Motley Moose – Archive

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According to Congressional Quarterly, in terms of winning Congressional votes on issues he took a stand on, Obama had the most successful Presidential first year in generations (based upon more than five decades of CQ keeping records).

“His success was 96.7 percent on all the votes where we said he had a clear position in both the House and the Senate. That’s an extraordinary number,” Cranford says.

The previous high scores were held by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, with 93 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower, who scored 89 percent in 1953. Cranford notes that George W. Bush’s score hit the high 80s in 2001, the year of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But Obama surpassed them all, Cranford says.

NPR

While the road gets tougher moving forward (due to members of Congress preparing for their own campaigns/re-election efforts in the 2010 mid-terms and the likely subsequent loss of seats in both House and Senate), Obama has made his first year historic by yet another measure.

In a move that could cause tremors in the still waters of Chinese human rights, Google is considering pulling out of the country.  A recent investigation has found that the content of Chinese human rights advocates has been systematically attacked and Google has apparently reached the end of their patience.

While this may in the end amount to nothing much at all, on the other hand it is conceivable that this may amount to a straw on the back of the Chinese camel.

I can’t put this in to words.

Hispaniola has been rocked by a 7.0 earthquake.

I felt the effects here in D.R. .

Friends in Haiti (facebook because phones are down) are saying it’s very very bad.

I copied one of the messages but withheld the name for privacy reasons.

You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

This is the final in a four-part series about my visit to Stacia and Kristof Nordin’s permaculture project in Lilongwe, Malawi. Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Travel anywhere in Malawi and you’ll see people sweeping-the sidewalks, the floors of their houses, and the bare dirt outside their homes. And while the sweeping makes everything look tidy, it’s also one of the major causes of damage to soils in the country. Because sweeping compacts soils, leaving it without any organic matter, erosion is widespread and the soil has very little nutrients. As a result, crops-especially corn-in Malawi rely heavily on the use of artificial fertilizers.

Kristof and Stacia Nordin have been working in Malawi to help educate farmers that “tidy” yards and gardens aren’t necessarily better for producing food or the environment. Stacia works for the German-base NGO GTZ, while Kristof runs the farm and is a community facilitator. Their home is used as a demonstration plot for permaculture methods that incorporate composting, water harvesting, intercropping and other methods that help build organic matter in soils, conserve water, and protect agricultural diversity.

“Design,” says Kristof, “is key in permaculture,” meaning that everything from the garden beds to the edible fish pond to the composting toilet have an important role on their property.  And while their neighbors have been skeptical of the Nordins’ unswept yard, they’re impressed by the quantity-and diversity-of food grown by the family. More than 200 indigenous fruits and vegetables are grown on the land, providing a year round supply of food to the Nordins and their neighbors.

In addition, they’re training the 26 tenants who rent houses on the property to practice permaculture techniques around their homes and have built an edible playground, where children can play and learn about different indigenous fruits.  More importantly, the Nordins are showing that by not sweeping, people can get more out of the land than just maize.

Such practices will become even more important as drought, flooding, other effects of climate change continue to become more evident in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

For more about permaculture, check out Chapter 6, “From Agriculture to Permaculture” in State of the World 2010, which was released today.

A very brief diary, partly because my word’s can’t match that of my subject – and also because I find this too painful to write too much.

Tony Judt, a British Historian and Professor of History at NYU, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in September 2008. There’s a quite incredible unsentimental and unsparing piece about living with the illness in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Just to give you a harrowing sample…

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs-since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable…

But then comes the night. I leave bedtime until the last possible moment compatible with my nurse’s need for sleep. Once I have been “prepared” for bed I am rolled into the bedroom in the wheelchair where I have spent the past eighteen hours… I am sat upright at an angle of some 110° and wedged into place with folded towels and pillows, my left leg in particular turned out ballet-like to compensate for its propensity to collapse inward. This process requires considerable concentration. If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.

…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts

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Politico today has the news we were all waiting for: Alaskan Blogger Sarah Palin – a scathing critic of the news industry who came to national attention by being a favorite topic of the news industry – has now joined the news industry.

And not just any part of the news industry, the part we all knew she would join forces with.

The opposing sides in the battle over gay rights have traditionally broken down along conservative and liberal lines. As in most battles of this sort, liberals argue from a position of equality and inclusion and conservatives argue from a position in defense of tradition. These positions have become so entrenched that simply knowing someone’s political orientation is enough to give you a person’s stance on this issue. That is why it is so refreshing encouraging to see a staunch conservative make the case for same-sex marriage.

No one would accuse Ted Olson of being a liberal. Olson served as Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan administration and was appointed Solicitor General under George W. Bush. He was present at the first meeting of the Federalist Society and served on the board of the conservative magazine The American Spectator. His most notable legal achievement may have been his victory in Bush v Gore in 2001 where he argued successfully in front of the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Olson is different – a man of impeccable establishment conservative credentials…”

What makes Olson stand out from his fellow conservatives is his stance on same-sex marriage. He joined his opponent in the Bush v Gore case, David Boies, to mount a legal challenge to Proposition 8 in California. That lawsuit is ongoing and should result in a ruling soon.

The case he is bringing before the California Supreme Court would be enough to make Olson newsworthy. However, I find the argument he makes in a recent piece in Newsweek in support of equal rights even more compelling than his legal efforts.

Crossposted from Nourishing the Planet.

I’ve had the opportunity to try some traditional-and tasty-local foods while I’ve been traveling in Africa, including amaranth, breadfruit, matooke (mashed banana), posho (maize flour), groundnut sauce, spider weed, sukuma wiki (a leafy green), and a whole lot of other vegetables and fruits with names that I can neither remember nor pronounce.

One thing I haven’t tried yet is found all over Africa and, in addition to being a food source, it is also considered a pest-grasshoppers. As I was walking through a market in Kampala, Uganda I noticed women “shelling” what I thought were beans, but upon closer inspection the baskets sitting between their legs were full of wriggling grasshoppers. As they sat, chatting with one another and the curious American, they were de-winging the insects so that they could be either sold “raw” or fried for customers.

Despite the yuck factor many of you reading this might have for eating insects, grasshoppers, crickets, termites, and other “bugs” can be a nutritious source of protein, vitamins, minerals,

and other nutrients. According to the results from a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization workshop in 2008, caterpillars are an important source of food for many people in Central Africa, providing not only protein, but also potassium and iron.

Collecting and selling insects can also be an important source of income, especially for women in Africa. And as climate change increases the prevalence of certain insects, they become an even more important source of food in the future.

In continuing the cooking series.

Sadly, these aren’t the ribs I finished last night. We were sadly short handed, and I wasn’t able to get any shots during the process. My assistant had to fill in for her mother thanks to a nasty flu bug that put her little brother in the hospital, so there was some scrambling yesterday to do the extras.