Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Happy Cesar Chavez Day!

"Perhaps we can bring the day when children will learn from their earliest days that being fully man and fully woman means to give one's life to the liberation of the brother who suffers. It is up to each one of us. It won't happen unless we decide to use our lives to show the way."
 – Cesar Chavez


"He fought for the farmworkers' right to form their own union, demanded that the workers have lunchbreaks, access to clean drinking water and restrooms..." (from the video)

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Overheard: Popularity Contested

A herd of 18-24 year old males walking by:

Guy 1: "And how cool are ya if you got facebook messages poppin' into your phone every five minutes?"

Guy 2: "And 99% of 'em are 'leave me alone.'"

Thursday, March 24, 2011

He Says "No Nukes is Good Nukes" Too - and he's been there!

I just read an article that skillfully minimizes the hazards of nuclear power as it pays lip service to the dangers.  This is as scary as fallout, though not literally (yet, at least not outside Japan at the moment). 

I Googled "No nukes is good nukes" and found this insightful article from Robert Scheer, who's obviously not in somebody's pocket and has done his research.

"I know there will be an attempt to sell us the argument that the odds of a catastrophic earthquake and a catastrophic tsunami occurring together in an area containing a nuclear power facility are incredibly low, that the Japanese plants in question were of inadequate design and, as in the case of Chernobyl, that 'human error' was at fault. Despite the earlier accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, there was a strong tendency to present the Chernobyl disaster as a warning sign not about nuclear power in general but rather the particular failures of a rotting Soviet economy.  After the Japanese experience, such cavalier dismissal of the intrinsic problems of nuclear power is no longer plausible."

Read more from Robert Scheer, and his reflections on Chernyobyl, humanity and our charming combination of ignorance and hubris.

Monday, March 21, 2011

The Sun is Right There, Every Day, Without Fail

Today we talk about nuclear power, which makes us powerless beyond belief, and at the end of this post, a little reprieve. The second video has horrific images, so if you already understand why today we have fears about the effects of nuclear radiation, you can skip it. The first video is what my and my parents' generations were told. It felt like a lie because it was, but a lot of people believed it because it could be received as comforting, and that was enough!

"Sometimes a mutation can be a good variation - an improvement over the parents. If you'll be honest with yourself, face the fact: you'll proably realize that your principal worry ought to be that your offspring will look just like you."

Nice and easy to live with, the above, yes? Wouldn't it be nice if only it were true. The following images are disturbing. The video shows some of the birth defects caused by radiation exposure:



But there have been alternatives all my life that have been pushed to the side in favor of high profit energy sources like oil and nuclear. Here's an example of what can be done (but nobody makes money) note the Newfoundlander with the soda cans:

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

All You Need is Love

All You Need is Love sung in 156 countries, all edited together in a lovely way. It's a campaign for AIDS awareness, but also a good general reminder that we focus on bringing out the goodness in humanity for all reasons.