Ducklings -- photo by my friend & colleague Karen's twin sister
What's Important This Week:
Après Nous Les Dragons: The experts on Extinction
believe that, when we are gone from the planet, Earth will be dominated
by insects and birds, two very resilient life forms. The latest story
on consequences of The End of Oil (a story which was suddenly and
inexplicably pulled after it was published, but is still in the archives)
suggests that high gasoline prices are grounding aerial spray planes,
leaving entire monoculture crops threatened by insects. We may have to
find another way to get our daily dose of malathion poisoning. Oh, and this is the year of the 17 year locusts.
Corporatists and Criminals Bilk the Elderly Together:
Big corporations assemble phone lists of vulnerable, lonely and
confused elderly people and then pitch them to 'telemarketers'. “Only
one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in
lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,” said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “If someone advertises a list by saying
it contains gullible or elderly people, it’s like putting out a sign
saying ‘Thieves welcome here.’ ”
Inoculating Yourself Against Disk and Computer Crashes:
Slowly but surely I've been migrating the content of my machine to
cyberspace, so I can do everything that I do on my 'home' computer, on
any machine anywhere. Thanks to Google and others, we no longer need to
retrieve and store e-mail on our machines, nor do we need to buy or
maintain MS 'productivity' software anymore. I've moved 'My Documents'
to Box.net. My music files and blog backup files are on my mp3 player and flash drive, and I'm migrating all my photos to Flickr or Picasaweb. My bookmarks are on spurl.net and my future podcasts will be on archive.org. Freedom! (Now I need a 'Google Virtual Desktop' to find my stuff wherever in cyberspace it is.)
The Real Dangers of Pandemic Outbreaks: An excellent article by Sharon Astyk explains that the greatest
threat from pandemic disease is not loss of life, it's economic
collapse, the excuse to institute martial law and further extinguish
civil freedoms, and the backburnering of vital work to address Peak
Oil, global warming and other threats. She goes on to talk about
pandemic preparedness, with a prescription much like mine, except more
optimistic that people will actually prepare. Thanks to whoever pointed
me to this, and apologies for not noting who that was when I
bookmarked/spurled it. If you live in the US and want to speak up on why pandemic preparation is important, Lugon and his Flu wiki colleagues tell us the government says it's willing to listen.
Big Pharma Pays Doctors to Test Psych Drugs on Child Patients: The young can complain, but they can't vote or sue, and no one listens to them anyway. So they're the perfect
guinea pigs for testing expensive psychological drugs on, without
regard for side effects, and it's as easy and legal to bribe doctors to
do it.
No New China Poisoning Scandals This Week: But maybe that's because corporatists like Murdoch have the order out to squelch all bad news stories about China.
Another Silent Spring: Meanwhile, the cancer prevention network reports we're still pretty good at letting domestic corporatists poison us. Excerpt:
It
is infinitely harder to identify causal links between the substances
that body burden tests say are in our flesh, blood and bones, and their
health effects. This complexity has protected the chemical industry for
decades, and has served up a perfect excuse for many politicians to
avoid taking tough, decisive, preventative action.
The hundreds
of millions of dollars donated annually to cancer agencies are
funnelled mainly into research for better treatments and "cures" for
cancer; far less is targeted to preventing the disease in the first
place, and only a negligible fraction to reducing our exposure to
carcinogens in everyday products, in our food, water and air, and
virtually everywhere. Just last week, researchers from five U.S.
institutions named 216 chemicals that can induce breast cancers in
animals. Of these, humans are highly exposed to 97 of them, including
industrial solvents, pesticides, dyes, gasoline and diesel exhaust
compounds, cosmetics ingredients, hormones, pharmaceuticals and
radiation.
Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.
Thoughts for the Week:
Grab a coffee or tea and settle in for 45 minutes to watch Robert Newman's deliciously entertaining and informative History of Oil. It will change the way you understand Middle East and global news forever. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.
And then, take a look at what Flemming Funch and Tom Munnecke have to say about framing your conversations around the "Yes, and..." principle instead of "Yes, but...". It's all about accepting what you really cannot change, and instead adapting and/or letting yourself change. Excerpt:
It
almost never works to negate [argue with] what other people really
believe in [no matter how persuasively]...[And] the more enlightened
you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else
be like [and agree with] you. Ironically, as we could say you had all
the more reason to do so... |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
