Winding up with a BANG!

I was feeling pretty good today. Began with helping to put together our homeless community newsletter, The Occasional Times. After this afternoon's WHEEL (homeless women's organizing group) we spent some time talking over the last year. Our organizer, Michele, had to push us to do it because we were all itching to get gone; I ended up grateful I stayed, it was a very rewarding exercise.

Big wins for the year on my personal list:

1. The publication of our book, Beloved Community: The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry.
   
   
2. Winning the addition of homeless people as a protected group in Seattle's Malicious Harassment Ordinance (by unanimous vote!).
   
   
3. We saved the Lora Lake Apartments from destruction.

I wound up at Real Change doing some research for WHEEL. Wes was there for the daily Sid-feeding. When Wes announced he was going up to Madison Market, I decided to tag along.

When we got off the bus at 17th & Madison, we jaywalked across the street, slanting downhill toward the market; so I guess you could say we brought it on ourselves. There was a ridge in the asphalt, running lengthwise with the traffic instead of crosswise like a speed-bump. We both tripped over it, almost simultaneously. Wes kept his long legs under him, lurching several steps and flapping "like a clipped-wing chicken trying to fly" as he described himself later. I with my little short legs only managed to avoid falling in the roadway itself. I went face down in the grass at the edge of the sidewalk and lay there while I took stock of how many places I hurt. When I heard Wes's distressed cry of "Oh, shit!" my first thought was, "Did we drop something in the road? Where are my glasses?" His reaction was instead triggered by turning back in relief after he avoided falling down, to find me lying face down and still!

I have only a small bit of bruising on one knee -- which is a miracle, considering how easily I bruise -- but I pulled muscles in my right shoulder badly and it hurt a LOT for the rest of the night. I'm actually writing this on the first, because no way was I using a keyboard last night! It only hurts a little bit now, though. I bought a cold can of rootbeer and kept running it across the sore spots all the way home!

On a bright note, my back feels ever so much better! I thought I had pulled a muscle lifting a worm bin, but maybe it was a slipped disc after all. When I got up from the ground last night, the pain seemed gone! At first I thought it might be just because my shoulder hurt so much worse, but the pain didn't come back as my shoulder pain faded, and my lower back has been more flexible, too.

I don't advise face-first falls as a remedy for lower-back pain, but I will take the serendipitous blessing. :) Sarah N. Dippity rides again!

Happy New Year, everyone!

For Your Gmail Security

UK-based graphic and logo designer David Airey recently had his domain name stolen through a security hole in Google's free-email service, gmail. The good news is that, with the support of many of the online public and the help of both ICDSoft and GoDaddy, he has it back.

One of the lessons learned during this period is that using a free email service for business purposes is risky. Several comments on Airey's blog contained information that can diminish the risk for all of us (including bloggers).

• Any web application can be hijacked by taking its session cookie, not just GMail. The increasing sophistication of technology makes it possible for thieves to snatch this information right out of the air. Always use https when accessing webmail, or any other online account. For GMail, go to (and bookmark) https://mail.google.com/


• The Firefox extension CustomizeGoogle keeps all Google domains locked to https (among the many other useful things it does).


• You can set up a regular email client, like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc, to access GMail via IMAP. This will pretty much make your mail access immune to cross-site scripting attacks.

Write On! And Be Safe!

Climate change deniers never get tired - only their arguments do

According to cognitive scientists, the first thing our brain naturally does when hearing a new statement is believe it. Only afterwards do the habits of skepticism kick in -- if we have trained them -- and send our neurons scouting for any counter-evidence. "It ain't necessarily so" is a trained response -- not a built-in circuit.

So what do you do if your claim is disproved the first time you make it? Repeat it -- over and over and over, until everybody gets tired of correcting you, and then you win!

I am not tired yet. Steven "The JunkMan" Milloy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute posts a Global Warming Denial's Top Ten List as a year-end wrap-up. Here, once again, is why he is still wrong:

1. Milloy trumpets a study by climate-change skeptics claiming that Observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don’t match well with temperatures predicted by the [IPCC's] mathematical climate models..."
   
   He didn't finish his research. On the same day that Science Daily and Fox News noticed the study, the climate scientists at RealClimate.org posted a refutation of it. For a less technical summary, See #3 of Prof. John Mitchell's Climate Change Myths:
   

   Myth 3 - There is less warming in the upper atmosphere than at the surface which disproves human-induced warming
   
   We expect greater warming in the upper atmosphere than at the surface in the tropics, but the reverse is true at high latitudes. This expectation holds whether the cause of warming is due to greenhouse gases or changes in the Sun’s output. Until recently, measurements of the temperature changes in the tropics in recent decades did not appear to show greater warming aloft than at the surface. It has now been shown that allowing for uncertainties in the observations, the theoretical and modelling results can be reconciled with the observations.
   
   The bottom line is that the range of available information is now consistent with increased warming through the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere).

   Turns out, the authors tried the same argument before in 2004 and got trounced. They tried this year with a slightly revised version; they are still wrong.
   
   
2. Milloy says one more time with feeling, "It's all the sun's fault!" This is getting as old as "Evolution is just a theory." One more time, with feeling, "No, it's not!"
   
   
3. It was even warmer 1000 years ago, so we can't be causing the warming now!
   
   This is one more attempt to sell the Medieval Warming Period as a global phenomenon; still shoddy merchandise. The latest "study" is by Craig Loehle, of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement -- an "environmental resource for the forest products industry" that is largely funded by the forest products industry.
   
   Find out more on the Medieval Warming Period at GristMill, NOAA, and Wikipedia, as well as the RealClimate entry linked above.
   
   
4. We don't have to do anything to correct global warming: the atmosphere self-regulates.
   
   One more example of "personal responsibility" conservatives sloughing off any hint of personal responsibility. James Lovelock, who first proposed the vision of a "self-regulating" system Earth, himself thinks we have overloaded the system.
   
   I think: 1) When you make a mess, do you clean it up yourself or do you wait for the "natural forces of the environment" to decay it? 2) How many people have to lose their livelihoods, lose their homes, sicken, and die while we wait for the climate to "self regulate"? 3) Nature has no reason to favor human interests in her "self-regulation." Natural "self-regulation" could include plague, flood, fire, and other methods more unpleasant to humans than cutting down on driving.
   
   
5. Roll out the Straw Man! A 2005 report on the Atlantic Ocean current raised alarms in some of the media. Milloy uses this as an example of scientists being "alarmist," although scientists themselves were much more cautious about the findings. A better way to prevent future alarmism would have been to improve his readers' understanding of the science, as the scientists at RealClimate did. Further news about the Atlantic Current.

I have gotten a bit tired, after all. I'm going to have to close this blog entry here and continue the list "next year." Do you think that Steven Milloy, who gets paid for this kind of thing, could be induced to do his own research?

More on Steven Milloy.

Ron Paul will not make you free

I've had a bad cold all week and I don't even really feel like blogging right now, but I am annoyed and fed up, and what's a blog for if you can't rant, eh?

Whatever my criticisms of Ron Paul himself (and I have many), I recognize common interests with most of his supporters. We are angry about the decline of democracy and the engrossment of executive power under all administrations in the last forty years, especially this latest and most blatantly non-democratic administration. We will have an increase of civil liberties in this country, and a return to the balance of powers envisioned by the creators of our Constitution, or we are going to have a new revolution. While there is a division of opinion on what kind of revolution, the feeling of revolution is pretty universal.

Conservatives are feeling trod upon and want to have a revolution that will give them more freedom. Libertarians are feeling trod upon and want to have a revolution that will give them more freedom. Liberals are always certain that everybody is being trod upon and want a perpetual revolution. And everybody is certain that the freedom they want is going to be for everybody else's good -- whether "everybody else" wants it or not!

My head hurts, my nose hurts, my chest hurts, my arthritis hurts, and I'm not feeling tactful tonight. I say a pox on all your houses!

Freedom of thought is meaningless to you if you don't think. Spending one hour researching the argument against one of your own fixed beliefs will do more to advance your freedom of thought that blowing up ten "Ten Commandment" monuments. Freedom of speech is meaningless unless you speak up. When you edit yourself silent you are under a far more efficient tyranny than anyone else can exercise over you. When was the last time you exercised your freedom to associate, face to face and in person? How often do you communicate with your elected officials and governmental bureaucracies? How can anyone give you the "right to petition" if you don't use it?

Cynicism is nothing but laziness and moral cowardice. "All politicians are corrupt" gives all corrupt politicians carte blanche and lets you out of any responsibility for work. What do you think "self-government" meant? You get to cast a vote every now and then and go fishing the rest of the time?

The freedom that most libertarians are hot about is the freedom to enjoy all of the benefits of living in a highly developed country without paying for any of it. By the chance of birth they inherited electricity, indoor plumbing, public hygiene, interstate roads, the internet, and many other blessings they did not earn or create. The very idea that, having benefited from living in a complex society, they have any personal obligation to help maintain it, outrages them!

Honey, if you can be dropped bare naked into the middle of a virgin forest and build a 21st-century civilization from scratch, I will call you a self-made man and agree that you owe no taxes to anyone. In reality as it is, you and I and every soul alive, from those in the most terrible poverty in the middle of the Sudan to Bill Gates the Glorious, receive far more in life than we ever return.

None of us get any benefit whatsoever out of letting anyone else go hungry, homeless, or sick and untreated. All of us become healthier and more prosperous when we increase the health and prosperity of the poorest and weakest among us. A strong country is one with a strong citizenry -- healthy, well-fed, housed, and educated -- and that is a free country.

So get off your free-rider mentality and start increasing the freedom of everyone around you: freedom from want and disease, freedom to study, freedom to raise a family, freedom to travel, freedom to participate in society. That will increase your personal freedom more than the entire World Wide Web's hooting and hollering for Ron Paul.

Tim Ceis's Response to Homeless Deaths: The Smirk

Seattle Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis's only response to a homeless women who asked him to explain what the City is doing about the rising numbers of homeless people dying on the streets is a smirk.

I like what Tim Harris has to say about this:
"If I hear one more opportunistic bureaucrat say we've decided to 'end homelessness and stop managing it' as an excuse for leaving people out to freeze in the cold and harassing them in the meanwhile, I think I'm going to have to organize a piss-in on someone's front lawn."

Back Door SLAM!

Allofasudden I don't feel so old ---

Googling Myself

According to recent news, this is not a rare activity. The latest news&blogs quoting or referring to me (since the roundup I posted on MySpace in July 2006) are:

• December of last year (2006), KOMO news reported on one of our Women in Black vigils for homeless people who have died outside or by violence in King County. They included two quotes from me: "There are no throwaway people... everyone deserves to be remembered, honored, to have their life remembered when they die." and "With all of the deaths in the community, if I had to bear this alone, I'd go back into depression and be homeless again." (video included)
  
  
• Several videos of me by Wes, this year:
  • A Video Valentine from Wes (his first experiment in iMovie, be kind).
    
  • Two videos of me at the Union Hotel Valentines Day Dance Party: video one; video two. (None of Wes; no fair!)
    
  • A performance of my poem "Mother Escapes" at a "DESC Talent Show" in February. The sound quality is not good, so I've posted this with the words in the StreetWrites blog.
    
  • The end of May was Memorial Day weekend -- Folklife Festival! I performed with the Seattle Raging Grannies, and Wes got it on video.
  • In July, Wes and I went with several other people from Real Change to the 2007 conference of NASNA (North American Street Newspaper Association), held this year in Portland, Oregon. Wes also took the time to blog about it. Video included.


• In March, Wes reported on a community meeting about the Homeless Place of Remembrance project, something very dear to my heart. You can believe just about everything he says about it (and about me). Just don't believe him when he says he'll confess to the 20th Century.
  
  
• In May, "Jewel Two Snaps" quoted from my essay on "Why Write?" and had fun with some of my writing exercises, including the challenge to "simplify!"
  
  Try KISSing these phrases yourself:
  • amelioration of affectional starvation
  • languor lures linguistic lapses
  • transcendental fervor
  • cantatas of calumny
  • cantabile concatenations of cant
    
    
• In June, the Seattle P-I quoted me in their report on a Women in Black vigil for Isaac Palmer, a homeless man killed by a brush-clearing tractor.
  
  
• Back to Wes, who in June (2006) used our adventures with a broken refrigerator and building management to illustrate fractals.
  
  
• Back to poetry: WHEEL (homeless women's organizing group) has a REAL poetry book out, and Tim Harris reviewed it for Real Change -- starting the blog entry with a vivid description of me editing previous WHEEL chapbooks.
  
  
• In other good news about homelessness -- on December 10, 2007, Seattle amended the city's malicious harassment ordinance (that defines harm or threat of harm to any person or their property on the basis of their membership in a group as a specific crime as "malicious harassment") to include homeless people as a protected class. The P-I article covering a previous committee hearing on the amendment includes this:

  "When you're homeless, especially women, you're afraid all the time. You're afraid when you sleep -- even if you're in a shelter," said Anitra Freeman, who has been homeless. "We have to send a different message to our children, to everyone out there."

• And back to poetry (again): My most popular poem, by the number of sites quoting it, seems to be "What is Family?"
  • It is posted on the opening page of the Kelley Family Album;
    
  • Somebody who goes by "!O+O!" posted it as part of the theme for Family Day: June 27, 2007;
    
  • The Fowler family used it on their Reunion announcement;
    
  • And "P B & J" posted it, with pictures, in early-morning musings about family and other human connections during the Christmas season. (picture from P B & J)

What Is Family?

Family are the shouts in the dark that keep you awake
trying to be invisible under your blankets.
Family is the warm heart you run to
when everyone else at the rink skates too fast
and you've cut your knees on the ice.
Family are given to you at birth
with your eyes and lips and nose.
They will stick to you wherever you go
and shape how you see
and what you say
and how you are seen
forever.
Family are found new each day
wherever you put your heart last.
Family are the people you share bread with,
and whoever you share the lack of bread with.
Sometimes your family aren't people.
Family is whoever lives under the tent of your soul.
Your family can be as big as you are,
and from birth to death, your real, real family
are the ones who make you grow bigger.

poem by Anitra L. Freeman

As I say at my own website, if I post something on the internet, you may use it freely, as long as you

• Attribute it to me, Anitra L. Freeman.
• Don't alter it (change the wording). (You may use small sections out of a whole, as long as the context is clear.)
• Make nonprofit use of it. If you are going to make money, I want money!
• If you want to make me extra happy, include a link to my website so that readers can find more: http://anitra.net/writing/

These days, Creative Commons has made such licensing even easier.

This work by Anitra L. Freeman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Eid Al-Adha

Joyful Eid al-Adha to all Muslim readers.