Category Archives: communications/media

Aung San Suu Kyi

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…is coming to Fort Wayne tomorrow. She is giving a speech in her native tongue at the Memorial Coliseum free of charge.

For those that don’t know, Fort Wayne is home to the largest Burmese population in the United States.

Story here:  http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/local/ipfw-screens-movie-before-a-nobel-peace-prize-winner-visits-fort-wayne(of course, there are the prejudiced ones who put their stupid comments in the comments section….<sigh> and the rightwing radio station has said little, if anything, about the trip.

I want to go, but my car is having issues and I might not get it repaired in time to drive out there.

Anyway, it’s a historical event for this town and I’m happy that she is able to make the trip.

If you wish, you may listen to the speech on the local public radio station:  WBOI Link here:  http://nipr.fm/

 

 

So…it’s come to this…

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Good Grief.  

The ultimate insecure man…

…who now has the tools to feed that insecurity.  What was he hoping to do with the information?  Embarrass her?  Catch her in the act of something?  It’s not like the days of divorce before—where you had to have grounds for a divorce…so I’m at a loss as to what his ultimate reasons were…

If your marriage is that broken, it’s time to walk away dude.

Think about this technology and single women…living in apartments that their landlords have access to anytime they want…pretty unnerving.  I’ve seen ads for teddy bears with cameras in them, shower heads with cameras in them (marketed under the shady reason of a “nanny cam” )  etc. , and always wondered about certain shady individuals who use the technology for their own creepy desires.

Big Brother, indeed.

 

Sleeping with the enemy…

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…toxic chemical manufacturers created a front group to promote the use of fire retardants…and the guy behind it was also a mouthpiece for the tobacco industry.

Be sure to click on the Chicago Tribune’s excellent piece.

Here’s the kicker:  fire itself is not usually the cause of death–it’s smoke inhalation.  From chemicals.  One of the fire guys I talked to told me that burning plastic is the worst–burning plastic creates cyanide and it will “drop you like that” (as he snapped his fingers).  He said they never go into where plastic is burning without their oxygen masks.

Here’s a report from the LA Times in 2011.

…and the next question should be:  If it affects humans, what effect does it have on nature?

Here’s a short blurb on the increase of the toxic chemicals in the oceans.

These stories make me glad that I sewed my kids’ pajamas when they were young, using untreated cotton…at least I spared them that exposure.

 

Libya, et al…

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Well, now, common sense hasn’t left Washington, after all….

…of course Romney is gung-ho on getting us into yet another war–his five boys aren’t going to bleed for the country…

This up on the idiots behind the film that set off the violence…

Financial crimes. Check.

Pose as someone else. Check.

Claim to be a Jew when you’re a Christian. Check.

Sounds like a stand-up sort of guy. /snark

And let’s not ignore that Steve Klein is what appears to be a religious right activist who is training militias in churches…stunning, just stunning…

 

Attack on embassy in Libya

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Report here. Stevens was apparently trying to find a safer place when he and his staff were killed.  And for what?  He didn’t produce the offensive video, so why target him?  Or why target anyone?  If your spirituality is strong, you’re not going to let something like this make you insane. And the Islamic religion also has  “do unto others as you would have done to you” in their book, as well, so by this act, they are going against their religion.

And what about the idiot who produced this hate-film?  Terry Jones was advocating burning the Koran, and is behind promoting this—so why isn’t this guy being reined in?  And who is the Israeli-American property developer?  I’m suspicious that he wasn’t named in the piece.

DN! reports on the Libyan situation.

They are also reporting that President Obama has refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Gah, the guy has a pair, after all. Color me shocked.  Israel has made the statement that they are free to do as they wish–to attack Iran if the mood strikes them, and the U.S. is not supposed to have any say in the matter, but we’re supposed to come running and bail them out if they do attack–extending our people, our funding, our equipment, etc. when the country is struggling. (Well, not the 1%, mind you)

So…anyone wanna place  a wager on us getting into another senseless war…?

 

Chicago public school teachers to strike

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Story here.

Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education.  (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂

…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited.  They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them?  What kind of profit can we make off of them?

This report from Indiana.

From the story:

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

 

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Unbelievable.  What a way to worm out of accountability.  The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?

This from Pennsylvania.  Nepotism? Um, yeah.  Nice little game they have going there.

Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah.  If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.

This from Miami.  Taxpayers should not be funding them at all.  But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it??  You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?

 

 

Clinton Fact Check

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AP has this up on the Clinton speech.

Yeah, I for one am sick of the “we were prosperous when Clinton was president…” while forgetting that he instituted NAFTA.  We, in the midwest, were feeling this before the rest of the country–there were factories closing down left and right in the town I was raised in.

The health care law only makes sense to me when it will help me with preventative care.  That includes organic food and attention to diet by the medical profession instead of pushing pills as the solution for health ills.

Of course, I don’t have cable and didn’t watch it, so I can’t comment on that, but from what is being reported–he took an hour to speak?  WTH?

 

Taibbi on Romney

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DN! has this up with Matt Taibbi giving the scoop on what Romney is all about–he’s not about creating jobs, and saving companies, but swooping in, making a boatload of money, and leaving the carcass behind…

Taibbi mentions Carlyle Group--red flags go up. (hat tip to this site)

From the article:

But what sets Carlyle apart is the way it has exploited its political contacts. When Carlucci arrived there in 1989, he brought with him a phalanx of former subordinates from the CIA and the Pentagon, and an awareness of the scale of business a company like Carlyle could do in the corridors and steak-houses of Washington. In a decade and a half, the firm has been able to realise a 34% rate of return on its investments, and now claims to be the largest private equity firm in the world. Success brought more investors, including the international financier George Soros and, in 1995, the wealthy Saudi Binladin family, who insist they long ago severed all links with their notorious relative. The first president Bush is understood to have visited the Binladins in Saudi Arabia twice on the firm’s behalf.

Another article here.

On the rest of the video–the guy going to the Romney campaign event and being told he was unpatriotic for wanting to save his job should be blasted on every radio station, every TV station, and printed on the front page of every newspaper (what ones are left…).  People are being lied to and are not getting that “fair and balanced” coverage.  I mean, the utter gall of them saying that unemployed people on food stamps are just lazy and unmotivated…while shipping their jobs to China…

…my mind flashed to Romney’s poor rendition of “America, the Beautiful…”  while Taibbi speaks of him and his cohorts’ non-allegiance to the States and the people trying to earn a living.

Taibbi makes a good point when he says the dispute over the actual time that Romney left Bain isn’t as important as to what profit he was reaping from Bain’s actions…that’s the key–what money did he make off the deals?

And Taibbi hints about how they don’t want to pay for anything–they make boatloads of money on these companies, after borrowing the money to do it.