So, I've been informed that my rss feed is showing up as red due to my blogging inactivity. Said inactivity is due to a variety of factors, but primarily my stubborn refusal to cave in and accept the anti-worker, anti-intellectual aggressions of corporate education, even as I prepare to leave my current position. I'm sapped, battered, and bruised, but still throwing punches. All this has taken away from my blogging time and energy. Nonetheless, my students are awesome and the future is bright. The collapse of corporate capitalism--though predictably hurting the structurally vulnerable the most--brings hope and possibilities that I relish, and I intend to help compost the Washington Consensus from its rotten core.

I have a number of pending entries. One important one will be called "Against Turnitin.com"--why do so few people understand the danger? And unfortunately I will not be writing about my adventures this semester, but I will be traveling to Brazil and Honduras, ISA, in June, and will be posting extensive fieldnotes then. In the meantime, here's something I posted yesterday to a listserv on which my friends are having a great debate about swine flu:

I don't think Egypt's slaughter of all pigs is hysteria. I think it's a calculated xenophobic way for some in the government to get at Christians using public health as an excuse. As thin of a justification as swine flu is, it carries here because of the deep-seated belief that the dirtiness of pigs is a moral quality that carries over to people who eat and raise them. It's tragic that all these pigs have to die. Their death is quite sure to be more unhygienic than their life. I get the sense that in these countries where ID cards declare your religion as something you are born with and can never be without, determine who you can marry, and permit or prevent all kinds of access to "public" goods and services, farm animals become a proxy for people's genocidal urges. Same thing happened with chickens when bird flu hit Egypt--although chickens are not religion-specific like pigs are, they were a prime sustainable food source for the urban poor. All the poor people 's chickens were killed off, and now everyone gets their overpriced eggs from factory farms. Which of course are the cause of bird-swine-human flu in the first place.

And by the way, have you noticed the pig industry's actually made headway in getting the press to rename it? I've seen it called "influenza humana" in the Spanish-language press. Hah. I don't want people to blame the pigs, but industry shouldn't get off the hook. Maybe it should be "Factory Farm Flu" or "Capitalist Croup."

Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure I've had it since last week, and it sucks. I think I got it from missing tacos de carnitas too much.