post a bunch of good links, but The Big Picture has the big picture of what’s been going on in Iran right now.

This is one of my favorite shots from yesterday’s visit to the Japanese Peace Garden at the Nimitz Center. Not that I think it’s possible to take a bad photo there. The place is just so beautiful. It’s one of my favorite places in the whole world. Never fails to make me feel peaceful and centered … and in awe of the beauty around me.

If you want to know more about the garden and it’s creation, it was just featured on Central Texas Gardener this week, and the video has been posted online. It will fill you in on the history of this wonderful gift given to my hometown (and the American people as a whole) in honor of Admiral Nimitz and his friendship with Admiral Togo.

I was there when they built it. I was 11 years old at the time, and not only was I fascinated with what was going on across the street behind the big rock wall, I was also excessively curious about the Japanese who were there building it. The only people and cultures I’d had experience with up to that point in my life had been German and Hispanic. The Japanese were so different … in the way they spoke, worked, dressed, and even in how they ate^†.

Bless them, they never seemed annoyed by the tiny little American girl hovering around while they worked^††, not even when I brought friends along. In fact, if I hung around too long, they put me to work planting. There’s a corner of the garden, behind the ropes that keep visitors at bay, that my hands were involved in creating, and I think I left a little of myself there. Once the excitement of the creation of the garden was over, the bench across from that corner became my favorite place to sit and do embroidery … or just to sit and think.

I still feel happy (and proud) whenever I go there and see the irises and grasses I helped plant (the ones along the bottom of the photo and the right bottom corner). In a way, it feels like that’s where I achieved a little bit of immortality. That garden is going to be there long after I am gone. In fact, barring some horrible future crisis, I imagine that garden –and the corner of it I helped plant– will be there forever. Not that I was thinking such lofty thoughts at the age of 11. I was just thrilled to have an excuse to spend more time there … to watch these unusual people building a garden unlike any I had seen before (except in old martial arts movies on late-night TV).

The Peace Garden is a very special place, and it’s open year-round and costs nothing to visit. It’s a little slice of Japan in the middle of a small Texas town, and if you are in the area, it’s well worth visiting.

Side note: The whole Nimitz Museum complex is fascinating and worth spending a day walking through. Right now is not a good time to visit though. They are expanding the museum (by a lot), and there’s a lot of construction going on. Supposedly it will be finished in December (and the Bushes –the whole lot of them, I believe– will be there for the grand opening). It was impressive before, but it’s really going to be something now! But wait until next year, if you want to see the whole museum, as about half of it is closed right now. When the Bush Gallery reopens though, it’s going to be a hundred times more awesome than it was before, and it was really awesome before! You can watch a preview video (in 3D graphics) of what the new building and exhibits are going to be like.

1. † The workers always had bento boxes of unusual food for lunch. Even sitting around a work site eating their “box” lunches, they seemed so formal to my young American eyes. Almost like eating was a ritual. Sometimes one of them would give me some odd bit of food to try, and though my juvenile palate still preferred mac-n-cheese, that was where my love of Japanese food began. [↩]
2. †† I was not your average 11 year, which is likely why they weren’t bothered with me being around. I was a quiet and watchful child, always stayed out of the way, and rarely spoke unless spoken to first. In other words, not much of a bother at all, so long as no one minded being watched intensely. [↩]

I’ve been pondering business cards. I have some, but I don’t like them anymore. I want something new and really different. In my search for inspiration today, I ran across Cool Business Card Designs: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Plenty of inspiration there, and a lot of really awesome business card designs!

Tonight, I ran across a web site I was certain had to be a parody, a spoof, being completely preposterous on purpose, someone having some fun. What I was reading was so diametrically opposed to the universe and reality I happen to live in, it could be nothing but a joke. A bad one, but still something meant to be entertaining in some odd funny way. I didn’t find it terribly funny, so I went to Google to make sure I had this person’s official web site. Surely not. It had to be someone spoofing that person and trying to make them look like complete and total moonbats.

But no … I was in fact reading the web site of an internet broadcaster, and he is completely and totally for real.

For example:

“Tonight at 9:00 PM, “The Hal Turner Show” will talk about the recent killing of an abortionist and what the shooter did wrong. No, not the shooting itself; but rather what he did wrong that got him caught!

We’ll talk at length about how to carry out such an act and significantly reduce the chances of getting caught.”

Or…

“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions.”

And finally…

“It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.

If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they’re going to get uppity with us about this; I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down too.”

His name is Hal Turner. I should hope it comes as no surprise he’s been arrested. What I find surprising is how many people on the internet seem to think he’s getting a raw deal, because “Free speech!!! Rah! Rah! There can be no limits on free speech!”

Well, there are all sorts of limits on freedom in the USA, and if there weren’t, we wouldn’t have prisons full of people who had broken “laws” of some sort. Freedom is just a steady state where the majority of people are at least content with the way things are going, and when the majority is no longer pleased with their particular flavor of freedom, they change the way things are going until it is pleasing again. We are only as free as our personally applied chains allow.

One of the things we, as a society and civilization have agreed upon is it is generally a very bad thing to kill someone, except under very specific circumstances. Another thing we have agreed on –or so I thought– is it is also a very bad thing to convince, persuade, entice, provoke, or incite others to kill or harm someone. Not to mention publicly stating you have enough bullets to “put down” state attorneys, police officers, and members of the court is, to put it in overly mild terms, is never ever considered wise.

I feel sorry for Mr. Turner, not because he got arrested for speaking his mind, but because he must be suffering from some kind of mental condition. No rational and sane mind would post and say things like the above and then be surprised or outraged about being arrested.

“What happened to society? I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.”
–Craig T. Nelson

Really? Mr. Nelson got no help at all from anyone? Then what the hell does he call food stamps and welfare? Personally, I call that getting help from a whole lot of someones … like every tax payer in the USA.

And since I am posting that idiotic statement, let me post this one too:

“Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else.”
–Manny Miranda

Who is everybody else? White people? What does that make African-Americans? Aliens from Planet X? What a freaking moronic and racist ass, and the sad fact is he probably doesn’t even realize how offensive and obnoxious that statement is to anyone with a brain cell or two.

My gods, the stupid … it hurts my head!

Speaking of stupidity and idiots, I have found a book a simply must read: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Hardcover).

Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?

Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.

Yes, I need to scrape together some spare cash to get this book ASAP, if only to validate the feeling I have had since the mid-80’s that Americans have been getting more and more stupid with every passing year. It’s always nice when I don’t feel like I am alone in realizing this sad fact.

Time Warner has done it now. They have dropped HDNet and HDNet Movies from the high definition tier we pay extra to get. Now we are left with MavTV (”created by men for men” and gods does it suck), MGMHD (old movies), Universal HD (used to be good but has begun sucking), and the Smithsonian Channel.

Though I am sure the new Smithsonian Channel will have programming I would enjoy, I won’t justify paying an extra $7 a month just for that one channel, and I couldn’t care less about the other three. When we first got HDTV, the extra HD tier was a good idea. Most channels weren’t available in HD yet, and for a small amount of money, we got about a dozen channels to enjoy on our new HD television. Now almost all the standard channels are freely available in high definition, and we have the HD versions of all the premium channels we pay for as well. We are longer hurting for high definition programming. Without HDNet and HDMovie, that extra tier is now completely worthless to us. Those were two of our favorite channels, and the only reason we continued paying for the HD tier after they dropped a few other channels we liked from it.

And since we’ll be going to the TW office to cancel that, we might as well tell them to ditch Cinemax as well. Haven’t been watching it, and it usually only has crap on anyway. If the soft porn was at least good, it would be one thing, but it’s not even good soft porn. So Cinemax goes too, and we’ll be saving close to $20 a month on our cable bill.

Until they raise the prices again, of course, which they always seem to do after the take away channels everyone loves and add junk no one wanted, no one likes, and likely costs them next to nothing to get their hands on.

Oh how I wish some competition for Time Warner would come to my neighborhood. I am so sick of being stuck with them if we want high speed internet and cable TV. They do nothing but screw everyone over all the damn time.

Read today in an online discussion:

“Most of the founding fathers were ministers moron.”

Since I can’t be bothered to go to the trouble to sign up for an account at the particular newspaper where I read that, and the information about what our founding fathers actually did for a living is rather interesting, I shall educate the masses here at my own blog.

Via Wikipedia:

The 1787 delegates practiced a wide range of high and middle-status occupations, and many pursued more than one career simultaneously. They did not differ dramatically from the Loyalists, except they were generally younger and less senior in their professions. Thirty-five were lawyers or had benefited from legal education, though not all of them relied on the profession for a livelihood. Some had also become judges.

* At the time of the convention, 13 men were merchants: Blount, Broom, Clymer, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Shields, Gilman, Gorham, Langdon, Robert Morris, Pierce, Sherman, and Wilson.

* Six were major land speculators: Blount, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Gorham, Robert Morris, and Wilson.

* Eleven speculated in securities on a large scale: Bedford, Blair, Clymer, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Franklin, King, Langdon, Robert Morris, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Sherman.

* Twelve owned or managed slave-operated plantations or large farms: Bassett, Blair, Blount, Butler, Carroll, Jenifer, Jefferson, Mason, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Rutledge, Spaight, and Washington. Madison also owned slaves, as did Franklin, who later freed his slaves and became an abolitionist.

* Broom and Few were small farmers.

* Eight of the men received a substantial part of their income from public office: Baldwin, Blair, Brearly, Gilman, Livingston, Madison, and Rutledge.

* Three had retired from active economic endeavors: Franklin, McHenry, and Mifflin.

* Franklin and Williamson were scientists, in addition to their other activities.

* McClurg, McHenry, and Williamson were physicians, and Johnson was a college president.

I certainly didn’t know all of them without looking it up, and they were all pretty much what I expected. Wealthy, white, educated, male, landowners in the middle to upper classes and having careers that suited their positions in life. And while it is recorded that a few of them had studied theology, and I am certain some of those often discussed theology privately and publicly (because I have read a number of their books and papers), not a one of them was actually a “minister” of any sort.

Furthermore … no, we don’t need to designate the first week of May as America’s Spiritual Heritage Week for “the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.” Nor do we need to designate 2010 as The Year of the Bible. Both of these things have been recently presented as plausible ideas by a few of our national elected representatives, because there are those who are so firmly of the belief the USA is a Christian nation, they feel the need to ram that idea down everyone’s throats.

I started a rant about this very subject last week and eventually trashed it, because it gets tiresome arguing about the same stuff all the time. All I have to say about whether or not we are a Christian nation is this:

Which particular sect of Christianity in the USA is representative of this supposed Christian nation everyone keeps telling me we are? In my travels and studies in the world of Christian believers, there are a vast number of differing sects all wearing the label of Christianity, and few of them agree on even the basic points of morality, dogma, or beliefs. So which of these Christian sects is it that is meant to represent the whole of America? Answer me that.

Two blogs I have been enjoying lately:

Awkward Family Photos never fails to elicit a groan or giggle from me. What were some of those families thinking when they had that photo taken? Seriously!

Kind Over Matter is a blog “dedicated to kind acts, inspirational art & kind projects”. I don’t really know how to describe it better than that. I just love it.

Attention all knitters, crocheters, and other needlework nerds:

Check out The TikkunTree Project.

The Concept: To create a communally-produced peace tree, by suspending countless knitted (or crocheted, or embroidered) leaves, olives, and doves, from a knitted tree trunk structure. The project will also include a hand-made candle-light vigil to surround the tree.

The coffee bean crisis seems to be in the process of resolving itself. Lin brought home some beans he found at Target, which will likely be alright, but even better than that, Tasha (one of my wonderful blog visitors) point me in the direction of Sweet Maria’s … where one can buy organic, fair trade green coffee beans to roast at home. It’s the kind of thing that gets me all tingly with excitement! I’d never even considered roasting beans at home, but next week, I do believe I will be putting in an order for a couple of pounds of beans, after I have poured over all the varieties available (and there are a lot of varieties to choose from).

What’s really tickling me pink is that I can roast them in my old, unused and gathering dust, air popcorn popper. Finally, a use for that thing taking up space that I haven’t been able to part with^†.

I am so excited about the whole idea of roasting my own beans, I want to order some right now! Unfortunately, I paid the electric bill today, and that always makes me feel like I shouldn’t spend any other money, especially on something essentially trivial like fancy coffee. But oh, next week, I will be ordering me some beans!!! I can’t wait!

1. † Yes, I am sentimentally attached to the popcorn popper - my parents bought it when I was ten, and we used it all the time. Many good memories. [↩]

Microworld by Licht. More of Paul’s macro droplet shots can be seen at his Flickr gallery and others’ macro droplet shots in the Refractions in Liquid Drops group pool.

By the way, Village of Joy is a really nifty web site full of eye candy. Be sure to look around while you are there!

A Link Dump of other interesting non-news things.

This is the section of the cemetery where my dad is buried. In fact, walking straight down the path on the right of the photo, my dad’s headstone is about halfway up the image.

I am absolutely crazy about Weekend Designer. Maybe my other sewing friends will be crazy about it too. Sewing projects involving simple pattern drafting and no-pattern sewing. What’s not to be crazy about?!

The 8 PG-Rated Movies That Should Not Have Been Rated PG: I have seen all the movies listed, and, in fact, saw all the movies listed well before I could get into R rated movies (and in some cases, before I could go to a PG movie alone). I was not heavily terrorized by any of them, beyond what would be expected from watching a scary movie –otherwise, it isn’t a scary movie, now is it? Are children and teenagers really that incapable of handling anything other than rainbows and unicorns these days?

Inflation Calculator: Find out just how little your money is worth now and how much you could buy in the past … if you had a time machine to get there.

Bottle Biology: Cool little environmental projects using large soda bottles. I have to do one of these, just for the fun of it!

Take a trip into the past by reading scans of a 1943 USDA Victory Garden pamphlet.

The Subprime Primer: A series of drawings explaining in the simplest terms how this mess happened. Funny, in a sad sort of way.

How to Prune Tomatoes

SearchMe is an interesting visual search engine. I don’t use it all the time, because I am addicted to Google, but it’s pretty cool.

The Last Days of W. - a photo essay (with sound)

Not-So-Bulky Golden Compass Hood - a knitting pattern.

My Pet Chicken is where I will probably be ordering chicks eventually. Have a good choice of breeds, great prices, and they don’t require you to order 25 chicks. I do not need 25 chicks. Three will do nicely, thank you.

10,000 Pages: A Colouring Book of Abstract Line Art

The links in my Read Later list are now down to 225, so this seems like an excellent time to stop. My goodness what a lot of junk that really didn’t need to be read later! But still, some good links hidden in the dreck, so I’m glad I didn’t just ditch them without looking.

There has been an ArborMetrics Solutions car and an Asplundh Tree Expert truck hanging around on our street all week. Longer than a week actually. I’m pretty sure the first time I saw them was last Friday when I went to the store. Both of those companies are vegetation management firms usually hired by cities, and I have no idea what they are doing on our little two block street for so many days. All I ever see them doing is standing around their parked vehicles chattering with each other. Seems to me they are getting paid to do nothing much at all. I certainly don’t see them looking at any vegetation or trees.

Sort of makes me want to call the city and ask what they are supposed to be doing other than parking on our narrow street and flapping their jaws … or go out there and ask them what they are supposed to be doing other than parking on our narrow street and flapping their jaws. I might even clue them into the fact that if one wants to look busy, carrying a notebook and occasionally scribbling something in it while pointing off in various directions works much better than leaning up against a truck and, well, flapping your jaws for hours and days. Spray painting indecipherable marks on the street and planting little pink flags for no reason also seems to work for other city employees and contractors who don’t want to have to do any actual work. They look young, so it’s possible they don’t know how to stretch a one day job into a week long job yet.