Monday, May 28, 2007

Don't worry; be happy.

"...the most revolutionary act that you can commit in our society today is to be happy...If you want to change the world, then be your own focus for a celebration of life. Really, fundamentally, at the very core of your being, be thankful you are alive, that you've got this opportunity, with these molecules, at this moment..."
http://betterworldheroes.com/adams-patch.htm
~Patch Adams
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http://environment.about.com/od/globalwarming/a/ipcc_three.htm
...since 1990 when the United States first called for voluntary rather than mandatory efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, U.S. emissions have increased 28 percent while federal funding for climate change research has declined significantly...
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http://oldamericancentury.org/links.htm
http://organizepittsburgh.org/index.php?page=resources/links
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National Coalition Against Censorship
http://ncac.org/art/art_now/commemorating.cfm
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http://hugthemonkey.com
http://orgasmicbirth.com/links
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http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu
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Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
http://wilpf.org
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Sunday, May 27, 2007

dem dirty Dems

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"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."
~Wendell Berry
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http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2007/2576
http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/alcohol/links.shtml
http://fossilfreefuel.com
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From:
What do these crimes have in common?
by David Swanson 5/24/7
http://freepress.org/departments/display/20/2007/2607
Another day, another impeachable offense. If this one were on a television show we'd all flip it off in disgust as too unlikely. The President phones up a hospital to demand that the ailing Attorney General (who has turned over his duties and is disoriented) admit the President's legal counsel and chief of staff so that they can ask him to sign off on an illegal spying program. The AG refuses to sign off. The acting AG, who is fully conscious but considers the program illegal, also refuses to sign off. The White House goes ahead and launches the program anyway...
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Allegheny Mountain Green Festival
http://amgf.org/_links.htm
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http://chicagosyndicate.blogspot.com/search/label/Jack%20Ruby
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From:
Blowing Green Smoke
by James Howard Kunstler 4/16/7
http://kunstler.com/mags_diary21.html
...January's food riots in Mexico, which resulted from Mexican corn being sold to American ethanol distillers rather than Mexican cornmeal millers, who couldn't match their bids...
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echelon spying software election stolen
http://internationalsocialist.org
http://socialistworker.org
http://www.animalfreedom.info/
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus
http://allegheny.extension.psu.edu
http://urbanecologycollaborative.org
http://search.lternet.edu/directory_view.php?personid=9480
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Maren Leyla Cooke :
...Research Working Group of the Urban Ecological Collaborative is organizing a series of
informal research seminars, beginning with a meeting about soil
contamination and remediation. We'll have presentations on the history
of lead & metal contamination in Panther Hollow, contemporary
atmospheric lead fate and transport, the CMU Brassica Project
(simultaneous bioremediation and oilseed production), and foundry sands
as topsoil materials. We'll follow the talks with discussion on needs
for further (basic and applied) research and potential collaborations...http://allegheny.extension.psu.edu/meeting facilitator, Daniel Bain, at dbain+@pitt.edu
or 412-624-8766...Research Working Group...Mike Masiuk at the Cooperative Extension, mcm2@psu.edu...
http://www.blackberrymeadows.com ...
http://sylvanianatives.com/
...annuals and organic gardening supplies from Gardenalia, 252 S.
Highland Avenue (412-441-9611)....
Garden Dreams...810-812 Holland Ave., Wilkinsburg 412-638-3333)...mindyjoyschwartz@comcast.net...
http://pittsburghgardenswap.blogspot.com/
http://www.wilkinsburgcleanandgreen.org/
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Urban Land Institute
http://uli.org
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http://kretschmannfarm.com
http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M10233
https://www.pathwayswellnessprogram.com/Farm_to_Table.html
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"The war in Iraq is in fact illegal. It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war. An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq."
- Lt. Ehren Watada
http://duckdaotsu.blogspot.com
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Junior Master Gardeners
http://jmgkids.us
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http://uruknet.de/?l=x&p=-1&hd=0&size=1#Action
http://davidicke.com
landstewardshipproject.org
http://spearheadvibrations.com
http://sustain360.org
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World faces hottest year ever, as El Niño combines with global warming
by Cahal Milmo 1/1/7
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2116873.ece
...combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record...
University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/pjones
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http://humorgazette.com/blog1.htm
http://www.humorgazette.com/bush_documents.htm
...as seen on TV, President Bush possesses a rare ability to piss in your ear and tell you it's a shimmering beacon of democracy...
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Gore Argues That a Culture of Fear Has Corrupted Public Life
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/comments?type=story&id=3198208
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html
http://digg.com/political_opinion/MUST_READ_Excerpt_from_The_Assault_on_Reason_by_Al_Gore_TIME
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Bush could double force by Christmas
Stewart M. Powell, Hearst Newspapers
5/22/7
...The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq...
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Mystery of Cause and Effect
http://www.suprememastertv.com/vod/skin/board/vege/movie.php?bo_table=BMD&wr_id=72
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http://strombackfoundation.com
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Ron Paul, honest Republican
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AD7dnFDdwu0
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http://ignatz.blogspot.com
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Our problems meet in common solutions

Life is a picture that just keeps getting bigger. When I was just a little palooka, to cross Greenfield Avenue was not allowed. That side of Magee Field was the edge of the universe; go past there and you WILL get a whipping, and maybe something even worse might happen. When we humans still thought the world was flat the borders of maps sometimes said "There be dragons" - we just didn't know what was out there. Now we recognize there's no end to the universe. No matter how far you go, there's more farther out.

There's no end to our problems. And there are always solutions that end up causing other problems. In this time of great stress, breathtaking new techno-fixes coincide with problems that interact with with such complexity that we don't know what's going to happen from day to day - except that things are becoming more unstable.

Actually, we all have the same problems, but see them from different angles. Looking at the big picture can help find single solutions that help many problems.

Years ago, before many had heard of composting, people would complain that the food nowadays doesn't taste as good as it used to. Some of these same people would complain that I was causing a disease hazard when applying my farming experience to making organic garbage into fertilizer. But I knew that food grown in healthier soil not only tastes better - it is better and is really the best way to prevent people from getting sick. So treating a problem - garbage - as a resource kills two birds with one stone...Uh, maybe that's not a good analogy... let's say creates a win/win/win/win situation. We don't have to get rid of the garbage, we get a free fertilizer, our food tastes better, and we're better nourished and so more resistant to disease. There are even more wins to the deal: more quantity and variety of living things in the soil make for a more stable ecosystem, including for human beings.

You can define the problem as:
not enough food;
not enough fertilizer;
food that doesn't taste good;
people having weakened immune systems;
our landfills and air and waterways being sources of toxics and disease because we didn't let the organic wastes go back to the soil as it should;
or a shortage of plants to absorb more of that carbon dioxide we've way too much of already.

But, looking at the ecosystem as a whole (we humans included), composting shows itself to be a solver of so many problems that working together to compost more of the organic sector of our waste couldn't help but make a lot of people happy (or at least less unhappy) in the long run.

Perhaps our new leaders (once we get rid of the dividers who have been profiting from encouraging conflict in the world) will be uniters, helping to bring the world into a new sense of community. Because only by working together are we going to survive the changes ahead.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Nuclear power is not the answer.

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We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
~Albert Einstein
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Petersen_Thermageddon.htm
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From
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
by Helen Caldicott, MD 2006
http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_catalog&task=author&author_id=P14771
http://nuclearpolicy.org/?Page=Module&ModuleID=55
page 4
...Although a nuclear power plant itself releases no carbon dioxide, the production of nuclear electricity depends upon a vast, complex, and hidden industrial infrastructure that is never featured by the nuclear industry in its propaganda, but that actually releases a large amount of carbon dioxide as well as other global warming gases...the vast infrastructure necessary to create nuclear energy, called the nuclear fuel cycle, is a prodigious user of fossil fuel...most of the energy used to create nuclear energy - to mine uranium ore for fuel, to crush and mill the ore, to enrich the uranium to create the concrete and steel for the reactor, and to store the thermally and radioactively hot waste - comes from the consumption of fossil fuels, that is coal or oil...
page8
...millions of tons of radioactive material that is currently dumped on the ground, often on native Indian tribal land, emitting radioactive elements to the air and water...the remediation process also involves the extensive use of fossil fuels and the production of more carbon dioxide...
page 13
...At the end of its lifetime, the reactor will need to be cleaned of extensive quantities of accumulated radioactive material...separate from decommissioning, may be energetically very expensive and will need as much energy debt as 50% of the original energetic construction costs...
The water that cools the reactor core becomes heavily contaminated with tritium, or radioactive hydrogen, and with carbon 14, the long-term medical and ecological effects of which are not well understood...radioactive life of tritium is more than 200 years,...of carbon 14 is 114,600 years...
page 15
...Every year,one-third of the now-intensely radioactive fuel rods must be removed from the reactor, because they are so contaminated with fission products that they hinder the efficiency of the electricity production. These rods emit so much radiation that a lethal dose can be acquired by a person standing in close proximity to a single spent fuel rod within seconds. But they are also extremely thermally hot and must therefore be stored for thirty to sixty years in a heavily shielded building and continually cooled by air or water. If they are not continually cooled , the zirconium cladding of the rod could become so hot that it would spontaneously burn, releasing its radioactive inventory. Finally, after and adequate cooling period, the rods must eventually be packed into a container by remote control.
Construction of these highly specialized containers uses as much energy as construction of the original reactor itself...To make matters worse, spent fuel packaging is a completely new and relatively untested technology for which there is no operational data.
Transportation of High-Level and Intermediate Waste and Long-Term Storage for 240,000 Years...
page 19
Paying for Nuclear Energy
The True Economic Costs of Nuclear Energy
The nuclear energy myth...costs...apply only to...existing nuclear reactors...omission of capital costs of construction, regulatory delays, and the like...
A report from the New Economics Foundation titled "Mirage and Oasis: Energy Choices in an Age of Global Warming" concluded that the cost of nuclear power had been underestimated by almost a factor of three. Indeed, the nuclear industry baldly provides false estimates of the financial cost of nuclear electricity, failing to account for the total nuclear fuel cycle, basing their numbers on incomplete data. Were the true costs to be factored in, the unit cost of nuclear power would rise dramatically....
...once realistic construction and running costs are considered, the price of nuclear electricity rises...
page 21
...Socialized Electricity
Perhaps the reason the leading nuclear power producers do not seem fazed by the high tab for nuclear power is that they do not expect to pick it up. Despite the fact that most developed countries are rhetorically wedded to principles of the "free market," their governments remain inexplicably enthusiastic about a form of energy that cannot be sustained without huge government subsidies and handouts. This socialization of nuclear electricity within a capitalist society has never been called into question, nor has it been critically scrutinized by the general public and their elected representatives. Yet dozens of the same CEOs calling for welfare reform with respect to individuals benefit from policies that amount to corporate welfare for the nuclear power industry...
...Nuclear power was and still is an offshoot of the nuclear weapons industry and a beneficiary of the intensive government-funded research and development committed to nuclear weapons during the Cold War...nuclear energy's renaissance is based on a string of lies that begins by casting nuclear energy as the answer to global warming and goes to position it as the economically responsible alternative to those "expensive renewable energy sources."
...Overt fabrications are propagated from the highest levels...
page 22
...the nuclear power industry's revival is utterly dependent upon taking money out of the taxpayer's pocket.
...it must be clearly stated to those investing millions...that they will lose all, should there be a catastrophic nuclear meltdown in the United States or any other part of the world...A very experienced nuclear engineer, David Lochbaum, who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists is deeply concerned about the current lack of safety standards in U.S. reactors and is convinced there will be a nuclear catastrophe within the near future..."It's not if but when."...
Nuclear power has been and still is dependent upon government subsidies at every level...
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Time is short
http://dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/the-climate-of-global-warming
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http://ww4report.com/node/2922
...the United States government is violating the human rights of...by refusing to limit its greenhouse gas emissions...
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From
Thermageddon
Countdown to 2030
by Robert Hunter, cofounder of Greenpeace 2003
http://thermageddon.com
http://www.arcadepub.com/book/?GCOI=55970100189270
page 124
...the leader of the small island state of Nauru, and elderly gentleman named Kinza Clodumar...His soft but passionate words...After poignantly describing how most of his country's interior had been destroyed by colonial mining interests, Clodumar had paused, composed himself, and said
My people have been confined to the narrow coastal fringe that separates this wasteland from our mother the sea...but two meters above the sea surface. We are trapped, a wasteland at our back, and at our front, a terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions. We submit respectfully that the willful destruction of entire countries and cultures, with foreknowledge, would represent an unspeakable crime against humanity. No nation has the right to place its own misconstrued national interest before the physical and cultural survival of whole countries...
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Independent Progressive Politics Network
http://ippn.org
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Fixing ozone hole raises warming concerns
CFCs replaced by chemicals that release greenhouse gas emissions
By John Heilprin 8/21/6
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14452816/
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Treatment with 'friendly' bacteria could counter autism in children
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1308572006
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Darfur crisis linked to climate change: UK
by Bill Weinberg 4/17/7
http://ww4report.com/node/3634
...John Ashton, Prime Minister Tony Blair's special ambassador on climate change. "But there is absolutely no doubt that it's a more difficult conflict to deal with, because on top of all that, you've had a 40% fall in the rainfall in northern Darfur over the last 25 to 30 years, again in a way that's entirely consistent with what the climate models would have told you to expect."...

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"wintergreen mint plant"
http://www.newfrontier.com/nepal/glossary.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintergreen

http://newfrontier.com/2/friends.htm
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From:
The Provocateur State
Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"—and Global Terrorism?
by Frank Morales
http://ww4report.com/node/457
...US Army Field Manual 30-31B, entitled "Stability Operations Intelligence - Special Fields," dated March 18, 1970 and signed by Gen. William C Westmoreland, promoted terrorist attacks (and the planting of false evidence) in public places which were then to be blamed on "communists" and "socialists." It called for the execution of terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, carried out through a network of covert US/NATO armies, in order to convince European governments of "the communist threat."
What's striking is that during this period the primary source for US government info on the Russian "threat" was coming from the Gehlen Organiation, Hitlers eastern front intelligence apparatus, which in the aftermath of World War II had cut a deal with the CIA's Allen Dulles and worked out of Fort Hunt, just outside Washington DC, before being relocated back to Munich. Headed up by super-spy Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, the Org's "special operations" expertise was heeded, financed and well-protected by U.S. tax dollars well into the 1970's...
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Venezuela criticizes DEA as 'new cartel'
by Fabiola Sanchez, Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070507/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/venezuela_us_drugs
...accusing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of being a "new cartel" that aids traffickers.
Justice Minister Pedro Carreno said the South American nation suspended cooperation with the agency in 2005 after determining that "they were moving a large amount of drugs." President Hugo Chavez at the time also accused the DEA of spying.
"The United States with its DEA monopolizes the shipping of drugs like a cartel," Carreno told reporters....
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Brzezinski confirms that the United States can organise attacks in their own territory
2/2/7
http://www.voltairenet.org/article145515.html#article145515
With the exception of Washington Note and Financial Times, the mainstream media decided not to report Zbigniew Brzezinski’s comments that shatter the United Stator ruling class. Auditioned on February 1st, 2007 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the former National Security Adviser read a statement the terms of which had been carefully chosen.
He indicated that : " a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan".
As you must have noticed: Mr Brzezinski evoked the Bush administration plausible organization of an attack in the United States, and the possibility of holding Iran wrongly responsible for it.
In Washington the analysts hesitate between two interpretations of this statement. For certain officials, the former National Security Adviser tried to beat the neoconservatives to it and to cast doubt in advance on any circumstance which would lead to the war. For others, Mr Brzezinski wanted, in addition, to suggest that in case of collision with the war partisans, he could reopen the September 11th file. In any case, Thierry Meyssan’s hypothesis - According to which the September 11th attacks would have been perpetrated by a Military-Industrial Complex faction to provoke the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - Leaves suddenly the taboo domain to be discussed publicly by Washington elites.
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Steve Frisby's Geometric Art
http://stevefrisby.co.uk
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http://tribes.tribe.net/realityportaltribe
http://people.tribe.net/realityportal
http://worldwidenlightenment.com
http://realityportal.info
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Physicians for Social Responsibility - Pittsburgh
http://psrpittsburgh.org
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Thursday, May 03, 2007

time

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From:
Animal Extinction - the greatest threat to mankind
By the end of the century half of all species will be extinct. Does that matter?
4/30/7 by Julia Whitty
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2494659.ece
...Scientists recognise that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna.

From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.

Today we're living through the sixth great extinction...
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http://theclimateproject.org
http://tompaine.com
http://amleft.blogspot.com
http://prissypatriot.blogspot.com