Categories
Interesting People Politics Science

Sea Shepherd

If you believe business as usual will work and you don’t need to do much more than pay your bills and drop your kids off to school, you may want to watch this. Human Governments and Big Business have squeezed out pretty much all that Earth can take and keep on giving. From here on out life as usual causes irrevocable damage. If the seas have mass die off and extinctions, what kind of world are we going to leave the children? Human children, it’s not just about the whales and krill and Ocean acidity.

Categories
Design Politics

“Work smarter, not harder”

From baheyeldin.com

“Work smarter, not harder” is something that sounds good, but in reality it is often a hollow sentence with no substance in it. In the corporate world, when a manager informs his team of staff cuts, while the workload is the same or more, “smarter” does not mean anything other than “do more with less”. If this “working smarter” was tangible and doable, then why was it not employed before the staff cuts? Huh?

Here is a Dilbert comic lampooning this misused non-wisdom …

Categories
Politics

Health Care: What is Single Payer?

Just heard this lady on the radio (KEXP 90.3FM, Community Forum, 7:30 AM Sat 2/27/10), what got me is the part where a $600 bill ( starting with overly expensive healthcare and overly high copays, and a health emergency that struck at the end of the year, thus requiring two years worth of max-copays in two months, plus continuing strugle to pay health bills culminating in… ) they can’t pay forces them to file bankruptcy, she to be able to pay for health insurance to finish her cancer treatments and her husband a few days before going into the hospital for heart surgery. This is her organization’s website – americanpatientsunited – where one quickly finds this video:

Categories
Interesting People Politics

Amy Goodman causes Olympic anxiety for Canadian border guard

Canadian border guards give Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! a thorough detention and harassment as she attempts to cross the border into Canada to promote her new book.

How is this in Canada’s border guards purview? Harassing a news anchor on a book tour? Over the Winter Olympics? After 90 minutes, when they finally let her in to Canada, it was grudgingly, still treating her as a persona non grata, limiting her stay to two days.

Categories
Interesting People Politics

“People with some of the smallest carbon footprints on earth are being displaced by companies with some of the biggest.” by Mark Schapiro

Corporate solutions seem to lose sight and punish the little guy even without actively willing it. They just can’t help themselves. It’s the nature of the belief system that the world needs leadership and you’re it. The little guy, living in their little world, with their little education just don’t get it.

Didn’t think I would find material to object to in buying up forest to preserve trees to hold carbon and trade those carbon offsets on the open market. But the rights of the indigenous people need to be respected, their use of the surrounding forest factored in to the equation. It complicates the formulas, but as long as their use requirements are sustainable in that environment I believe their rights need to be factored in, not factored out with restrictions, pressure and policing tactics (fines, jail, guns).

Watched it on DN! Mark Schapiro of the Center for Investigative Reporting. After traveling to Brazil, Schapiro writes, “People with some of the smallest carbon footprints on earth are being displaced by companies with some of the biggest.”

But thought he did a bit of a clumsy interview. Seemed to me likes to talk at length, not in short succinct live interview friendly complete thoughts, thus he wasn’t getting to the point in the time allowed. So I went to his Frontline piece and saw him present his argument in the way he is good at. And he makes a good point. Bellow is the first 2 minute video chapter of several chapters.

And here is the Mother Jones article GM’s Money Trees.