This up from common dreams.
…I used to steal my brother’s copy of MAD magazine. My mother had already branded me a tomboy because I liked playing with matchbox cars, so I had to sneak peaks at the mag without her knowledge. God, it was a funny magazine…and at times politically enlightening. Damn commies. 🙂
common dreams has this up.
I was reading about all the consequences of nuclear disaster in the ecology textbook yesterday…brought back a lot of that anxiety of the 60s and 70s…
The costs are enormous and not necessarily recoverable. The book likened it to what happened in Hamburg during WWII– it was July, 1943, that Hamburg was just plastered with bombs. There were fires that shot flames 1500 feet into the air. People were incinerated by the heat. They reported that bomb shelters were turned into infernos and rescue workers could not enter them for two weeks following the bombing. The book likened this to nuclear disaster because of the chemical component that poisoned the land, rivers, killed the humans and wildlife in the area. It was total devastation of life. And the soils would not recover from the chemical devastation that killed not only vegetation, but the beneficial soil bacteria that helped the rooted ones to survive.
I’ll have to write a more thorough report of how the book details the ripple effect of nuclear disaster–chilling.
I’m late with this, but it’s nice to know others are out there fighting for those of us most affected by this. The cuts in food stamps…i.e., the “Eat Shit” campaign of those compassionate conservatives who think all life is precious…as long as you’re a conservative and wealthy….poor people should just dry up and blow away and “decrease the surplus population…”
From the email sent to the organic advocates group I belong to:
Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) and other hill champions are coordinating Members
of Congress to make ‘one minute’ speeches in opposition to the House Ag
Committee’s proposed cuts to SNAP. When you call your Members of Congress
today, ask him/her to speak out on the House floor in support of SNAP
tomorrow, *July 10 at noon or on Wed., July 11th at noon*. If interested,
House offices should contact LaDavia Drane (ladavia.drane@ mail.house. gov)
in Rep. Fudge’s office. “One Minutes” are first come, first serve.~~~~~~~~~~~
“House Republicans think a working poor household with $2,000 in assets
shouldn’t be getting food stamps – an average of $1.50 per meal – but they
don’t seem to have problems with far wealthier insurance companies and
agribusiness getting much bigger handouts from the Farm Bill,” noted Dunlea.The Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill would cut spending
over ten years by more than $35 billion, the Senate bill $23 billion.****“****America* ***’s children, seniors and 1.5 million veteran households
facing a constant struggle against hunger deserve better from Congress,”
said Senator Gillibrand of the House bill.****The House bill does not include several amendments attached to the Senate
bill, including one that required those getting subsidized crop insurance
to comply with conservation requirements and another that reduce by 15
percentage points the share of crop insurance premiums the government pays
for farmers with adjusted gross incomes of more than $750,000. Currently
the government bears an average 62 percent of crop insurance premiums
~~~~~~~~~
The quote from Henry Kissinger popped in my head. Link Here:
http://www.corporate-aliens.com/quotes/getquote.php?Henry-Kissinger"eid=1427
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Okay, the last story on DN, Gov. Rick Perry said he was going to refuse the Obama Healthcare, which would mean he would refuse all money for medicaid.
So…I’d like to see Gov. Perry look a young pregnant and poor woman in the eyes and tell her that she can’t go for prenatal checkups. Is this what they mean by compassionate conservatives? Why is it that when a woman wants to end the pregnancy with abortion that they say that she can’t do that because life is precious, but then deny her healthcare in order to have a healthy child?
On the flip side, she should be allowed to choose her provider— i.e., a midwife with a home birth is what she prefers, then that should be covered, as well. I have to laugh when I hear stories of how shocked people are when women who birth on their own “before the medical profession can intervene”…as if women have only given birth in hospitals since time began…
Newsflash: obstetricians, who make their $$ off of hospital births, are claiming that home births are much more dangerous than hospital births…
…meanwhile, bankers say that people who finance their homes through private lenders at lower interest rates are in danger of…of…of….well, they don’t know, but terrible, terrible things happen when people start making independent decisions…/snark
Back to the article–the shocking rate of 32% of births being made through Caesarean is outrageous. Interference with the natural birth process so you won’t get sued means you’re in the wrong profession (if you’re that inept). And you might note the reference that C-sections cost more $$…jaysus h, if they’re using it for making a profit, that is unconscionable!
The UK has this website up–gives women more information so they can make a decision. Good God, what will they think of next? Allowing women to wear pants? /snark
I know that if I were better informed, I would have had my kids at home. The hospital births were a nightmare and the interference by the doctors and staff made it miserable instead of a joyous occasion. And I’ve read that the position of the woman being on her back (which I was) is the most dangerous position for her to labor in…but it’s more convenient for doctors…perhaps someone should bring that up when they claim to be worried about the safety of home births.
Gah, I don’t believe this entire post was eaten in cyberspace! Arrgh!
Okay, since I don’t know which website caused the error, I’ll try adding one at a time…
You’ll have to go to the DN website to see what stories I’m commenting on…
President Obama is once again promising that he will let the Bush Tax Cuts for the rich to expire…yeah, well, we’ve heard that before…
…and we all know the rich don’t want to pay for anything…
Okay, if these two posts hold up, I might have time to put the other links up in the next post…
Incredibly, the citizens of Bhopal, India, are still left holding the bag after Union Carbide’s tragic 1984 accident that killed 20,000 people and polluted unknown amounts of water, soil and air.
In the environmental book I’m reading, they recount the Love Canal disaster and all the complexities involved in resolving a toxic event. The original company, Hooker Chemical, sold the land to the local school board, and incredibly, the school board took it with a contract that stipulated that Hooker Chemical was not responsible for any chemicals on the land. They had been dumping chemicals there for years—and they built a school on top of the land. Parents began complaining about their children’s health issues within five years after the schools’ opening.
This is where it gets interesting–they were ignored, and when they were finally believed, at first the reaction is what you would expect by those in charge–they admitted there was a problem, and came up with solutions for it. However, once the financial numbers were crunched, they decided there wasn’t a problem, after all. Even the state’s health dept scientists were loathe to charge the state for the clean-up.
And the ones who did the toxic dumping–the chemical company–walked away. This is the real problem–chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies that screw up and just walk away because it’s more important to keep them in business than it is to hold them accountable.
I’m of the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it camp...too many times I’ve gotten my hopes up (Wisconsin being the latest) where Democracy was in action, but the voices went unheard….
…because 96-year-old-men are such a threat to the nation, you know….
Indian Country has this up on the Dept of the Interior refusing to release data on a survey of employment and poverty of the Native Americans.
Okay, if there’s a problem with the methodology, why not release the information and point out those problems to the reader?
Or is this a case of they didn’t like the answers they got and want to rephrase the questions? A red flag is the statement in the story that they want to revise survey questions.
I took a statistics class (political science class, no less) and the point that was stressed was that you could phrase questions to get the answers you were looking for–if your goal was to skew something to your viewpoint. When the data was entered into the computer program that tallies the answers, it will show a skewed view. Never trust a “survey” or “poll” that is more than 2 percentage points + or – because it means the questions have been phrased to obtain a desired result.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
More from Indian Country. This makes no sense to me…the wolf population has recovered, so let’s shoot them?? They say the reason that the deer population has swelled so much is because the wolf was nearly hunted into extinction.
I’ve been back and forth with the hunting thing–I’ve never really liked it, but when I became vegetarian, I despised hunters–mainly because the ones that I knew seem to get off on killing living things.
But then I read of the American Indian’s view of reverence for animals and how they took only what they needed and thanked the animal for its sacrifice. That made a huge difference to me. It especially helped me when I was told that I needed to start eating meat again because of severe anemia. I could live with it as long as I gave thanks to the animal for its sacrifice.
What’s needed here is balance–and humans to stop messing with the populations and their habitats for their own gain.
Eagle 
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