Checking in with the First Nations protestors in Canada….
SWN refuses to acknowledge they are trespassing on First Nations land and continue to use that land for fracking, despite the protests. My understanding is that they have started a fire blockade today at noon.
Someone posted a link to this video that captures in pictures when words fail…
…at 1:25 and 1:38, look at the concentration of teargas on ONE individual!!
….at 1:56,and the next photo should have the caption underneath with one word: COURAGE
…at 2:12 full disclosure: both sides had dogs. Gotta love their sense of humor.
…at 2:19…<sigh>….really? Is this man armed? He appears to be unarmed and of smaller stature than the SWN security officer.
Another video here on the mistreatment of the protestors taken in:
Think the NSA is bad? How about the Gates Foundation?? Sends chills down your spine how this non-government corporation has so much free access to personal data. The next question is: for what purpose? Sheila Resseger posted this letter to Secretary Duncan. Thank YOU, Senator Markey, for asking these important questions. Tim Furman posted this link for a gathering in Chicago on student privacy.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Wall Street Journal, along with other *cough* news rags, allegedly stole private information via cell phones to use against the owner. Keep in mind that Coulson was directly linked to the British Prime Minister. And the Gates Foundation is sponsoring “news” stories running in The Guardian.
Diane has a link up to this excellent post that just hits the nail on the head—how does one stack the deck so there is as little opposition as possible….? One holds meetings at times that almost guarantee low attendance by those involved–teachers, parents who work and parents with little ones ( they won’t bring little ones to the meetings and single parents will have difficulty getting sitters,too.)
The post features this video (under immature link):
Really eye-opening, eh? Is it fair to characterize Deasy as a bully and an idiot? From this episode, he seems to be a control freak running amok whom is more interested in feeding his ego than actual concern for the children. He claims she is being disrespectful to the kids, while he is showing disrespect for their teacher. Blessings to you, Patrena Shankling. Nobody should have to be treated in such an abusive manner—and what you experienced was classic verbal abuse where it doesn’t matter what you say, the abuser will escalate his tirade.
Speaking of abuse, Diane posted this on a child psychotherapist’s assessment of the testing, testing, testing of our children and how demoralizing it is to them. Six years old!
And JCGrim posts a comment on how the abuse gets worse—Good God:
School leaders say La Vergne High has a split lunch period, half academic intervention to help students who may be struggling in a subject and half lunch.
“They are not segregating them in the traditional sense. If the kids’ scores are low in certain areas, they are getting help in that area. If you want to label that segregation, then that’s not the correct way to label it,” said Rutherford County Schools spokesman James Evans.
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Well, you know, they say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Whether the segregation is intentional or not, it is still segregation. And what is wrong with you that you can’t even give the kids a break from learning for a half-hour? The brain needs a break, for crying out loud! Let the kids be kids and socialize without being overshadowed!
Diane posts here on Mark Naison. He describes how and why he became an activist. **edited to add link. Oops.
From his post:
Teachers everywhere were being driven out of their jobs and stripped of their autonomy and creativity. Children everywhere were being deluged with tests, and subjected to a one size fits all curriculum that, in all too many instances, smothered their unique talents and aptitudes.
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(sorry for the large text) — as I’m reading this, I’m reminded of something a nun said at a parents’ meeting once: we all have gifts to bring to the world–we have the jocks and beauty queens, but we need the nerds, the clowns, the creative, the stoic, etc. — those that are not necessarily celebrated in popular media, but whose gifts would surely be missed had they not graced the world. Even those who are mentally challenged bring something to the world.
Naison is understandably upset with the Administration for the education policies. However, I have seen a change in President Obama in the past, oh, year or year-and-a-half, in that he seems to be breaking away from the Clinton -thinking. My hope is that the more President Obama sees the damage that is happening to the children and public education as a whole, he will rethink the policies and replace Arne Duncan. We can hope….
Diane also posts the links to the Daily Show appearance. When she stated that Jon was upset about Common Core and how his staff was personally experiencing what we’ve been blasting about, I was upset that he doesn’t talk about it on air! Arrrgh! A missed opportunity to help the public understand why we are so upset and how our children are being psychologically abused!
(A side note~ I admire Jon for adopting the pit bull, but still would not recommend them. They have been bred to be fighters, and as such, their powerful jaws make it impossible to separate them from anything they’ve sunk their teeth into—there are stories of pit bulls who would not release even when someone was beating on them to get them off of another dog/human being. )
Diane has a link to Mercedes Schneider’s debunking the Louisiana “miracle”. This is why one needs to ask how statistics were compiled and what methodology they used. The lies will be exposed when these questions are answered.
Diane and Michelle Rhee will debate Feb. 6. Rhee made increasing demands which seem to speak of the lack of substance to her arguments.
Finally, in my own little corner of the world– a quiz on Indiana politics and ruining public education by devious means.
Note in the comments that charter school proponents are now trying to market charter schools as “community schools” to make destroying public schools more palatable.
This comment just makes me want to cry because it’s so true:
We are ‘leaders’ in many areas…eighth most polluted air in the nation, broken infrastructure, roads with cracks and potholes, 47th in the nation for adults with college degrees, most polluted rivers in the U.S., underfunding of public schools [so more money can go to charter schools], eighth most overweight population in the nation and our recent achievement in outstanding ‘education reform’ is an increased number of vouchers and charter school expansion!
Add to this list of achievements the desire of our GOP controlled Congress and Tea Partier Governor Pence to dilute Superintendent Glitz’s responsibilities simply because she understands the needs of children and teachers.
Global News features a homeowner who installed solar panels and is now seeing the benefits. He requested a meter that would feed the excess energy he doesn’t need back into the utility grid, but didn’t see it for months. The power company exec offers no explanation, only to say that the problem has been fixed. And the reporter stated that someone refused to be interviewed…I’m assuming it’s the power company’s representative?
Anyway, I thought about all the excuses used for not pushing solar energy for the northern states–that there’s just not enough sunlight to make it economically feasible—and here we have someone in Canada, which has even less sunlight and because of the shape of Earth, is less intense energy from the sun, and yet they are still able to absorb enough energy to power their homes and have more to send back to the utility company. Kind of blows that excuse, doesn’t it?
There are others here in the U.S. who go completely off-grid, where they’re not attached to the public utility, and they use batteries to store the excess energy for days that the sun doesn’t shine.
The time has come for solar. Cheap–when you factor in environmental damage by all other means of producing energy: coal (mercury, lead, arsenic), oil (cancer), nuclear (cancer), gas (fracking–mercury, cancer, and God only knows what else).—plus their detrimental effects on climate change.
Clean. Unlimited power source.
I did a web search and found a national geographic video on a solar farm–but the narrator states that unlike solar panels, they use mirrors that reflect light upward, and then a tube with synthetic oil captures the heat, to transport it. With that information, I clicked off the video. Why on Earth would they use synthetic oil?? It just seems that we are so creatively challenged that we can’t think outside the oil box.
It’s just so harrrrd to think sustainably!! /said with dripping sarcasm
National Sustainable Agricultural Association has this action alert up on the latest fight for your food, family farms, and organic farms. Again, we have corporate interests battling against….well, stuff that benefits the average person…..like clean air, water, and chemical free food.
Not to mention the diseases sure to come with the filthy practices of the factory farms. (A side note~ chicken manure IS worth some money, if left to season. It’s one of the best fertilizers out there. And natural to boot.)
From the link:
Carole Morison: Perdue showed up on the farm when the Food, Inc. film crew was here. When the company finally figured out who was visiting, we received a letter threatening contract termination for “violating bio-security.” Their threat stemmed from me not having people sign a log book that the company had placed on our farm to monitor our visitors.
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Oh.My.God. Can you say Big Brother? I knew that you could. Violating bio-security? Seriously? bwahahahahaha, that’s rich! How do they figure “security” is involved? “Security” is the new “cloak” word—something to hide behind when you want to coerce people to do something against their better instincts….
And this is yet another example of the Too Big Too Fail as a way to monopolize a market–the detrimental aspects are seen with bullying these farmers to give into their demands “or else”, to unhealthy practices that most folks would find appalling if they knew, to the environmental impact of upsetting the ecology by having so many chickens crammed into such a small space.
And speaking of monopolizing the market, my blog here on Senators who voted against GMO labeling, links to gut inflammation, etc.
This is sobering news. Note that the article doesn’t go into diet, but if GMO’s were introduced in the 90s, and strokes started increasing at that time….is anyone going to look into the connection?
Also, colorectal cancer has increased in youth at the rate of 13% from 1992-2005. The article goes for the easy blame of fast food….without exploring the GMO connection or toxic environment. I’m not saying that fast food isn’t a factor, because it is not healthy, but they need to go more deeply.
Also, neither of these articles explore economic factors where the families buy processed food because it’s cheaper, and the family’s health suffers because of it.
Breast cancer rates among the young, and especially young black women, are rising, too–tripling from 1976 to 2009. Red flags all over the place, folks.
For me personally, one of my lumps has shrunk, the other has stayed the same, a little over a year after discovery. Interestingly, I had read somewhere that women with fibrocystic breast disease respond well to iodine. If you recall, last year, about this time, I had three breast lumps and they were increasing in size. After increasing my iodine, one disappeared and the other stayed the same size.
Within the mercury poisoning group, there is great debate about low thyroid and iodine. Some folks are adamantly against iodine, saying if one has Hashimoto’s (which I suspect I have because it is autoimmune and goes with Celiac), that iodine will make it worse. That hasn’t been my experience. With the shrinking breast lumps, I would say that my intuition has been right in increasing the iodine.
Mercury interferes with iodine absorption. the Barium sprayed from chem trails interferes with iodine absorption. These are most likely factors in the increases in cancer, since the thyroid is a master gland controlling nearly every important body function, from the pituitary to the adrenals, to the gut, to brain function. This is serious stuff, and messing with the environment is coming around to bite us in the arse.
Global News has this up on the recovery of oil from sunken ships. At first, I wondered at all the sunken ships and if they might be a resource for oil instead of drilling the Earth….and then they say the price tag for this is $50 million.
You would think with all the technology out there that they could come up with some system that would allow for easier recovery of oil from sunken ships. Why couldn’t it be contained in some sort of rubber “balloon” that could more easily be recovered if a ship sank? Surely they could come up with something like that?
These have been washing ashore in California. They quote scientist Phil Hastings as saying that these sea creatures “get confused” and end up here….but don’t explore the “why” of it–probably poisoned by mercury in the ocean or some other noxious chemical. Maybe even corexit? Maybe their food has been poisoned? There is a reason that they are washing ashore and that needs to be explored without consideration of polluters like BP and others.
Here’s a good piece from the Guardian writer Martin Lukacs. He said there has been media coverage of the event…perhaps in Canada, but in the U.S.? Doing a quick search, I only saw one U.S. reference by a blogger. Otherwise….*crickets* It’s pretty telling when you see the nightly news plastered with commercials from BP and other energy companies. All the news that money can buy, folks…
Lukacs makes a good point with how the coverage is slanted towards painting the First Nations people as violent, but not forthcoming with the great harm fracking will cause….and how many people will die from cancer and other diseases caused by the benzene and mercury and other horrible stuff in the chemicals used. And of course, the media fails to mention the resulting earthquakes.
From Lukac’s article:
But Premier David Alward, hell-bent on opening up the province to shale gas, has spurned consultation with First Nations and the rest of the population. His latest step is demonization. “Clearly, there are those who do not have the same values we share as New Brunswickers,” he cynically announced on Friday. But the opposition to the Premier’s shale gas agenda is not just a supposedly isolated Indigenous community: it is two of every three people in Atlantic Canada. Little wonder he has repeatedly rejected a referendum on shale gas. It turns out the residents of Elsipogtog aren’t criminal deviants. They are the frontline of a fight for the democratic and environmental will of New Brunswick
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Now you’re talkin’. The taxpaying public does not want fracking!
Stephen Harper’s history is a little warped, eh? Um, I’m pretty sure there were people here before we ( “we” being Canada and U.S.) before there were lines drawn by the Europeans. And the people here were pretty much organized Nations. They were here for 10,000 years and were much better stewards of the land and water. You could drink from any stream. There was no trash strewn across the land. You could breathe.
Lukacs also brings up the repeated breaking of laws by those in power who then point fingers. Do as I say, not as I do….
The fishing rights battles are eerily similar to the same battles in the U.S. with the Native Americans, having their boats rammed, and state officials created an atmosphere of incitement by showing films of Native Americans fishing in areas to the commercial fisherman who thought it should be theirs. What was truly insulting to the Indigenous was the assertion by the Conservation Officers that the Native Americans would “overfish” the waters…when they had always practiced balance–they never took more than they needed. If anything, it was the commercial fisheries that were destroying the fish populations. The story is told in the book Now that the Buffalo is Gone by Alvin Josephy. Robert Satiacum was jailed for standing up for their rights. Meanwhile, his wife and other women warriors defied the state officials by continuing to fish, using their wits to evade capture. They were eventually caught, but I have to smile to myself in admiration of their wit and courage for fending them off as long as they could.
Eagle 