food and energy self-sufficiency

======
Hazelwood Harvest
bioeverything.blogspot.com/2008/11/declare-your-freedom-grow-food.html
pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A56756
======
biofuels, bioplastics
petrosuninc.com/algae-biofuels.html
...algae is capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops...
======
To
Danae Clark, Allegheny Greenworks
cc Joni Rabinowitz, Just Harvest
Barbara Williams, Hazelwood Harvest

Danae;
Thank you for your urban farming work and your letter to the editor. I didn't know that Lawrenceville also had lost a grocery store. Your description of a needed Food Policy Council is exactly what we had for several years. Joni Rabinowitz garnered support for it's establishment by having hearings at Pittsburgh City Council. I spoke in favor at the Council by referring to the terrible unemployment in Germany pre WW2 which favored both scapegoating (e.g. on the Jews) and rationalization. Poor people - with lower nutritional status being more likely to become ill - were quarantined in ghettoes to prevent spread of disease. I said then, and say now even more so, we have these same conditions. I agree with you that it is vital to all that all have access to good food.

The Food Policy Commission was composed of Food Bank, Just Harvest, Giant Eagle, and other community leaders. We learned a lot about the difficulties in assuring elderly, disabled, underemployed, car-less people access to good quality food (with contamination via chemicals and processing and microbial aspects briefly considered). We mapped the Pittsburgh area as far as what neighborhoods had available as far as large and small grocery stores. We managed a win-win by arranging nominal cost van service to some housing projects which delivered and returned residents to supermarkets.
I hope another food policy commission could get started up again, and quickly. Convinced as I am that we are in a moment of historic abrubt climate change, the added flexibility given by food gardens to handle loss of food outlets - permanent or temporary caused by weather events - I think will be starkly clear.

If we were able to have a cooperatively or city-owned, or for that matter owned by anyone, grocery stores which focused on low-cost fresh local organic, with of course WIC and food stamp EBT card, we could get going in the Spring.

Jim

======
post-gazette.com/pg/08363/937917-110.stm
Letters to the editor
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Pittsburgh should have a food policy council

The anger and frustration Lawrenceville residents are experiencing over the loss of their neighborhood grocery store is understandable ("Please Notice Lawrenceville Residents' Needs," Dec. 21 letters). Food is a basic need, and residents of all neighborhoods, regardless of income or age, should have access to it.

Other cities, such as Portland and Chicago, recognize the importance of this need and understand the vital role that food systems play in local economies. They have established food policy councils and adopted food policies that guide their cities' planning and development. The policies include everything from supporting the growth of urban agriculture to promoting the purchase of local food in city schools to requiring that all community master plans include a consideration of food production, distribution and access.

It would not be difficult to create a food policy council in Pittsburgh. There are numerous individuals with knowledge of our regional food system who could serve on the council, and the policies of other cities could serve as models. The Urban Redevelopment Authority has begun to take steps in this direction by initiating conversations with local growers and planning farmers' markets in select neighborhoods. But with a more balanced and comprehensive commitment, the URA/city could work toward providing food security for all Pittsburgh residents.

In an era of fast food, contaminated food and diminishing family-owned markets, access to affordable, nutritious food is imperative to our economic health and quality of life.

DANAE CLARK
Point Breeze

The writer is director of Allegheny Greenworks
Danae Clark
Phone: (412) 244-3435
danae7@gmail.com

Office location:
1129 Braddock Avenue
Braddock, PA 15104
alleghenygreenworks.com
, a green consulting business.

======
Garden opportunity
Editor;
Regarding "Thieves Cause Hazelwood Grocery to Give Up" (Dec. 23) and "Market Collapse: The Neighborhood Loses a Grocery, and Part of Itself" (Dec. 24): As difficult as it is to see, I believe there is opportunity in every crisis.

For many years I have advocated what is being called "relocalization" of food production with individual and community gardens. With inflationary pressures adding to the cost of food, and federal bailouts likely to greatly further increase these pressures, it seems to me that we should be going full scale toward as much locally grown food as possible.

With the help of the city, the Penn State Extension Service and volunteers, some of us have begun to turn empty lots into gardens. Next year, with the continued help of the Hazelwood Initiative, Hazelwood Harvest hopes to take up some of the added burden of providing food.

As the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank is receiving more calls for help along with fewer donations, organizations like Meals on Wheels are increasingly strapped because of higher food and energy costs, and everybody is feeling pinched at the checkout counter, it's clear that working together to grow food is becoming a necessity. To the extent that we can all enjoy growing food together, sharing with each other rather than stealing from each other, we can maintain the whole community's nutritional status and a civil society.

JIM McCUE
Hazelwood
======

Sleep well at night? I don't.

======
From:
Crimes Against Nature
How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are
Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 2004
robertfkennedyjr.com/books.html
page 164-168

...Of course, toxic chemical plants aren't the only potential dirty bombs on American soil. The nation's nuclear power plants pose an equally devastating threat...Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant...24 miles north of New York City.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 175 passed within a few thousand feet of Indian Point...Had it banked left and crashed into the plant instead, it could have triggered a large release of radiation. The surrounding area, including New York City, might have been rendered uninhabitable for years..."...the biggest threat is Indian Point...they're only open 'cause they've got pals in Washington."...

Contrary to the public perception aggressively promoted by the industry, terrorists would not have to puncture the containment dome to cause a serious accident or meltdown. Nuclear plants like Indian Point are vulnerable at half a dozen points, some of them virtually impossible to shield from determined attackers. Terrorists could provoke a meltdown by coordinating attacks against the reactor's cooling system or the plant's control room, by cutting electric lines going into or out of the plant, or, more alarmingly, by disabling the cooling-water pumps and intake structures, which are easily approached from the river's channel.

Worst of all, in a catastrophe that would rival or exceed the impact of a meltdown, terrorists could attack the plant's spent fuel pools, which house 30 years of accumulated high-level radioactive waste and are shielded only by a series of flimsy annex buildings, so-called butler shacks that have the structural integrity of a Kmart. Indian Point's irradiated spent-fuel pools contain more than 1,500 tons of high-level radioactive waste...a significant loss of water within the spent-fuel pools could provoke a fuel-assembly fire that could potentially release a pool's store of cesium 137 - up to 20 times the amount released at Chernobyl, which made an area approximately 1, miles around the plant uninhabitable, 100 miles of it permanently.

Imagine a world without New York City...nuclear power plants as potential U.S. targets...

With this in mind, you would think, and most people do, that in a country as civilized and technologically advanced as ours, nuclear plants would be among our most secure facilities. Amazingly, the opposite is true. Indian Point and other plants near Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., are virtually unprotected against terrorist attack on the scale of September 11. If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this astounding fact: Federal law absolves nuclear power plant operators from any legal duty to protect their plants from attacks "by enemies of the United States." So who does shoulder this heavy burden? Governor George Pataki of New York tells us that it is the federal government. But try to find a federal agency that will take responsibility. Not the NRC, not the Department of Homeland Security, and not the Pentagon...

...no protection from air attacks at Indian Point. The FAA has refused to declare a no-fly zone over the plant, which lies in the approach path of Westchester County Airport. The FAA has given this protection to Disneyland, Disney World, and Crawford, Texas. They even provided it for my cousin Caroline Kennedy's wedding on Cape Cod! In 2002, my brother Douglas, a reporter for Fox News, chartered a small airplane at Westchester Airport and flew over the plant with a film crew and circled it for 20 minutes, waiting in vain for someone to signal him off...a small private jet...packed with explosives...could crash into the right building and precipitate a spent-fuel fire - releasing all the plant's stored radiation...

...the GAO...report...found that the dereliction at Indian Point is in fact the rule at nuclear plants across the United States. According to the report, the NRC deliberately stages softball mock attacks to give the impression of plant security, and has often shielded the industry by burying significant security violations. NRC inspection reports routinely omit security violations such as a guard sleeping on duty or falsified security logs...
======
Allegation that the UN helped with Bush's coup d-etat of Haiti:
The Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization
2004 by Jean-Bertrand Aristide
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/513.html
======
Bacteria Make Better Alcohol Fuels
Modified E. coli produce long-chain alcohol fuels that have advantages over ethanol and butanol.
by Prachi Patel-Predd 12/9/8
technologyreview.com/energy/21783/?a=f
======
Claim that all government books are cooked
cafr1.com
taxretirement.com
======
Activists Clamor for organic farm at White House
npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98613372
eattheview.org
======
The White House Organic Farm Project
thewhofarm.org
twitter.com/TheWhoFarm
facebook.com/group.php?gid=31664663448
======
kitchengardeners.org

Christ brought not peace but a sword.

He turned over the tables of the money changers desecrating the temple. Our Earth is our temple, and commerce has become corrupt. Every gardener and farmer knows that the rotting of the old is the substrate of the new to come.
======
Pope decries selfishness in economic crisis.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081225/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_christmas
Pope Benedict XVI warned in his Christmas message Thursday that the world was headed toward ruin if selfishness prevails over solidarity during tough economic times for rich and poor nations..."If people look only to their own interests, our world will certainly fall apart."...
======
Letter-to-the-editor Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 12/25/8

To: letters@post-gazette.com

Editor:
Regarding
======
Thieves cause Hazelwood grocery to give up
post-gazette.com/pg/08358/937017-52.stm
======
and
======
Market collapse: The neighborhood loses a grocery, and part of itself
post-gazette.com/pg/08359/937303-192.stm
======
As difficult as it to see, I believe there is opportunity in every crisis. For many years I have advocated what is being called "relocalization" of food production with individual and community gardens. With inflationary pressures adding to the cost of food, and federal bailouts likely to greatly further increase these pressures, it seems to me to be even more urgent that we be going full scale toward as much food locally grown as possible. With the help of the city, the Penn State Extension Service, and volunteers, some of us have begun to turn empty lots into gardens. Next year, with the continued help of the Hazelwood Initiative, Hazelwood Harvest hopes to take up some of the added burden of providing food. As the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank is receiving more calls for help along with less donations, and organizations like Meals on Wheels are increasingly strapped because of higher food and energy costs, and everybody is feeling pinched at the checkout counter, it's clear that working together to grow food is becoming a necessity. To the extent that we can all enjoy growing food together, sharing with each other rather than stealing from each other, we can maintain the whole community's nutritional status and a civil society.


Jim McCue
Hazelwood
412/421-6496
composter and biotech researcher
======
ckm3.blogspot.com
======
ashizashiz.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-do-we-fight-this-ill-tell-you-how.html
======
12/19/8
feedingamerica.org/newsroom/press-release-archive/bank-of-america.aspx
...investing in the communities it serves, Bank of America will embark in 2009 on a new, ten-year goal to donate $2 billion to nonprofit organizations engaged in improving the health and vitality of their neighborhoods. Bank of America approaches giving through a national strategy called "neighborhood excellence" under which it works with local leaders to identify and meet the most pressing needs of individual communities...
======
bushville.org
...Hoovervilles – 1929 – 40’s
Villages of homeless that appeared following the Great Depression...
======
9/11 was an inside [and an outside] job.
brasschecktv.com/page/91.html
======
spiritual center in the brain?
news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20081224/sc_livescience/spiritualityspotfoundinbrain
======

Make laws obeyable.

======
"Match people-less homes with homeless people."
~Max Rameau
takebacktheland.blogspot.com
======
I always get a kick outta people who try to use the law to herd people around, criminalizing them for acting by their own lights and according to their own unique natures. Whether re sex, or the desire to make a home, or the use of marijuana or other psychedelic drugs - the legal push-and-shovers have the gall and stupidity to call them immoral for not being able to obey their perverted laws.
======
The Miami grassroots group Take Back the Land has launched a campaign to help some of the victims of the foreclosure crisis. The group has been helping homeless families illegally move into vacant homes that have been foreclosed.

...it is immoral to maintain vacant homes for the purpose of profits in the future, while human beings are forced to live on the street today. The madness of such a policy is only compounded when one considers the owners of these vacant homes are not other people, but banks, the same banks receiving billions of dollars in bailouts without having to trade in the foreclosed homes for use by some of the people financing the bailouts. Additional government resources, including police and other government agencies, should not be used to evict low income people from homes in order to maintain vacant structures for bailed out banks to profit from some time in the future...
takebacktheland.net
democracynow.org/2008/12/19/take_back_the_land_miami_grassroots
======
Environmental Investigation Agency
eia-global.org
======
Rove threatened him - now he's dead
Key witness in Bush election fraud
brasschecktv.com/page/508.html
velvetrevolution.us/prosecute_rove
======

We are our own enemies.

======
The Biology of Doom:
The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project
By Ed Regis 2000
books.google.com/books?id=8HWQ1uzybFwC
...America's own covert biological weapons program from its origins in World War II...employed 5,000 people and tested pathogens on 2,000 live human volunteers; conducted open-air tests on American soil; sprayed our cities with bacterial aerosols; and stockpiled millions of bacterial bombs for instant deployment. Yet, surprisingly, almost nothing has been published about this project until now. This is the first book to expose the true story of America's secret program to create biological weapons of mass destruction...
+
...page 144
On May 8, 1951, North Korea's minister of foreign affairs...sent a cable to the president of the UN Security Council saying that the United States had attacked Pyongyang and the surrounding areas with weapons carrying the smallpox virus...some 3,500 cases of smallpox had broken out in the area, with 350 deaths...
Ridgway called the charges "deliberate lies."...smallpox was endemic in the affected areas and these were natural outbreaks...
...In February 1952, however, North Korea's Pak Hen Yen was back with new claims. "The forces of the American imperialist invaders again used bacteriological weapons early this year for mass annihilation of the people," he said. "The American imperialist invaders, since January 23 this year, have been systematically scattering large quantities of bacteria-carrying insects by aircraft in order to disseminate infectious diseases over our front line positions and rear."
Bacteriological tests showed, he claimed that the insects were infected with plague, cholera, and other diseases
Shortly afterward, in March, Chou En-lai, minister for foreign affairs of the People's Republic of China, claimed that the United States was also bombing China with bacterial weapons. The Americans were using not only insects but a fantastic assortment of bombs and vectors in an attempt to spread smallpox, anthrax, plague, meningitis, encephalitis, and cholera, along with fowl septicemia and four different diseases of plants.
These charges were soon accompanied by details which, if authentic, would indeed appear to show that American bombers had flown over the area and dropped the biological kitchen sink upon the Far East. There were eyewitnesses, photographs, lab results, and artifacts.
On March 12, 1952, according to local public health authorities, residents of K'uan Tien, a town near the Yalu River in the Liaotung Province of China, watched as eight American F-86 jet fighters flew overhead and one of them released a bright cylindrical canister. This was in broad daylight, shortly after noon, and the witnesses set out to find the object. The failed. What they found, instead, were swarms of anthomyiid flies and masses of spiders.
Everything about these insects was anomalous: they appeared in habitats that were wrong for the species, at the wrong time of the season (some of the insects had been found on snowbanks), and in concentrations, combinations, and distribution patterns that were irregular in the extreme.
A seperate group of investigators found quantities of fowl feathers scattered in the vicinity. When the flies, spiders, and feathers were examined in the laboratory, all of them showed traces of the anthrax microbe, Bacillus anthracis.
Nine days after the incident, a search party located a small depression in the ground, one that looked as if it had been made by a bomb. Inside the crater, and on the surface of the snow-covered cornfield that surrounded it, were the remains of an object that apparently had shattered upon impact...an "artificial eggshell."
Even before they'd found the eggshell, members of the search team had fallen ill with respiratory infection. After a short course of the disease, four of them were dead of pulmonary antrhax. That, anyway, was the story...
+
======
"How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. "
~Henry David Thoreau
======
"The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day."
~Theodore Roosevelt
======
"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world."
~James Baldwin - From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976)
======
"My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest...no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism...true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village."
~Gandhi
======
levees.org
======

Life spirals up

======
mass suicide mass – (for jonestown and ourtown)

what is common to us all
a case of the jones
of keeping up with joneses
cult is the tip of the culture

ah this collective guilt
of knowing what is being
done to us
by us

where was their individuality
asked all the waving flags

and our grandfathers
who said, if not me
maybe my son
grandsons still waiting
hiding of clock cloak
of worker
dreaming
that their 10,000 year old class
will be abolished

slow death
mass suicide mass
for those who couldn't keep
track of themselves
without their main man
in the midst of a
subverted subverted future
which clouds our love

yes there is a crack
in the reality
going to war suicide
going to chemical plant suicide
going to revolutionary suicide
going to build nuke plant suicide
not making a new world suicide
not demystifying suicide

audy murphy, remember him
uncle sam's no.1 son
congressional medal of honor winner
who died alone
because he couldn't find community

sgt york
alvin york
who gary cooper made
us love gun
and sgt york dying of cancer

the same year the new anti war
movement shook d.c.
the i.r.s. danced around alvin's bed
chanting
you owe us taxes
from the movie of your life
humphrey bogart would say
"taxes is a protection racket"

dylan don't follow leaders echoes
earlier hip chants
of how in the original moment
the people copped for the king
instead of themselves, the self
suicide the denial of the self
succumbing to the man's plan
and believing it to death
watch out for disciples baby

the guns creep in
the guns creep out
shouts the explorer to the new world
still
how heavy to fall in the new world
yes dreams have cracks in the
rainbow on the way to becoming human
only forward never dies

hey wait nine months
next time baby
it took 10,000 years
to make you baby

from the bottom tip
of argentina chile death locks
to the top of guyana
not so strange deaths
some will say
it was the howls and screams
from nicaraguan
argentinean
guatemalan
chilean
and brazilian torture dungeons
that made them nuts
conspiracy fact
can wisdom come
from death jones jim
something alive must
life demands it

steve ben israel 1978

carnegiehall.org/textSite/box_office/events/evt_9602.html
robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=1294
allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=17903
newmuseum.org/events/211
video.aol.com/video-detail/steve-ben-israel-taking-the-train/492672739
video.aol.com/video-detail/steve-ben-israel-nonviolent-executions/4153659306
youtube.com/watch?v=dtL3pjwZo4s
unlikelystories.org/benisrael0108.shtml
danaherbert.blogspot.com/2008/05/village-interviews-steve-ben-israel.html
blacklistedjournalist.com/column95k3.html
theaterlab.info/nonviolent.html
allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=41:80590~T3
ingridjungermann.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/the-death-of-poetry
humanbeatbox.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23747
timessquare.com/Theater/Theater_Stories/2007_Obie_Awards_Winners!
======
Hazelwood resident hopes gardens are way to fight blight
by Adam Fleming
pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A56756
hen Barbara Williams first planned to bring a vegetable garden to Ladora Way, she thought the produce would "support the area as well as bring Hazelwood out of the doldrums." She didn't know that she'd be one of the people in need of support.

In August, the work-from-home customer-service agency she worked for started cutting back her hours, eventually to zero.

"I'm one of the poor unfortunate Hazelwooders right now," she says with a laugh. "I'm laid off just like everybody else."

Fortunately for her, and her neighbors, the blow of a declining economy was tempered by the garden.

"We were feeding a lot of folks off this garden," Williams says. "We started late, [but] we produced a lot."

The herbs and vegetables were available to the community on a need basis. Williams has hopes of expanding to other lots and creating a nonprofit group to support the endeavor.

The garden -- which is on a plot of land about the size of two row houses -- is within sight of Williams' corner house.

The collard greens are still producing, but most everything else has been bedded down for the winter. Williams says they broke ground in mid-June and started harvesting in September.

There was an herb garden and a tomato patch growing on pieces of an old chain-link fence. Community members salvaged discarded items to build the garden's framework, even plucking materials from the remains of recently demolished homes in Hazelwood. But "we have to be careful what we're getting," Williams cautions, adding that they don't take from houses that were in a fire because of the potential for contamination.

Two rows of tires -- which the neighborhood kids painted -- serve as planters along the street. The city's Green Up team, which supports community efforts to transform vacant lots and other blighted zones into environmentally friendly areas, built seven raised beds. Behind them, four other beds are sectioned off by railroad ties. A couple of scarecrows sit on a donated bench.

Williams and her neighbors don't even own the land they're working.

"We don't have that kind of money ... yet," she says. "We're going to get there."

The lot is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority -- but some of the other vacant yards that Williams has her eye on are city-owned, which can be purchased relatively cheaply by adjacent property owners.

Still, even the city's side-yard program requires at minimum a $201 down payment, a $200 payment to cover closing costs, and possibly a bidding process with a $250 minimum bid -- which is why for now, Williams isn't looking to take ownership of the garden.

In addition to clearing debris and putting in topsoil, the Green Up Pittsburgh initiative provides horticulture experts from Penn State to help community stewards transform publicly owned vacant lots into gardens.

"If there are interested community stewards, we're willing to make a go of it," says Lauren Byrne, the city's Neighborhood Initiatives Coordinator.

In Hazelwood, Byrne adds, Williams "is our champion in the Green Up program."

Williams is coordinating an effort to create a sustainable nonprofit called Hazelwood Harvest. (Reed Smith is handling the legal work for incorporation pro bono.) There's an organizational meeting in the works for January.

"I was going to do it this month, but I got kind of sidetracked," Williams says, pointing to a hole in the floor that was caused by an electrical fire.

Unemployment and a house fire haven't caused her to lose sight of her goals, however. Next to her desk is a poster-sized map of Hazelwood properties, with color-coding for vacant lots that might offer room for expansion.

Byrne says the work Williams has already done is "amazing. ... In the same conversation that she was telling me that she lost her job, and [that] they were victims of this house fire, she said, 'What about those other URA lots?'"

Williams says she's just trying to grow a stronger community, and provide some good food to those who are hungry.

"Have you been to Whole Foods?" she asks. "It's expensive. We're producing squash where you can just come and pick it off the vine."
======
change.org
milkriver.blogspot.com
======
The Dry Composting Toilet:
An efficient, dignified and healthy system for everyone
by Lourdes Castillo Castillo, translated from Spanish by Michael Zap
zoomzap.org/techniques/SES-eng.php
======
alvincurran.com
======

Everything is not as it seems.

======
"The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me. She is not dead, but sleepeth."
~Henry David Thoreau
======
enviroblog.org
======
From
brasschecktv.com/page/501.html
"Coincidence?
December 8 - Governor Rod Blagojevich announces the State of Illinois will cease doing business with Bank of America.

December 9 - Governor Rod Blagojevich, who has been reportedly under investigations by the federal government for three years is indicted based on a recent wire tap.

If he is as dirty as he is being portrayed, why did it take three years to find something on him?

Also...

When is the last time you saw a governor take a high profile stand for a small business and working people against a multinational bank?

The FBI sure shut that down quick.

What convenient timing they have."
======
healthandenvironment.org
======
Farmers Legal Action Group
flaginc.org
======
http://hawk.heraldinteractive.com/news/international/general/view/2008_12_17_Scientists_find_hole_in_Earth_s_magnetic_field/
======

Take a virtuous cycle up.

Redefining Productivity

Every day we are being threatened by job losses and other effects of the economic downturn. Each of us is personally affected - with family, loved ones and neighbors who: are working several jobs and still not making enough money; have become unemployed or underemployed; are in jeopardy of losing their homes; may be unable to pay their rent; have budgets crippled by price rises. Assumptions about the future have been taken away by loss of savings and collapsing social services.

Some of us are walking wounded, asking for help from a community increasingly unable to provide a safety net. Others are reacting by saying "I've got my own problems." Few see we're all in the same boat. And each of us is tempted to think our own problems are worse than others, forgetting that our basic connectedness is the only rock we've ever really had to cling to.

There is no need to have unemployment in this country. There is so much work to do! The problem is that we don't have a system in which people are paid to do the things that actually need done. We need a world in which people are paid to do the really useful things, and not paid to do destructive things.

Economics is a funny science. Working in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 70's(a slum at the time), I saw daily situations in which people didn't have enough to eat well. So I was stunned to read that President Carter had taken action to raise the price of wheat - "to help the farmers" hurt by low wheat prices. Wait a minute, I thought, won't that raise the price of food? Since then I have come to recognize that people who don't have money can't generate demand - as far as the economy is concerned, they are invisible.

Why are we seeing this worldwide economic downturn? People are being left out. If you're an average business person, you're not interested in places where people don't have much money. So more and more sections of our cities and the world have become "red-lined" - not worth doing business with or in. Previous poor outcomes reinforce the expectation of a bad outcome in the future, so there's a trend toward areas becoming poorer. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with our neighborhood Hazelwood, for instance. If we and investors interested in our community change expectations and act accordingly, outcomes will change.

We've all heard of "vicious cycles." Feedback effects on Planet Earth at this time in history are resulting in vicious cycle effects such as unexpectedly high greenhouse gas levels. But there's also something called a "virtuous cycle." Look it up on Wikipedia. A virtuous cycle in economics is when some positive change - as it gradually catches on - becomes easier and more profitable because more and more are doing it and because of the economies of scale. This has been happening in recent years with organic locally grown food and composting.

Years ago, the words "organic" and "compost" were not used the way they are now. But people like myself made them popular by our absolute obsession to make a cleaner and healthier world. We were often thought of as troublemakers. People were convinced food waste belonged in the garbage. "What are you doing in the garbage? Are you crazy? I'm going to call the police. You're drawing rats, flies, mosquitoes, and disease by what you're doing. You're lowering property values. Nobody wants to live near a dump (a compost heap)." And the absolute best one was, "What you're doing is not natural" when in fact the really unnatural thing to do is to ship organic waste to a landfill.

Now the composter is defined as productive and so profitable rather than a troublemaker and a problem. This is the type of change we all need. The city helped with our neighborhood food garden because it was the right thing to do to help feed poor people. But it was also understood to be a great way to raise the value of the whole area. The city's investment in gardens pays off in numerous ways, from increasing property values to attracting investment. This is just one more example of how the virtuous cycle of society's return of organics to the Earth has made what was unprofitable profitable.

In the stagnation of the economy we're seeing the birth of a new economy based on regenerating the Earth - real productivity. Rather than just go along with a vicious downward cycle - into the interconnected curses of war, famine, disease, and poverty - we can break the mold and spearhead virtuous cycles which build healthy communities by using our waste biomass to recharge our local economies.

There but for the grace of God goes YER sorry ass.

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In the 435-member House of Representatives, 123 elected officials earned at least one million dollars last year, according to recently released financial records made public each year. Next door in the ornate Senate, whose blue-blooded pedigree includes a Kennedy and a Rockefeller, one in three people are millionaires. By comparison, less than one percent of Americans make seven-figure incomes.:
Source: Millionaires Fill US Congress Halls, Agence France Press, June 30, 2004

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"The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied corporations, and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar"
~Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

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"In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of."
~Confucius

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"Democracy [is] when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers."
~Aristotle

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"Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves."
~Walter Anderson

informationclearinghouse.info/article6418.htm
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"The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."
~Sandra Day O'Connor
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Stolen Fields:
A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream
by Jean Boggio 2008
jeanboggio.com

eminentdomainjean.blogspot.com
"...a look at the shadier practices of the government against it's own citizens."

Eminent Domain - the Human Cost

colerithpress.com/index.php?page_id=271
eminentdomainlady.typepad.com

"...descendant of the Cole family of Neville Island in Pittsburgh...eminent domain seizure of the farm at the time of WWI..."

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Don't make waste in the first place so you don't have to recycle it. Outlaw planned obsolescence.
zerowasteinstitute.org/zwconcepts.html
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The Carbon-Free Home
36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit
by Rebekah, Stephen Hren 2008
chelseagreen.com/authors
======
From:
Taken for a Ride
Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution
by Jack Doyle 2000

page 29

... [T]he automobile manufacturers, through AMA, conspired not to
compete in [the] research, development, manufacture, and installation of
[pollution] control devices, and collectively did all in their power to delay
such research, development, manufacturing, and installation.
~US Department of Justice
confidential memo, 1968

...Lloyd Cutler...on behalf of...the Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA)...
was defending...against a charge of industrial conspiracy. Nine
months earlier, the AMA - along with American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and
Gen­eral Motors - had been named by the Justice Department in an antitrust lawsuit
accusing them of conspiring for sixteen years to prevent and delay the manufacture
and use of pollution control devices for automobiles. 1"Beginning at least as early as 1953, and continuing thereafter...," alleged the DOJ complaint, "the defendants and coconspirators have been engaged in a com­bination and conspiracy in unreasonable restraint of interstate trade and commerce in motor vehicle air pollution control equipment.. . . "." The complaint charged that
the automakers, in violation of the Sherman Act, had:

• engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate competition among themselves in the research,
development, manufacture, and installation of pollution control equipment;

• engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate competition among themselves in purchas­
ing patents on new pollution control equipment developed by outside parties...

page 328

...Detroit claimed that meeting emissions and fuel economy standards simultaneously was impossible and would later push for weakening air pollution standards in trade for gains in fuel economy. Yet Honda had already shown it could do both simultaneously, at least in its smaller engine. Again, in 1985, when GM and Ford were pushing to rollback fuel economy standards, Honda was the first to bring a 50 mile-per-gallon automobile to the US market with its Honda Civic CRX-HF model.

Later, as global warming began to enter the debate, Honda offered a 1991 TV ad carrying the theme, "Think What You Can Save," using time-lapse photography showing a rain forest sprouting up around a Honda Civic VX (which was EPA rated at 58 MPG highway)...was challenged by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the US Business and Industrial Council, among others. The groups charged that Honda's ad implied that Civics preserved rain forests. Honda replied the ad only conveyed the car used less gasoline, which meant it would produce less emissions, including the carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming...

...as Honda became more of an upscale car producer...it appeared to pull back on fuel economy, at least in the policy area. By February 1991, Honda joined the Big Three in opposing a fuel economy bill...
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Society of Environmental Journalists
sej.org/resource/index18.htm
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The dirty side of 'clean' coal
by Douglas Fischer
dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/mountaintop-removal/mtr
======

Earth is gonna kick our ass.

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Don't buy slave-made products.
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From The National Labor Committee

nlcnet.org/article.php?id=610

Toys of Misery Made in Abusive Chinese Sweatshops

May also be carrying Bed Bugs

“Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

Young workers in China who make holiday toys for Disney, Hasbro and RC2—including Bratz dolls—are suffering from a serious infestation of bed bugs in their dorms. Workers report that their bodies are often covered with red welts from the bug bites, which can easily become infected if the wounds are scratched. A leading entomologist at a major university confirmed to the National Labor Committee that it would be very possible for bed bugs to hitch a ride to the U.S., especially if they hid the cardboard toy boxes.

Disney toys are produced at the Daewi factory in Dongguan, China under abusive and illegal sweatshop conditions:

• Workers are at the factory 96 hours a week, routinely toiling 15 ½-hour shifts, from 8:30 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
  
• All overtime is forced. Any worker missing a shift will be docked three days’ wages.
  
• Workers are cheated of up to 40 percent of the wages legally due them, paid below the minimum wage and shortchanged on their overtime pay.
  
• A worker arriving 30 minutes late will also be docked three days wages.
  
• Toiling in 95-degree temperatures, workers are drenched in their own sweat.
  
• Eight workers share each primitive dorm room, sleeping in double-level bunk beds which are infested with bed bugs.

Hasbro and RC2 Toys, including Bratz dolls are made under abusive sweatshop conditions at the Yongsheng factory in the south of China:

• Workers are at the factory 93 hours a week, toiling 13 ½-hour shifts, seven days a week.
  
• Anyone missing a single overtime shift is docked three days’ wages.
  
• Workers are cheated of up to 36 percent of the wages legally due them.
  
• Workers describe the factory food as “horrible…You can hardly bring yourself to swallow it.”
  
• Twenty-four workers are crowded into each dorm room sleeping on narrow triple- level bunk beds. Temperatures routinely reach 95 degrees. The dorms are infested with bed bugs.
• Each toilet is shared by 24 workers. ..

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"...Gaia is a tough bitch - a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone...."
~Lynn Margulis
edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/n-Ch.7.html
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edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/d-Contents.html
...Chapter 4
Brian Goodman
"Biology is Just a Dance"
The "new" biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal. As Stephen Jay Gould says, it has no purpose, no progress, no sense of direction. It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms...
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hydrogen
nationalvapor.com/resourceslinks.htm
======

quantum change

======
From:
Marine life faces "acid threat"
by Julian Siddle
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"...It's going down 10 to 20 times faster than the previous models predicted..."
~Professor Timothy Wootton, University of Chicago [re pH]
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news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7745714.stm
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=36073

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Researchers say carbon dioxide levels are having a marked effect on the health of shellfish such as mussels.

They sampled coastal waters off the north-west Pacific coast of the US every half-hour for eight years.

The results, published in the journal PNAS, suggest that earlier climate change models may have underestimated the rate of ocean acidification....
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halting the destruction, starting from scratch with the new

Book Bush. I believe in rehab rather than revenge for those who thrive on destruction. I wonder if there's a part of the brain that has to do with spirituality, maybe a part that some just don't have. We need a truth and reconciliation commission which can find the good in each of the perpetrators while exposing their crimes. We have survived almost 8 years without a president, with someone who is actually the wrong type of anarchist - making laws to suit himself and ignoring the ones he doesn't like - pretending to be the president. We no longer have the rule of law. Let's recognize that the only real law is God's law, and God is Love.
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truth and reconciliation
theleftcoaster.com/archives/013475.php#013475
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www.landslidecommunityfarm.org/Landslide_Community_Farm/Projects/Projects.html
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greensmps.org.au
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The Cleveland EcoVillage: Faith that cities are good for people and good for the planet
regionallearningnetwork.org/forum/topic/show?id=2210799%3ATopic%3A228
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censored
libertus.net/censor/banchall.html
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greencitybluelake.org
...Cleveland considers chickens and bees [and goats and pigs and...]...
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Sex Workers Outreach Project
swopusa.org
======
From:
Project for Public Spaces:
How Your Community Can Thrive - Even in Tough Times
pps.org/info/newsletter/Placemaking_in_a_Down_Economy/How_Your_Community_Can_Thrive-Even_in_Tough_Times
...In the past, a vital local economy was based on attracting large companies by offering inexpensive locations and a cheap labor force. The qualities of a particular place mattered little, and people migrated to where the jobs were. Moreover, much of that economic growth was based on cheap oil, which encouraged people’s work, homes and shopping destinations to be spread far apart. That’s all changed, and now communities with lively destinations that are easily reached by walking and transit gain distinct advantages...
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Fix the roads we have before building more.
myspace.com/pghstopsi69
stopi69.wordpress.com/links
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_69
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4/8/43
newspaperarchive.com/ContentListbyTopic.aspx?c=Franklin D. Roosevelt#1125
...President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that all wages would be frozen, a price ceiling would be implemented on all food commodities, and workers would not be permitted to change jobs unless the change would aid the war effort, all in an attempt to check out-of-control inflation. “Mr. Roosevelt said he thought everyone should avoid over-playing either scarcity or plenty because that is not good for public morale. We will have trouble, he said, if the public stops buying all at one time or tries all to buy at the same time,”...
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sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/resources.main
sustainablehospitals.org
sustainableproduction.org
marianamonument.blogspot.com
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Tar Sands - Feeding U.S. Refinery Expansions with Dirty Fuel
environmentalintegrity.org/pub513.cfm
...Refining tar sand oil will result in higher air emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid mist, and nitrogen oxides, as well as toxic metals such as lead and nickel compounds. The consequences of tar sand oil extraction include the clear-cutting and strip-mining of huge portions of intact boreal forest ecosystem, the creation of vast un-reclaimable toxic lakes of wastewater, the consumption of enormous amounts of water and energy, and the production of three times more greenhouse gas as extracting conventional crude oil...
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International Coalition for Sustainable Production and Consumption
icspac.net
======
permaculture.com/store/conversion_kits
permaculture.com
...With alcohol fuel, you can become energy independent, reverse global warming, and survive Peak Oil in style. Alcohol fuel is "liquid sunshine" and can't be controlled by transnational corporations. You can produce alcohol for less than $1 a gallon, using a wide variety of plants and waste products, from algae to stale donuts. It's a much better fuel than gasoline, and you can use it in your car, right now. You can even use alcohol to generate electricity. Alcohol fuel production is ecologically sustainable, revitalizes farms and communities, and creates huge new opportunities for small-scale businesses. Its byproducts are clean and valuable. Alcohol has a proud history and a vital future...
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performanceplants.com/biofuels.html
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"National security concerns are not defined only by the challenges created by terrorists abroad, but also by criminals in our midst, whether they be criminals located on the street or in a board room."
~Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General nominee
From
democracynow.org/2008/12/3/attorney_scott_horton_on_justice_after
...AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Matthew Alexander, his book, just out this week, would have been out earlier—he had trouble getting it out of the Pentagon, the vetting process—How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. And Scott Horton, his latest piece in Harper’s is called “Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration.”
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ronsuskind.com
democracynow.org/2008/8/13/the_way_of_the_world_ron
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"War cannot be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only through annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment...''
~Nikola Tesla
"My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla", Hart Bros., 1982. Originally appeared in the Electrical experimenter magazine in 1919.
www.neuronet.pitt.edu/~bogdan/tesla/onwar.htm
tesla.org
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2188562935002257117

coming down to Earth

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"It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn."
~Cesar Chavez
ufw.org/_page.php?inc=history/07.html&menu=research
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/César_Chávez
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International Union of Soil Sciences
iuss.org
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Fluoride's role in the Donora disaster was covered up. After watching this video clip, are you less skeptical of statements that use of depleted uranium weapons is a present day Holocaust?

From anti-fluoridation video at
pnacitizen.org/healthdecep.html

... [picture from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh] The Mellon Institute for Industrial Research in Pittsburgh, founded by leading ALCOA stockholder Andrew W. Mellon, which assisted industry in lawsuits alleging air pollution...the track record of...The Mellon Institute was a leading defender of asbestos for the asbestos industry...it's no coincidence that the Mellon Institute makes the first suggestion that fluoride be added to public water supplies..."If Harold Hodge and the University of Rochester are injecting people with plutonium and uranium, and at the same time they are reassuring us about fluoride safety, what's the connection?...The Manhattan Project needed enormous quantities of fluoride to make nuclear weapons ...documents ...uncovered...in the files of the Atomic Energy Commission are very clear and very explicit. The toxicology department at the University of Rochester, which was under the direction of Harold Hodge, was asked to come up with medical information that could help the government in lawsuits in which the United States Army and the U.S. government were being charged with fluoride pollution..."...
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povertymap.net/resources.cfm
povertyenvironment.net/?q=related_links
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aotearoaawiderperspective.wordpress.com/a-beginners-guide-to-911-truth

aotearoaawiderperspective.wordpress.com/now-that-i-have-your-attention-wtc-7

...Building three, officially named WTC 7 was a 47 floor...part of the WTC complex..
The collapse was not mentioned in the official 911 commission report and NIST, which promised an official explanation has yet to publish its rapport on the buildings collapse.

The building housed head quarters of the CIA, NSA, the IRS, Giuliani’s security head quarters, archives of fraud cases against Wall street Bankers and Enron and other assorted secretive organisations.

The security was such that nobody without clearance could enter the building. It would have been impossible for the “19 alleged” hijackers to place explosives in the building. So if they could not have brought the building down than who did?

Some more facts to ponder;

* Only three steel framed buildings ever collapsed due to fire. WTC 1,2 and 7.
* They all collapsed at free fall speed into their own footprint.
* No criminal investigators were allowed on the biggest crime scene in the history of the
United States.
* Almost all of the steel of all three buildings was removed and send to China for recycling...
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"...Congress...must save the world from the internal combustion engine..."
~Michael Moore
michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=242
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dissidentvoice.org/links
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meetthesystem.org
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Tucker car inventor alleging corporation/government collusion to stop manufacture of his car
http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1948/letter.html
tuckerclub.org
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"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
~James Baldwin
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"We are starving in the midst of bountiful harvests and booming exports!: Unemployed Rural Landless Workers, Para State, Brazil (2003)
informationclearinghouse.info/article21369.htm
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hybridliving.com.au
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