Dump the Dump: No garbage facility in a residential area, NYC
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Dump the Dump: No garbage facility in a residential area, NYC

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Dump the Dump

No giant garbage dump belongs in a residential community. Especially not one where over a hundred thousand children use the athletic facilities every week.

NYC has had its share of ambitious, cold-blooded politicians who, in their quest for power, care nothing when people get hurt. Speaker Christine Quinn is one of those politicians.
Speaker Quinn has openly boasted of her lust for higher office, and of her certainty that since she “has” Staten Island and the Bronx, she doesn’t need Manhattan. She’s certainly got it in for the Upper East Side–and the hundreds of thousands of children who attend school or participate in athletics there every single week.
Appropriating seductive ‘green’ terminology and the rhetoric of fairness–“Manhattan needs to do its fair share with trash”–Speaker Quinn has ardently supported a giant garbage processing facility at E. 91st street that will hurt East-Harlem and Yorkville. The euphemism being used for this 10 story plant, to which up to 500 garbage trucks will roll every day, is “marine transfer station.”
This garbage dump–let’s NOT use the political euphemism by which Speaker Quinn proposes to damage an entire neighborhood–will run 6 days a week, 24 hours per day. It will require a huge ramp to be built, and this ramp will literally bisect one the city’s most beloved, and most used, athletic facilities: Asphalt Green.
This neighborhood is home to dozens of schools, and the air pollution will rise by a minimum of 16%.

Noise levels, with hundreds of heavy garbage trucks rolling through every day, will rise beyond legal limits.
The East River estuary will be poisoned.
Shockingly enough, the City admits all of this in its reports!
Moreover, NO MONEY will be saved. Just the opposite, in fact. This abomination will require a new tax on New Yorkers–a garbage tax. At a time when money is already being cut from essential programs.
Worse, the Independent Budget Office prepared a report showing that the cost of this facility has skyrocketed beyond reason. The cost has risen from $55 million to more than $245 million. Many people expect it to reach $400 million.
From the website sanetrash.org:
There Are Sane Trash Solutions:
The City plans to dump garbage at the MTS and then ship that trash on barges to costly and environmentally unfriendly landfills that have not been identified yet. That multi-step, hugely expensive process, which will send “garbage barges to nowhere,” is not a sane solution. It is much more sensible to continue what the City is currently doing—transporting much of Manhattan’s residential trash in clean air vehicles directly to a “waste to energy” plant in New Jersey. The garbage is then converted to much-needed electrical energy.
That is a sane solution that preserves precious resources, and answers the City’s “borough equity” argument: other boroughs will not be absorbing Manhattan’s residential garbage that is disposed of in this way. It is not equitable to single out our residential neighborhood as the only one in the City with an industrial municipal waste facility.

PLEASE:

START CALLING SPEAKER QUINN’S OFFICE: 212 564 7757 OR 212 788 7210 and let her know:


TRASH DOES NOT BELONG IN A RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY JUST TO FURTHER YOUR POLITICAL AMBITION.


Moreover, the cost of building this plant has escalated wildly from $35mm to over $250 mm and 
The Health and Safety of East Harlem and Yorkville is in serious danger!


SAVE THE COMMUNITY WHICH EDUCATES AND OFFERS SPORTS TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN!

Note that garbage trucks have one of the highest pedestrian death accident rates!!

Favorite Quotes; and Live on A Book and A Chat Tomorrow
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Favorite Quotes; and Live on A Book and A Chat Tomorrow

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My two favorite quotes of the day:

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.” 
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear


“Insanity is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations and ages, it is the rule.”
― Nietzsche


I will be live on internet radio tomorrow 4/5 at 6:30 pm. Tune in here.

 

My speech at the ICAA for the BOOK LAUNCH/SCULPTURE SHOW
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My speech at the ICAA for the BOOK LAUNCH/SCULPTURE SHOW

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My speech at the ICAA

WELCOME to this book launch and celebration of classical art!!

I am so happy to see you here, and to welcome you to this wonderful evening of discussion about the value and importance of modern classicism. It’s a quixotic but urgent topic. I am here on stage with four of my favorite people—the honorable vice consul Signore Stefano Acunto, Jim Cooper, Peter Trippi, my husband Sabin Howard–to discuss this topic with you, and I’m so excited.
Please note there’s a lovely woman with an iPhone that can take your credit card information, if you’d like to buy a book. Sarah, where are you?
Let me take this opportunity to thank a few people, the ICAA and Signore Acunto and Mrs. Carole Acunto, Jim Cooper, Peter Trippi, David Ludwig, Todd Deskins, Sarah Miniaci, Drew Stevens, Don Steelman.
So, about this book THE ART OF LIFE….
A few weeks ago, in speaking with the honorable vice consul Steve Acunto, I told him that I would begin my talk by saying, “The Republicans think art is for sissies, and Democrats think art has to be ugly to be real art.”
“Well, Traci,” responded Signore Acunto, “then you shall have to wear a breastplate and helmet.”  So rather than turn myself into a valkyrie, I decided to think more deeply about what I meant, polemics aside.
At this point I should probably disclose that, politically, I am currently a radical skeptic, and there are two groups whom I view with skepticism: Democrats and Republicans. Also, liberals and conservatives. Here in the waning years of the American Empire, partisan politics has made fools of us all.
And yes, art is political. I believe my husband Sabin will tell you that art is not political—that it transcends petty ephemeral concerns. But I believe that art speaks to who we are and how we want to live, so it’s very political.
So is ugly art real art because that gives certain groups the virtuous feeling that they support freedom?
When I ask the question that way, you already know where I stand.
It’s amazing to think that the 20th century which gave rise to repeated genocides–repeated genocides–also gave rise to new intent and new methods to better ourselves, to become, as a human race, better–peaceful and tolerant. I am thinking about Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Along the way to evolving and becoming better as a human race, something happened. The problem for me is that in throwing out the bathwater, we threw out the baby. In throwing out discrimination, we threw out discernment. And we need discernment.
We need to discern between what is masterful and what is silly, what is skilled and what is sloppy, what is art and what is not. Currently in the culture there’s a underlying attitude among some groups that it’s not acceptable to discern, that to say, ”Sabin Howard’s work is art and Dung Madonna is not” makes you a (fill in the blank with the latest catchphrase for bad person) Nazi rascist bigot. Sabin calls this the “I’m ok, you’re ok, even the serial killer down the road” mentality.
But we do discern. Human beings intuitively sense mastery. We have an innate ability to look at something and see that it is beautiful, that it is powerful, that thought and skill and vision went into it. We just know.
But in much of the contemporary art world we are not supposed to know. We are not supposed to look. We’re supposed to understand visual art through our ears. We are supposed to listen to the heady babble of professors, PhD’s, and my personal favorite, gallery owners who have something to sell. We’re supposed to read the manual–The New York Times. We are supposed to stifle our authentic human response to a work of art.
So when an institution such as the National Endowment for Self-Expression funds images of the Virgin Mary submerged in urine, that institution may be pretending to support freedom, but what it is actually doing is legitimizing the stifling of our authentic human response to a work of art.
Don’t buy it. They’re selling snake oil. It’s scam art.
Marcel DuChamp did us all a disservice when he foisted a urinal on us. It would have been fine for a few minutes of intellectual shock value and entertainment. But here it is, 100 years later, and art is still being flushed down the toilet.
I am here to tell you: the emperor has no clothes.
The manual is irrelevant: looking is the point. Beauty is the point. Mastery is the point.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for ornamentation, decoration, entertainment, embellishment, and illustration. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for freaky fun. It means you can see the difference.
Now what about the other part of my polemical statement, art is for sissies.
I think this goes back to certain prevailing cultural notions about what’s butch and what’s manly, besides creating estate tax loopholes. Because you know, creating tax loopholes is very butch. It goes to our fascination with the anti-hero, with irony. We’re Americans, we’re outlaws, we’re renegades, we’re riding into the sunset. But we’d better watch out, because China is riding back out of the sunrise toward us. They’re bringing it.
And we’re responding with irony. TV and movies, the popular culture, is full of anti-heroic irony. It’s a defense. It’s a weak defense. Ultimately, it’s a defense against an open heart.
What art does, real art, REAL ART, is gives you an experience of an open heart. Whether it’s a novel, or a movie, or a well acted King Lear, or a painting or a piece of sculpture, you have an experience or your heart opening. You’re a better person because of it.
Real art uplifts you—it transforms you. It gives you an experience of transcendence, whether of joy or of sorrow, because both joy and sorrow move through an open heart.
Sabin Howard’s pieces lack irony as a deliberate choice to give the viewer an experience of the heart opening, of upliftment, of transformation. This is the most courageous choice of all. This is the most radical choice of all. This is the most visionary choice of all.
The great poet Rumi says:
In your light I learn how to love. 

In your beauty, how to make poems. 

You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, 

but sometimes I do, 

and that sight becomes this art.
Thank you.

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Congratulations Taylor Swift: MEAN rocks!!

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Dear Ms. Swift:

You’ve given a voice to all of us who’ve been attacked by petty people. Congratulations on your well deserved Grammys, and on your wonderful performance of the song at the event.

I like your music and I look forward, with pleasure, to watching your career over the years.

“You, with your words like knives and swords and weapons that you use against me
You have knocked me off my feet again got me feeling like I’m nothing
You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard, calling me out when I’m wounded
You, pickin’ on the weaker man

Well, you can take me down with just one single blow
But you don’t know what you don’t know

Someday I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean

Why you gotta be so mean?
You, with your switching sides and your walk-by lies and your humiliation
You, have pointed out my flaws again as if I don’t already see them
I’ll walk with my head down trying to block you out ’cause I’ll never impress you
I just wanna feel okay again


But all you are is mean
All you are is mean and a liar and pathetic and alone in life
And mean, and mean, and mean, and mean“

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SUPPORT INTERNET FREEDOM: PROTEST SOPA AND PIPA

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Support Internet Freedom

It’s bad enough, here in the waning years of the American Empire, that so few Americans even notice the travesty that our political system has become.

In our sponsorship duopoly (formerly a democracy but no longer), both parties have the agenda of impoverishing the poor and enriching the rich, while squeezing the middle class.

The Democrats and Republicans both accomplish this aim by 1, making it impossible for small American businesses to thrive; 2, fawning over large multinational corporations that function as sovereign nation-states without oversight or accountability, and 3, refusing to protect Americans from the sometimes poisonous goods China–and said multinational corporations–sells us. Our sponsorship duopoly has to curry favor with China because we owe China so much money.

The Democrats have become a party of the lowest common denominator, of the debasement of culture and opportunity, eroding at human ingenuity and ambition by giving hand-outs and teaching people that they are entitled to be taken care of. The Democrats have entirely lost the concept of “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” They have lost the notion of inspiring people to grow and take care of themselves, and of making it possible for people to create and take advantage of their own opportunities.

Rather, Obama is creating a welfare state that ultimately disempowers Americans and serves no one except the elite in power, who have more and more control over a weaker and weaker constituency.

The Republicans are busy figuring out how to protect and engorge the large multinational corporations, safeguard their inheritances, and install loopholes to avoid their own tax obligations. The Republicans have also become the party associated with the nutso-cuckoo fascist types who oppose freedom of procreational choice, freedom of marriage regardless of gender, and ultimately freedom of thought.

Neither party wants a thinking citizenry. That’s why the American congress has put together SOPA and PIPA: both parties are deeply vested in controlling American citizens by slowly dissolving the power of the Constitution. By slowly eradicating our ability to express our opinions and to post and research facts and trends of thought.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea, and the internet grows ideas like hardy weeds. Who knows what American will be exposed to if the internet is free?

We might realize how little freedom we as Americans actually have left.

PROTEST SOPA AND PIPA

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What I’m not supposed to say on air, Or, Longing for a way out of the Sponsorship Duopoly

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Lately I am promoting my new novel FALLEN, mostly on the internet, with an emphasis on internet radio. The other day an old friend hosted me on his show New Perspectives, on Rocklandworldradio.com. At one point I quoted Ann Coulter.

All hell broke loose.
I happened to read her blog “The Sun Never Sets on the British Welfare System,” and I agreed with it. So I brought it up in the interview. I should have been talking about my novel FALLEN, of course. But of late I am deeply concerned about the state of the nation, and of the world.
We do not live in a democracy, here in the waning years of the United States. We live in a sponsorship duopoly, in which public service has been replaced by public relations, and both the Republicans and the Democrats are deeply financially beholden to monied international corporations that function as sovereign nation-states without accountability or oversight.
Self-congratulatory liberals–and I am becoming convinced that they are, as a group, the most self-satisfied, narcissistic, least-self-examining, most judgmental people in the world–like to brandish Obama as the great white hope, savior of mankind. Oops, I mean, the great Harvard-educated hope. Oh, am I still getting it wrong? What is it that makes them feel morally superior when they look at him?
But Noam Chomsky has called Obama a “creation of the financial institutions” and spoken out about how Obama was financed by banks like Goldman Sachs. He has rewarded them quite generously. For me, I am appalled that Obama put Monsanto’s stoolie Vilsack in such a powerful position as Secretary of Agriculture. Furthermore, the FDA Food Safety Division is now run by Monsanto’s executive Michael Taylor.
HELLO AMERICANS: A MULTINATIONAL COMPANY WITH EXTREMELY SHADY OBJECTIVES AND NO OVERSIGHT OR ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOW IN CHARGE OF YOUR FOOD SUPPLY!!
Obama’s gift to us all. How much money does he owe Monsanto? How generously did they donate to him to get him to hand over the American food supply to them?
Do people realize how many gifts Obama is giving Monsanto, terms of genetically modified foods/plants? How organic foods are severely compromised, as is our access to them and to vitamins and herbal supplements?
More and more evidence is leaking out about how dangerous GMO food is. I use the term “leaking out” because the media tries hard to keep us in the dark about this danger. Just as there has been a near total black-out about the true danger of radiation in Japan. See Gary Null’s recent work on this terrifying issue: that nuclear power is a huge, billion-dollar, fantastically dangerous scam.
The question about the public’s awareness of Monsanto controlling our food supply pales in comparison to another question: why don’t the self-satisfied liberals see that Obama is eviscerating the middle class?
The rich are rich and always take care of themselves. Obama likes the proletariat, at least in theory. (One friend claims that his education at Harvard was paid for by Brezhnev.) He was a member of the Communist party.
Obama claims to be trying to help the proletariat. He gives a good speech but he’s pretty ineffectual, terms of doing anything. It’s the middle class, and small businesses, that are suffering because of Obama’s “Take care of the rich and the proletariat, but mostly the rich” credo. Chomsky goes so far as to say “Obama is a man of absolutely no principles… For them (the popular constituency) he is doing absolutely nothing.”
Recently I heard one definition of fascism: the alignment of state and corporation. Hello, Obama’s alignment with Monsanto and Goldman Sachs!!
But I don’t like the Republicans any more than I like Obama. As far as I can see, they’re more honest in some ways. They don’t pretend to do more than protect the rich and suck up to multi-national corporations. But is that the best we can hope for: Democratic chicanery vs. cold Republican greed?
For the record: I am NOT an Ann Coulter fan. Many of her antics are egregious and deplorable. I just think she’s not always wrong. This notion sets me up for rebuke and scorn by Liberals, who are the new Inquisitors. That is, they feel completely justified in rebuking and scorning anyone who does not think exactly as they do on all matters. Anyone who is not liberal according to their brand of liberalism is a racist, right wing, conservative, nutjob–eg, a bad person.

There can be no dissent when liberals are around, because they have a monopoly on the truth. Also, they are morally superior to everyone else. The New York Times will tell you that for a fact, and everyone knows the Times is completely neutral and unbiased.
In my opinion, partisan politics has made fools of everyone. There must be a middle way, a third option, a third party who can redeem this country.
I agree with the Republicans that big government is bad government. I’d like to cut government spending and to knock the unions down to the place where we can afford to bring jobs back from overseas to the US. I want a strong military; I think too many liberals are seriously afflicted with the wish-fulfillment fantasy that “If we are tolerant of them, they will be tolerant of us.”
At the same time, I am pro-Choice. I am anti-Death penalty. I am pro Gay marriage. I am pro separation of church and state. I want evolution taught in school to my kids, not intelligent design.
Most of all, I am pro-small businesses. Small AMERICAN businesses. How do we strengthen and encourage them? Because my husband is a sculptor and he employs models, foundry workers, bronze finishers, shipping and moving companies, etc., so I see first-hand how a small business creates income for a lot of people.
But with both the Republicans and the Democrats fixated on the big, ruthless, amoral corporations, small businesses don’t have a chance. And we are all worse for it.
I am anti-big multinational corporations. They care only for their bottom line. They do not care for human life. Certainly Monsanto does not.
So where is the candidate who is fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and pro-small businesses?
I liked a lot of what Perry said in his announcement speech, but I am not going to vote for a religious zealot.
So I quoted Ann Coulter. As soon as the radio interview ended, some friends texted me. One friend, a great wit and great heart, has been giving me hell, telling me I am the only person he knows who quotes her. I texted back, “I sometimes quote Snoopy too.”
He emailed me a parody of a novel written by Snoopy. So darn funny. I guess you had to be there. A few nights later we were going to dinner. I texted him, “Ann C is coming. She heard you were her #1 fan and can’t wait to meet you.”
He texted back about a smartphone app for applying for foodstamps that she’d be interested in.
They probably already have the app in the UK. We won’t get it here in the US until Monsanto has thoroughly adulterated the food supply and we are all so sick that we take a daily regimen of Monsanto drugs to stay healthy.
What a great racket, right? Make people sick and then sell them the drugs to cure it. Endorsed by Obama. The savior.