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Save Yourselves | The Conflicted Doomer Link
August 25, 2012

This week, in politics here, President Obama has apparently put pressure on the Eurozone not to boot Greece out before the November elections, lest the effect on our markets make the prez look bad and hurt his chances of reelection. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/obama-asks-eurozone-to-keep-greece-in-until-after-election-day-8076852.html

And as Obama and David Cameron warned Syria of interventions if they brought out the chemical weapons in their civil war, Vladamir Putin warned them, again, not to interfere in Syria.

While all of this smacks of the political gamesmanship and hubris typical of imperial leaders and will probably be about as effective in actually changing anything for the better as King Canute commanding the tides not to rise, for sheer unadulterated crazy, the Republicans won hands down this week.

In Texas an elected Republican judge of Lubbock county worried on a local radio interview that if Obama was reelected we might have civil war.

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Dandelion G.
Monday August 27, 2012, 9:59 am
Gee, sorry I didn't get a chance to get on here last night, speaking of being in a fog, my mind was last night. But have enjoyed reading the blog as well as the comments on here this morning. I noticed that Carole left the link to this C2 submission by Caitlin to the writer of the blog, so if she does happen to read this I want to thank her also for some of her other writings, I enjoyed the Cherokee Child short story, very nicely written.

Well, unless one has their head in the sand, I think most people realize that things are not as they should be. One might not fully understand all that is going wrong, the longer one delves into things the more that one understands how so many areas are messed up mostly due to shortsighted thinking instead of looking as the native americans did as to how it would affect the 7th generation.

I believe there will be a dropping down in most people's standard of living until enough people get sick and tired of being sick and tired. Not sure where the bottom must get, sort of like the frog in the water, turn the water up real slow and he sits in it until he is cooked, and this is what has been done a slow cooking. For if the senarios we see playing out before our eyes happened quickly say in 1968 people would of been in the streets by the millions, heck they were already in the streets. This is our punishment people for trying to bring a world to a place where it was a lot more fair and equitable.

Fair and equitable doesn't work in their intellectual minds, it's all about the profit sheet and bottom line. This global economy isn't for "us" or the poor in India even. The farmers in India have been fed a bill of goods, Monsanto seeds and now the farmers drink the costly fertilizer in their final protest. What else is there left to do? On the blog thread someone said they have a gun and will keep a bullet for themselves, well in India and other places they may not be in ownership of a gun but the kept the final container of Monsanto poison.

This is a global issue for the worlds people, there are a few powerful around this globe that pull the strings, the major Banksters, Corporations, and certain Families, and they only care about what works for them. We are like pieces on the chess set, and if a bunch of pawns get removed due to starvation, lack of medical, well so what. As long as they are still in the action it matters not.

I recall reading how human beings look at other human beings as not really being human beings. The story of the Cherokee Child brought that back to me. How one group of humans stood on the side of the road watching those women and children walking in thin clothes, frail, hungry, men too, along the Trail of Tears, and some wrote in their journals, I felt badly for them, but it would always end with.....something along the line as, but they were not really humans. The writer may of used various ways to state that claim, but in their minds, intelligent people too, they all satisfied themselves that they were somehow not really like themselves. So they let them walk on, some might of handed them a few items of food, a few even a jacket or blanket here or there, but mostly they went back to their homes and did nothing. This played out in Germany, as they watched their friends and neighbors be carted out of their homes, they felt these people were less human, and well if I stand up for them they'll take me too.

Well in this case boys and girls we are all the ones being walked down a particular downward spiral. It might not be to the gas chambers or as bad as the Trail of Tears, but who knows, how long do we all allow it to spiral down. Maybe instead of drinking the Monsanto poison or taking the bullet it might come to the Soylent Green and we just get tired of being sick and tired and have our one last movie, nice song played in our ears as we drift off into spirit. If we do nothing, we are not only hurting ourselves but those in other Countries that have always been on the low end of things, as our funds to help them dry up, as cost of foods go up due either to climate change or to those who hedge bets on the stock exchange, millions die. And who cares? How many of us regular Joe's and Jane's in better times stood up for them? Or like the bystanders watching the Indians, think of them as somehow not like us?

It doesn't have to be this way, we in this Country have a better chance than anywhere else to turn things around. A poor person in the Sudan has a long way to go, but we do have certain things in place that should come back into our control, but we've allowed it to slip away. Our ancestors that stood up in the Lawrence Mills of Massachusetts during the Bread and Roses would be appalled at our lackluster now.

Or those who marched alongside of MLK and road those buses into the south as they faced the unknown in towns they knew no one. Or the coal miners who all faced beatings to gain decent wages, safer working standards, and their children out of the mines and into classes. Those women who stood out in front of the Shirt Waist Factories, being spit upon, having thugs beat them up, just to get a few pennies more for their labor. Many of those women died in flames because the Owners did not want to cut back on their profits even if it meant the women suffered and died.

I know many on C2 do things off of C2, as I do myself, but too many Americans just bitch and moan and do not a darn thing about it. Unfortunate, when things start to go bad and some start to stand up, that is when the Greedy take notice and redirect the traffic, hence used the Tea Party people to their own advantage. Get them to look over there while it is in another place. Get us to hate each other while we are all floundering around and the ones at the top are laughing.

They don't care about us......and I was just talking to my daughter this morning that it really isn't going matter a lot who gets in if we have broken institutions, from the bottom up. We shouldn't have to wait for this next election in November, people are hurting today and been hurting today, but do you see any real help or things that are being done to correct anything? No, those in power are using their power only for their personal agendas, be it to protect their jobs, or their Puppet Master the Oil Barons, or because they don't like someone based on their skin color, or whatever the case may be.

They in Washington, who will all go home tonight to sleep in their beds, with food on the table and with great health care, allow each one of us to remain struggling in our own particular boats, be it a life raft, canoe, dinghie, speed boat, or a piece of floating wood, many are now at the bottom of the waters, is why Alan Grayson has the Names of the dead, those who died simply because they had no medical care in the USA. We expect people like Alan Grayson to have backbone, but where are the American people to support him, he can't stay in the ring if you do not support him. Is why Dennis Kucinich is leaving, he can't do nothing in Washington anymore, and the ones we do have we don't support them enough.

These things don't happen unless the majority of the people allow them to continue to happen, and don't expect an army to come rescue us, it is up to us to save ourselves. But we can't keep thinking as it being all individualized to build a hole in the ground and stock up supplies, if you want a decent world to survive in then you have to look at all of your brothers and sisters surviving and thriving. What is the point of surviving to stand with a gun ready to be shooting everyone that is going to be hungry, for there will be thousands, is that the life you want to survive for? Is it not better for us all to roll up our sleeves and turn this around?

Just one thought, as I've gone on long enough, $2 BILLION a WEEK goes to keep the Afghanistan war situation going. Do you not think that we couldn't get out from under our issues a lot quicker if we used our money to feed ourselves, provide medical care for ourselves, go into non toxic technologies, clean up our foods, our waters and our overall environment, that in by doing so, cleaning up our own acts, that we'd get the Vultures in control, and we could use this new found energy and respect in ourselves to then help others with book not bombs, with food not bombs. Why doesn't the American People understand that as long as the Wars go on we ALL suffer, and that is also the Drug War, and the War on Women.


John Trudell Let The Spirit Live
Really give this video some thought. John Trudell has always been to me a great thinker, a true Human Being, a brother in the struggle, and one who was made to suffer greatly for his speaking out. I put on two stories today, the other I leave here with a hotlink, to me, they both speak a similar story.

The ole' "Kill the Indian Save the Man" was only to save the man to be exploited the way the Dominent Society wanted things done. People who protected the Earth, as the Indians did, didn't hoard, lived simply so others could simply live, did not try to climb on the backs of others to get to some lofty perch, were not suited to make the few rich at the expense of others. Sharing, caring, each person on a level and even playing field.....wow, that would not work in a system that was brought over from Europe.

So you get rid of any way you can, kill, move, destroy, starvation, re-indoctrinate like the Boarding Schools were all about, keep their population low via sterilization, assimulation, relocation, in essence wipe of the whole "Indian thinking".......each generation had it's own portion of the story played out upon them.....

And it doesn't stop with the Indians.......this exploitation moves and continues to move.....because it has too under a system of exploitation. Are you feeling it? Can you see it? What is happening to a Finite Planet?

Many of us are talking about "Waking up....Come out of the Fog....Look behind the curtain"....various expressions

Hello......anyone out there?*


THE THICK DARK FOG

WINNER, "People's Choice," 2012 Black Hills Film Festival (May 1-6, 2012)

WINNER, "Best Documentary," 36th Annual American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco, CA (Nov. 5-7, 2011)

The Folly of Big Agriculture: Why Nature Always Wins

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board at the New York Times. His books include Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, The Rural Life, and Making Hay. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, Klinkenborg reflected on the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and explained why he continues to oppose genetically modified crops.

Large-scale industrial agriculture depends on engineering the land to ensure the absence of natural diversity. Nature ultimately finds a way to subvert uniformity and assert itself.

In its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers — big farmers — will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying.

If we could speed up time a little and become a lot more perceptive, we would see that nature’s big idea is to try out life wherever and however it can be tried, which means everywhere and anyhow. The result — over time and at this instant — is diversity, complexity, particularity, and inventiveness to an extent our minds are almost unfitted to conceive.

A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop — which is what we do with corn and soybeans and a handful of other agricultural commodities — it would diversify its crops to suit the earth. This is not going to happen in big agriculture, because big agriculture is irrational.

To a uniform crop like corn, farmers have been encouraged to apply a uniform herbicide to kill weeds. Modern corn is genetically engineered to not be killed by the herbicide in ubiquitous use. Mostly, that herbicide has been glyphosate, marketed under the Monsanto trade name Roundup. Farmers have sprayed and over-sprayed billions of gallons of Roundup thanks to an economic and moral premise: corn good, weeds bad. And yet you can’t help noticing that it has done nothing to stop the endless inventiveness of nature.

To broadleaf weeds, Roundup is not the apocalypse. It is simply a modest, temporal challenge; which is why, 15 years after genetically-engineered, Roundup-tolerant crops were widely introduced, it’s no longer working against spontaneous new generations of Roundup-tolerant weeds, especially in cotton fields. This is because research, in nature’s laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.

While the USDA hasn’t decided whether to approve Dow’s 2,4-D-tolerant soybeans yet, it has decided to speed up the process of reviewing genetically-engineered crops, mainly to help deal with the spread of so-called superweeds caused by the nearly universal application of glyphosate for the last decade and a half. According to Dow’s numbers, superweeds affected some 60 million acres of crops last year. If things go right, bureaucratically, that is just so much cash in Dow’s pocket.

Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity, the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it, and quickly.

Comment

Thursday April 12, 2012, 3:13 pm
This article is by a New York Times Editorial Board member who opposes genetically modified crops.
In a short articel easily understood, he uses news and examples to explain why human genetic modification won't work.
To those who can perceive a larger issue, his commentary points to the ongoing failure of human exploitation using every means that can be devised to support economic and population growth. He's right: Nature will always win.

What's necessary for us to understand is that nature 's response is slow enough that technology will keep plugging the erosion of our overexploitation until we take down most of the present remaining kinds of life and ecosystems with us.
The folly of big ag is only part of the folly, which is using our minds only for growth and economic enhancement, for you see that these are the only real issues given credence by elected officials and their constituents.
That fact is one for each person to spend significant time meditating over. The Hopi are agriculturalists who know that humans are out of balance, and have generally retreated from the greedy quest. Their ancestors were the people of the great Southwestern Pueblos of a millennium ago. They always had to watch climate, exploitation, population, weather, and so passed on oral wisdom which literate cultures fail to respect.

Yes, nature will win, and the ridiculous contest (and you will notice that our culture is ridiculously contest-oriented) in which this culture is engaged will once again, only take down the wise and innocent other beings now at human mercy. Mercy appears to be an attribute in short supply: so many care2 members are only here to promote human growth and human issues.

Without taking a larger view, such are a part of the demise of each free being, animal or plant whose light is extinguished by this growth and speciesism.

Thursday April 19, 2012, 4:53 pm
Thank you ****** info from Care2 members home blogs was posted Aug 13 2009 at opitslinkfest.blogspot.com and is listed as part of the Topical File on Corporate Farming ( an oxymoron BTW ) found in the Topical Index at Opit's LinkFest! ... my oldest online alias - being an acronymn for Olde Phartte In Training

Jon Huntsman, the lone voice of scientific sanity in the US Republican Presidential race

A few simple rules (essentially: no handball, no fouling, score by putting the ball in the net, no offsides) can explain enormously complicated behaviour (overhead kicks and flowing 40-pass moves). Similarly, the three simple rules of heritable traits, variation within a population, and differential reproduction can and do explain an incredibly complicated biological world. It's elegant, predictive, entirely falsifiable ("Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!") science. It has been demonstrated beautifully in the lab, in the astonishing Lenski experiment; the evolution of microbes in the face of antibiotics is well documented and dangerous.

( Yes, well. A few simple rules of Talking Points also tend to explain media coverage too, not least of which involves conflating unrelated issues as illustrative of mental confusion...which is correct ! )

From Comments

Reality returns

A Selection of Brief Comments on Global Warming from UN-IPCC Invited Participants

Part A of four parts

It is right and in the public interest to expose the truth as told by those nominated and participating in the UN-IPCC, both skeptics and believers. As George Orwell once wrote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
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1. Russia - Dr Yury Izrael, past UN IPCC Vice President, director of Global Climate and Ecology Institute, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"There is no proven link between human activity and global warming.”
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2. Dr. Oliver W. Frauenfield (Climate Scientist), Contributing Author to the UN IPCC Working Group 1 Fourth Assessment Report, with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences Division of Cryospheric and Polar Processes at the University of Colorado.

"Without question, much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”

"Only after we identify these factors and determine how they affect one another, can we begin to produce accurate models. And only then should we rely on those models to shape policy. Until that time, climate variability will remain controversial and uncertain."
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3. Dr Patrick Michaels (Climatologist and Ecologist) UN IPCC Expert Reviewer and University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences. Former Virginia State Climatologist.

“It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various ‘solutions' for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century."
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4. USA - Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University:

"In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this." Wojick added: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
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5. South Africa - Dr. Philip Lloyd, UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author, Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer, and author of more than 150 refereed publications.

“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil. I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.”
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6. Norway – Dr Tom Segalstad (Geologist & Geochemist) UN-PCC Expert Reviewer , a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC:

"It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction."
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7. Japan - Dr Kiminori Itoh (Environmental Physical Chemist) Yokohama National University UN-IPCC expert reviewer

“Man-made warming is the worst scientific scandal in history.”

“When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”

You may have seen the list of Talking Points up at Grist. That has nothing on this.

Climate Change : The Next Generation

None of which tackles the innate absurdity of 'scientific' predictions of the future.

5 Good Reasons to Consider Living in a Yurt (Really)
Yurt? What's a yurt? It's a portable, felt-covered, wood lattice-framed dwelling structure...with a long history.

An FDA Ban on Genetically-Engineered Milk is Twenty Years Overdue

Malaysia and China Sign US$11bn Power Deal That Involves the Displacement of 608,000 Borneo Natives

Sarawak Court Orders Oil Palm Company to Return Native Land
KUCHING, Sarawak, Malaysia, January 21, 2010 (ENS) -Sarawak's natives have won two important court cases over native land issues, their attorney announced this morning in the Sarawak state capital of Kuching on the island of Borneo. The cases had been filed by the natives against the government of Sarawak and an oil palm company that planned to establish an oil palm plantation on native lands

Veteran Journalist Predicts Industrial Crash, Says Sustainable Living Could Save Us

Supreme Court Rejects Michigan's Motion to Block Invasive Carp

Thirst for Oil Imperils South America's Most Biodiverse Wilderness
Yasuní National Park, located in the core of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is the most biodiverse area in all of South America, a team of Ecuadorean, American, and European scientists concludes in the first major peer-reviewed study of life forms in the park, published today. But proposed oil development threatens to destroy one of the world's last high-biodiversity wilderness areas.

Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading
An FoE reports says 'cap and trade' carbonn markets have done little to reduce emissions but have been plagued by corruption and inefficiency

IEER/PSR factsheet: Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power. PDF 34.6KB

July 2009: Brief Virginia Tech paper showing nuclear power by far the most water-intensive means of producing electricity (page 8). PDF T
This has enormous implications because, as the report notes, 36 states face water shortages in the next 10 years.

Investigation of radioactive waste dispersal practices begins in Tennessee and moves across the country
The release of NIRS' report Out of Control - On Purpose: DOE’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste into Landfills and Consumer Products,
caused a flurry of media coverage, especially in Tennessee, one of the key locations examined in the report. Demetria Kalodimos of WSMV-TV in Nashville has run several investigative reports on the issue, and received an award for women in radio and TV for the coverage.

Fake Photos Helped Lead US to War in Iraq

Care2 Selections from the news crew's picks
Chemists offer new hydrogen purification methodNature Materials
How the agrofuels lobby is shaping the world's agriculture
Rocket fuel man
"Washington's ever-spinning revolving door...can turn politicians who pushed environmental concerns into influence peddlers for polluters" ( Something I expect happened to former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein while Environment Minister in the Lougheed administration. Not something happening just in Washington in the last few years, in other words )
Secrecy and Denial as Pakistan lets US use airbase to strike militants
U.S. intel chief's shocking warning : Wall Street's disaster has spawned our greatest terrorism threat
( Are we ready to heed those YouTube posts about American concentration camps yet ? It's a valid warning : against a coerced desperation. )
Time to dump that Bush-era law permitting an invasion of Holland to 'rescue' U.S. soldiers
( One and Dick and George's 'Get Out of Jail Free Cards' )
Torrential rains a mixed blessing for Australia

So then I used those as a jumping-off point for surfing

Government-funded study calls for major overhaul of nation's crime labs
( Anybody serious about cutting corruption - including the DoJ - has to recognize the importance of valid evidence )
Google earth reveals secret history of U.S. base in Pakistan
Report : FDA ignores safety regs, risks lives
All of Them Must Go Hat Tip briarpatch
A World Without Water
France to loan Jordan $200 million for water plan