Category Archives: communications/media

Freedom town

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Jon Stewart takes a look at the Freedom Towns being promoted by the fundamentalist/conservatives.  Wow.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-29-2013/america-2–now-with-more-freedom—a-glenn-beck-holiday

In the beginning of this segment, when they are just outlining what it is about, I’m thinking….they’re talking Communes?

Well, okay, not exactly communes, where everybody is supposed to share food and chores and stuff, but yeah, this comes pretty close to it, by demanding residents adopt the same narrow view.

The thing is…it’s not that far from Communism, which requires everyone be the same—by discouraging independent thought and creativity and action.  (And I wonder what they do with someone who loses their job and becomes homeless in this Utopia? Or *gasp* someone who develops an independent thought and starts expressing liberal ideals…?)

And to link into the previous post on the Fourth Amendment–it along with the First Amendment are parts of the Constitution that kept us from becoming Communist China, Communist Russia, and Nazi Germany.  Without them, we’re toast.

So…..you would think that the conservatives would be fighting like the despised liberals to preserve them.

Why aren’t they??

There’s no climate change…

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Well, I shouldn’t be surprised, but yet, I still am about the gushing by the nooz broadcasters on the spring weather…

They were just all over the “nice” weather we’ve had the past few days—-50-and 60-degree days.  They even went out “on the street” to ask the public their opinion about the great weather we’re having….and they were all positive comments on how great it was to wear a light jacket or no jacket at all in January in Indiana…and they even mentioned that all the comments were positive, except one…guess which one didn’t make it to the broadcast?  This was a deliberate choice, folks.  Newsroom editors wield huge power in what gets on the air and what doesn’t.  And what does get on the air has an enormous impact–they know this.

So…I was a little beside myself with this broadcast.  I mean, are people really that dense?  Do they not know what is happening?  Do they even think about how this summer is going to be if we’re having 60-degree weather in January?  Good Grief, how soon they forget when we had 90 degree heat throughout the summer, with a drought, last year, and how dangerously low the rivers were.  Thankfully, we’ve had some good rain and that good snow in December, and the rivers are now up to level.  A small victory, but it won’t last if we start having 80-degree heat in March like we did last year.

But there’s no Climate Change.  These people will just go on their merry way until the last drop of water comes out of the tap…

I mean, seriously, doesn’t anyone think beyond their nose?

What about the too warm water that is a threat to nuclear power plant ability to cool the nuclear core?  If the warming trends continue, we will lose the ability to cool the core….can anyone say meltdown?  I hate to even think of a worse case scenario of a plant in a scramble that cannot be cooled because the water is too warm to cool it.

Another scenario is this.  Discharging hotter water into the already warm water, leading to fish kills and other destruction of the carefully constructed eco system is not a good, well thought out plan.

Speaking of the effects of the warmer weather, the plants are also being affected, as my Sedum Autumn Joy is starting to pop up from the soil.  (I brought it here with me–it’s a plant that I’ve had since my son was a baby.  I dug it up when I lost my house.)

This weather is not normal and not something to be celebrated.

Earth will survive.  We won’t.

Boycott Kellogg’s

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Organic Consumers posted this a while back (I’m sooo far behind in emails).  Financially supporting the companies that truly have the best interests of their consumers at heart is the best way to go.  Well, that and labeling our food.

Read the note on Kashi’s using genetically engineered soy in their “organic” products.  It is such a cop-out to claim pollination was the reason the soy was GMO–an easy way to escape accountability.  Instead of fighting GMO labeling, they should be fighting against Monsanto and the others involved in genetically modified food.  This food is highly likely involved in leaky gut, as the body cannot recognize the grain anymore, and treats it as a foreign substance and that leads to gut inflammation and eventually leaky gut.

A link here to eye problems and leaky gut and GMO’s.  Very interesting.  My eyes have begun to improve–I was using 1.50 readers and now am able to use the 1.25 magnification.  I’m also able to distinguish fine degrees of color, and I had lost some of my ability to determine colors.  I know this by my embroidery thread that I used for counted cross-stitch–the thread is numbered and has very minute distinctions, and it was difficult for me to separate them by color.  I grew so frustrated at it that I just put them all in one bag, unable to organize them.  This began to change when I started to detox.

Here’s a good opinion on the GMO’s.

More here on the global effort to get GMO’s labeled.

A debate between a professor and a neoliberal. (hat tip to organic consumers).

Lastly, I really wonder about the exposure even if you’re not eating GMO foods (or at least trying not to by buying organic).  I say this because every year, around late July, I begin to have more severe allergy symptoms, culminating in September, when I usually have headaches several days out of the month (this has been after mercury poisoning–at least, that’s when I first noticed it).  I found a link here on the increase in allergies and GMO’s.

Here is a paper that must have been written by a Monsanto toadie, it is so slanted towards GMO’s and gives very little attention or support for research towards health concerns.  This is what I was seeing when I was a student in college and I took a class in science writing:  they had a forum at this strongly agricultural school on GMO’s when they were first being introduced in 1997-98 (only we found out later that they had been unleashed onto the unsuspecting public earlier.)

A good blog here on GMO.

 

 

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Related to this is an stunning affirmation of those in power that amalgams are safe.  Just stunning. Absolutely stunning.  (hat tip to organic consumers).  It just goes to show that Washington is bought by those whose interests don’t include the health and well being of the public, but of who has the $$$ to fund their campaigns.

And my previous blog  with this on how not only mercury affects us, but the animals, as well.  My other blogs on it here and here.

And I’m finished.  So much for catching up on my emails. 😛

 

 

Failure to prosecute Wall St.

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…because we’d much rather go after computer wizzes who have legal access to files and download them for the public so that the public knows what their government is doing…

link here.

bgrothus has this link in the comments section.  Remember, folks, the derivatives were the cause of the meltdown.  They were betting on people losing their mortgages….these scumbags were betting on people like me losing their houses. 

…and not only betting on people losing their houses, but on people dying.  It’s amazing how they can make it seem….normal.  Just coldly predict how long someone lives and apply a monetary value to it, i.e., insurance $$.

(crap, I have to go, and I wanted to explore this more….argh)

Aaron Swartz

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I found this interesting post on Aaron Swartz, which raises more questions than it answers…

I found another post on this site Saturday, but couldn’t find it again looking today.  It mentioned a post by Marcy Wheeler on what was going on with Aaron Swartz and his suicide after being hounded by authorities.  (Be sure to click on the NY Times link, which explains a little better.)  More here.

This chills one to the bone.  And what exactly was he downloading that caused such concern?  The articles dance around it. Anyway, Aaron Swartz believed that the information out there that was paid for by taxpayers deserved to be easily accessed–that is, without paying high $$ to join JSTOR or any other program to gain access.  It was noted that many documents are being electronically copied with limited access to the public.  This is incredibly disturbing, as everyone knows that Information is Power. And knowledge can inform the American citizen what their government is doing. (This is why stuff like Kindle worry me–taking information off of physical books and putting them in electronic gadgets that require a battery and software to view is dangerous in that if either of those fail to work, the information is inaccessible.  One can easily see how this can turn into denial of information–book burning a la the information age.)

The thing is…Swartz had legal access to the information, via Harvard!  He had the legal right to access. He was trying to make a point that the copyright laws protected electronic information that the taxpayers paid for, but were denied access to.  Now, think of the library books one checks out…they are copyrighted materials, but one can still access the information via a library card.  I think Swartz was applying those same principles to his providing this information.  Note that JSTOR refused to prosecute him once they learned he had legal access.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Beyond Vietnam

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Susie Madrak has a post up on MLK’s birthday celebration.  This is my view, too, on how everybody brings up “I Have a Dream” speech, and then fail to acknowledge his “Beyond Vietnam” speech (which he gave a year to the day before his murder).

He was expanding from the Civil Rights protests towards protesting the condition of the poor and of the terrible consequences of war.  This was more of a threat to the status quo than anything he had done prior.  Indeed, even his friends that had supported him during the Civil Rights era were abandoning him when he started advocating for the poor and protesting against war.  According to those that knew him, he never felt so alone.

He knew that advocating those positions was dangerous.

And he did it anyway….

 

A good option?

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As I was walking the other day, I thought about the states that legalized marijuana in the past election…and something about it bugged me.

Something that David Crosby said in a 60s documentary popped into my head:  while talking about the positives of the peace movement of the 60s, he remarked that cocaine had been the downfall of it all.

Whenever I see repubs suddenly change their opinions in a 180 degree direction, it gets my attention.  A few of them have been advocating legalization of small amounts of pot in this conservative area…another reason to question their motives.

Now, you can call me a conspiracy theorist (wouldn’t be the first time), but there is something going on….and I don’t know about you, but I could see pot doing the same thing as cocaine did—stopping a positive movement by messing with people’s cognitive function.  I’m not sure of all the effects of pot, but that is one of them, along with possible lung cancer and heart issues.  I’m not looking down my nose, mind you, I tried it when I was seventeen. (I’m one of those who wonder what all the fuss was about–it really did nothing for me).

I’m just putting this out there because I think it needs to be said.  I mean, I look at Timothy Leary, and see him as an under-the-radar drug pusher.  I was pretty young when he was in his element of “Tune in, turn on, drop out” (or whatever version), but had the opportunity to revisit his mindset again when I started in college in the 90s.  We read a bit of his assertions back in the day –he had used scare tactics, much as the conservatives are using now, to advocate for LSD and other drug legalization–saying that there would be agents in helicopters hunting down people using drugs and other scare tactics.

And I don’t get the videotaping his death…ego?  Pfft.  I don’t want to be videotaped, I want to go quietly, just me going to God.  And I don’t even want a headstone—I like what my aunt did–she had her ashes spread over San Francisco Bay.    After I’m gone, I hope that there will be people around to remember me…but if not, no stupid headstone and no video of me will truly speak of who I was and what I did while here….

(A side note–and this may or may not have anything to do with Leary, but he had a wife and daughter commit suicide.  So much for finding happiness in drugs.)

So…I guess this post is about a warning not to repeat the same mistakes of the 60s….

 

 

 

 

A trail of bullets…

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C.J.Chivers of the New York Times had this up over the weekend–a post on ammunition being supplied to Africa.  I thought I’d post it because of the focus on Africa.  Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems that Africa is becoming a focal point…or perhaps it was always there, but ignored?

Anyway, I thought that it’s striking that a lot is said about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but not of small arms ammunition and shipping it to other countries.

The question one has to ask is…why?  What do they hope to gain?  Is it for their political benefit or just plain guns profits?