2007 - %3, February

How could humans become their own renewable source of energy? This is only one of the many questions Myriel Milicevic explored while heading-up the Human Powered Workshop during the Interaction Design Workshop Week in Belgium earlier this month.

Projects participants designed at the workshop include the Dirt Annihilator, a street-cleaning trike, Energy on Wheels, a shopping cart that generates power, and an energy generating rocking chair. The objects were inspired by from a Colombian eco-village and electricity-generating turnstiles in Japanese train stations, among other things.

Organizer Milicevic recently spoke to the folks at the interactive design blog, We-Make-Money-Not-Art. She claimed "there is not much difference between politics and play." This realization was the outcome of a workshop she collaborated on with artist and designer Amy Franceschini, called The Politics of Play. (For another example of the intersection between politics and play, you also might want to check out Amy Franceschini's project, Victory Gardens 2007, currently at the SF MOMA.)

The essence of the Human Powered Workshop and the Politics of Play can be summed up in Myriel Milicevic's statement, "I like to remind people that they can make their own observations, share them,…and see grass-roots movements evolve. People can come up with very powerful and creative solutions even with very limited resources."

You can read more about Milicevic's socially and environmentally concerned design projects on here.

--Rose Miller

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What with Mother Jones being referred to as a "liberal stalwart" (Chicago Tribune) and a "porno-political remnant of the nineteen sixties" (the NRA), you'd think that our readers would be leftist--and, err, sex-positive--enough to support gay rights. But nobody seems willing to support the gay cause. Check out a couple of comments from one of my recent blog posts on GLBT issues:

I, personally, am not anti-gay BUT...if one owns a small business then one's views count. If you can't stand flaming queens then why would you employ one? Laws aren't going to force you to hire one, your personal tastes will sort out who gets the job. My point in general is that, as OWNER of a business, who the fu*k is going to tell me how to run it?

Homosexuality is a perversion and no one should be forced to hire perverts.

Well, some feminists don't want to help the queers any more than these Mother Jones readers do. The Maryland Court of Appeals is currently considering a claim that banning gay marriage constitutes a violation of the state's Equal Rights Amendment. (The Massachusetts gay marriage decision partially relied on that state's ERA.) Die-hard supporters still trying to win a national ERA are pissed, the American Prospect reports:

Idella Moore of 4ERA, penned a Women's E-News column titled "The ERA has nothing to do with Gay Marriage" in which she wrote, "...[T]oday we must battle not only long-time opponents of the amendment, but defend this amendment against misinterpretation by those whom most would consider our natural allies."

Meanwhile, the die-hard opponents of the ERA to whom Moore refers are simultaneously accusing her of being the gay-lover. An article in the National Review gloated, "Mrs. Schlafly not only had the right idea when she fought the Equal Rights Amendment during the 70s, but predictions she made back then are still accurate today." Schlafly had predicted that the "ERA would legalize the granting of marriage licenses to same-sex couples and generally implement the gay and lesbian agenda."

And we all know that granting the 4 percent of Americans who are openly gay the right to marry will bring this country to its knees even faster than the journalism of this "pro-terrorist rag" (Lyndon LaRouche).

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Diesel shoppers surely are. I can't believe I missed this. Diesel's new ad campaign for their Spring/Summer '07 collection, is out, and my oh my, just wait until you see what they have in store. The campaign is based on the premise of whether or not you (their client) are ready (Read: Do you have the right clothing and accessories?) for the hot temps of global warming. Yes, this is for real. There is even a video which warns of the dangers associated with a warming climate, but urges fashion lovers not to distress, and instead take action (of course, in the form of bolstering your wardrobe with warm-weather essentials). You really have to see it for yourself.

Keep up on the latest news about global warming at the MoJo science and health blog, The Blue Marble.

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A couple weeks ago, political news website Politico used the phrase "slow bleed" to describe John Murtha's plan to end the war in Iraq by making war-fighting virtually impossible for George W. Bush. (See the first sentence of that link for the usage.) Murtha wanted to pass a bill requiring things like higher readiness standards for troops and longer leave times between deployments that would essentially cut off the flow of troops available to make war -- in time, the war would have to come to a grinding stop.

So, okay. It's a plan to slowly kill the war in Iraq. Immediately after the Politico story was released, the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and other news outlets used the phrase "slow bleed." What was the problem -- after all, it seems like a fitting description of the plan? Republicans started using the phrase to highlight its morbid qualities, pounding away with it over and over on the floor of the House and going so far as to say that Democrats were using "slow bleed" as a title for the plan (which was false; Politico's story was the first usage). The whole situation just looked insensitive (and bumbling) on the part of the Dems: how could they name a plan that potentially endangers the troops, so the argument goes, with a phrase that evokes a wounded or dying soldier?

Eventually, after left-wing groups started hammering Politico for creating the mess, an editor at the website came clean, saying that he had thrown in the phrase to punch up the prose and that the Democrats and the writer of the story had nothing to do with it. Here are his feelings on the subject:

Please note the context: What is slowly bleeding away is the administration's political support to keep fighting the war. Republicans pounced on the phrase because of the ease with which that context could be shorn away, to give the impression that what Democrats were slow-bleeding were the bodies of troops in Iraq.

That willingness to wrest words from context -- and to attribute the phrase to Democrats even though it was not theirs -- was demagogic on the part of Republican operatives. But it was never my plan to make their work so easy.

I would agree that blame for the situation rests with the Republicans if I felt that blame deserved to be assigned. I see no problem with the phrase. I'm not scared off by the fact that it might bring to mind the image of a bleeding soldier; we've been at war for four years and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people are dead. Are we so squeamish? And are Americans such nit-wits that their attention to the Iraq debate can be short-circuited by a poorly chosen turn of phrase? Highlighting the words "slow bleed" instead of debating the plan on its merits was a cheap trick by the Republicans, I agree, but what everyone should have done was ignored their attempts to derail serious debate on a serious topic and instead push ahead with the plan -- which most Americans support.

Murtha was finding new and innovative ways to end the war in Iraq. A prefectly descriptive label with unfortunate connotations was applied to it. Are we really so immature that we focus on the latter and can't see the former?

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