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Fur Pete’s Sake!

I’m angry! Remember back in the early 90s when everyone was against using real fur in fashion and used faux fur and it was cool? And then there was a backlash in the mid-90s (which resulted in part in me having a letter published in the mag in response to Vogue’s stupid editor, Anna Wintour’s comment that she didn’t understand how meat-eaters could be anti-fur)…. Well, now things are going about how you’d expect, with an increasing demand for the fur of endangered species. And this is not good. Angry angry angry angry! STUPID people!!!!

Happy Meanie

A try at a first post, for me. I have now entered the blogosphere.

Fast Company‘s cover article for December is a good overview of what Wal-Mart is doing to our economy. It is more even-handed than many others very critical of WM, so perhaps more useful for discussion with frequent shoppers whom we all know.

“The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know”

Then there’s the PBS StoreWars report, which is more polarizing. And for a real exposure of the oxymoron “Wal-Mart ethics,” try here.

A Good Farmer

by BARBARA KINGSOLVER
from the November 3, 2003 issue of The Nation

Sometime around my fortieth birthday I began an earnest study of agriculture.
I worked quietly on this project, speaking of my new interest to almost no
one because of what they might think. Specifically, they might think I was out
of my mind.

Why? Because at this moment in history it’s considered smart to get out of
agriculture. And because I was already embarked on a career as a writer, doing work that many people might consider intellectual and therefore superior to anything involving the risk of dirty fingernails. Also, as a woman in my early
40s, I conformed to no right-minded picture of an apprentice farmer. And
finally, with some chagrin I’ll admit that I grew up among farmers and spent the
first decades of my life plotting my escape from a place that seemed to offer me almost no potential for economic, intellectual or spiritual satisfaction.

It took nigh onto half a lifetime before the valuables I’d casually left
behind turned up in the lost and found.
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