Damek.

One of my favorite authors, Ken MacLeod, tells us John M. Ford has died. Not knowing who Mr. Ford was, I clicked through to discover a poem I quite like. I don’t usually like poetry, despite having gone through a teenage phase where I wrote some. But what really through me for a loop was clicking through yet again to find the circumstances under which the poem was written.

My lord, a man who could jot off a verse like that as a blog comment. There certainly is a hole in the universe now. I’ll have to seek some of his work.

New York City has joined other cities and countries in regulating (via a ban) trans fats from restaurants.

Well, almost anyway. There’s a review period and a final vote in October. But it’s pretty much done. After an initial distaste over another government ban (which always seem heavy-handed), a cursory review of the information leads me to believe there’s nothing bad about this. There will be some short-term costs for restaurants as they change their recipes and cooking methods, but they really need to do this, and once the intial hurdles are jumped, it’ll be back to business as usual. It’s beyond the capabilities of most people, particularly those most affected by these sorts of foods (think KFC), to stay informed and monitor their diet for something like this.

Granted, it doesn’t have secondary health effects like cigarette smoke, but it’s not really like that. I think of it more as if we’ve just discovered some common food ingredient is actually a slow poison. There’s no reason for it to be there, and it hurts everyone who consumes it. So why not ban it? If only for a distaste of bans, then it’s the wrong reason to oppose it. I could see opposing it if it were something like regular animal fats which, when eaten to excess are unhealthy, but when eaten in moderation are not really a problem. I’m all for healthy people just eating real butter instead of alternatives. In that case it’s not the stuff but the behavior that’s the problem; banning the stuff would punish other people who are not abusing it and ruining their health.

But trans fat is the alternative. I quote Wikipedia:

Most trans fats consumed today, however, are industrially created through partial hydrogenation of plant oils and animal fats — a chemical process developed in the early 1900s and first commercialized as Crisco in 1909.

Unlike other fats, trans fats are neither required nor beneficial for health.

So, in my opinion, in this case, banning the stuff instead of worrying about the behavior is just fine. We can worry later about the larger behaviors of overeating and the economic realities that force people to eat KFC all the time. That’s a longer battle with many ramifications. This seems a simple measure which will protect people’s health — and lives.

The world needs more lewd wedding songs. (An observation elicited by a random sentence in the middle of Spin, another great book from Robert Charles Wilson. Really good.)

Related to that, the world needs some sort of new tradition (distinct from a wedding) to celebrate the intentions of a pair of people to share their lives for a while. No air of permanence needed, no air of ownership — just a party to say, “A and B are together now and we think that’s great!” A way to preserve the community-knitting, celebratory aspects of weddings while shedding the negative hangups. Not just a reception; something to replace marriage in the way that a drunken wake can replace a funeral. Full of ribaldry and hope. And it needs a name, a place in culture..

Bouldin at The Daily Gotham (an arguably left/progressive site) has put up an article on “The Greens in the two-party system” (main title “Worse than Worthless”). It provides a nice overview of how the two parties do manage to encompass a wide range of views, how the system works overall, and what role “third” parties play.

My own short experience with the Green Party a few years ago, and with American politics in general, has led me to share his view that it’s not lack of choice that is the problem in the system, but lack of a willingness to work with those who don’t match the perfect choice you’d like to have available. The “platform” of the Democratic Party, and the policies & strategies they pursue, are a product of all the actors involved. If some of the actors remove themselves, the product ends up not only representing only those actors left participating.

Now, I expect Greens would say (as I once did) that they stopped voting for Democrats because Democrats didn’t represent them. In effect, it’s a chicken-egg problem; it’s not the Greens leaving that made Dems move right, the Dems moving right made the Greens stop voting for them.

Even if this is true, it reflects a misunderstanding of how the system works, as Bouldin did a nice job of explaining. Excising yourself from the picture only makes things worse. It cannot make them better.

Now, sure, simply returning to voting for Democrats will make no difference. That only helps keep the status quo (well, it would have in 2000; it would be an improvement now). You have to participate in party discussions and activities and do some long, hard, dirty work to shift the gestalt Democratic Party platform your way. Now, not everyone has the time or energy to do this. Voting is all some some can do. But clearly somebody has the time and energy to organize and maintain the Green Part(ies), and if that were spent working within the party instead of against it, we’d be living in a much better world right now.

Kos writes about whining. I think it’s important to remember, and it’s applicable beyond the political realm, too. And it reminds me of thoughts I would have whenever classmates would complain to the teacher (or professor; this happened in college, too!): “I meant to do the homework, but…” or “I wanted to finish the paper today but…”

Actions don’t just speak louder than words, they’re more important. In many cases they’re all that matter. I still need to be reminded of it from time to time.

It’s also worth noting that, in many cases, we are incapable of action, or too busy with other action to handle more. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether whining or complaining is worth the bother in those cases. (Sure it’s more complex than this; sometimes words are a form of action, but that’s not whining, that’s acting.)