This post is a yin & yang post meaning you'll go from feeling sympathetically helpless to hopeful that at least the Daily Show is around to make you laugh at their satire, or maybe just more helpless. Fair and balanced like Fox, right? Gian, that last post was great and extremely powerful. Thank you so much. Below I'm going to take something you showed me once that really affected me the first time I saw it and post it here. Many of you have probably already seen it. Underneath that video I'm going to post another Daily Show clip I've been looking for and have finally found that made me laugh a lot the first time. It's about an amendment proposed that would make English the official American language with bitter consequences. I can almost feel the slap in the face it would be for the families who are not native English speakers. I suppose it makes sense though because we all know English is in tough competition for the ever-so-important title of "Official Language" with... Oh wait, everyone already knows English is the primary language. The amendment would be pointless, obviously, and damaging as John Oliver humorously points out. Watch.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon
"Language Burier"
"Okay, give me: 'I'm allergic to Penicillin'"
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Friday, August 10, 2007
Diversity Shmiversity
No End In Sight
See this movie please. If you do: you will know why Iraq is the shitstorm it is today, who is primarily responsible for it, and why our current administration ought to be drug out from the shadows, slapped, shamed, ridiculed, and put behind bars in the most vile, merciless, and sickening prisons possible.
Go to the website for availible theatres. I also suggest you check out "The War" link for a lucid history of American involvement in Iraq.
Now get angry
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Thursday, August 9, 2007
"A yogi practises tummo, the Tibetan form of Kundalini yoga. As the Seventh Dalai Lama wrote: 'Vital energies generated by inner or outer means are drawn into one's central channel, causing the mystic fires to blaze....... The letters AH and HAM flare, fall and vibrate, transporting one to the end of the primordial path of insight and Great Bliss. Lights from the mystic fire flash into a hundred directions, summoning the blessings of Buddhas as boundless as space.'"
Read more!
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Mad As Hell and Terrorstorm
I found this website and I can only afford timewise to watch this first video I'm posting, along with the last video on that link. It's from Network made in 1976, but like many speeches, lectures, lyrics, and essays I've been finding lately, the age-old message is preserved with the humanistic desire to change and progress, beginning with getting people to willingly open their eyes. This Howard Beale character might as well be you or me or any of the fellow Davids standing up to Goliath. Underneath the first video I posted a monologue taken out of the last video, also found on the link. I also found the trailer to this Alex Jones film (Jones is another Robert Greenwald, who made Iraq for Sale) called Terrorstorm. It's on YouTube in its entirety but I don't have the time to spend the two hours watching it at the moment so I'll just post the trailer that I saw. After Loose Change and In Plane Sight, conspiracy theory skeptics, like most of our parents, ask WHY the government would do something like stage a terrorist attack, "Our government would never!". YOUR government. Anyway, this film might help us find or compliment the answer to that "Why?" question.
Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
and I'm not going to take this anymore !!!"
Alex Jones' Terrorstorm sneak peak:
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Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Great Wall Protesters Gone
From a recent note by a friend of mine in Students for a Free Tibet:
Dear Friends, Family, Allies
We are writing you from the Students for a Free Tibet office where the phones are ringing off the hook.
Around 10 p.m. NYC time (10 a.m. Beijng time) six courageous Tibetan independence activists from the UK, US, and Canada were detained by Chinese authorities after rappelling (abseiling) off the top of the Great Wall of China with a 450-square foot banner reading “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” in English and Chinese.
The activists from the UK, the US and Canada are Sam Price, Melanie Raoul, Leslie Kaup, Duane Martinez, Pete Speller and Nupur Modi. Their current whereabouts are unknown but we are monitoring the situation closely.
The action took place on the eve of the one-year countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics as China was preparing for what they thought would be a glorious celebration. As Ben Blanchard from The Guardian has already reported: "Free Tibet activists on the Great Wall, a barrage of critical rights reports, a shroud of smog hanging over Beijing -- China's government must surely have imagined a more auspicious one-year countdown for the Olympics."
To see the footage of these amazing Tibetan freedom activists in action, click on the links below:
http://www.youtube.com/wat
http://www.youtube.com/wat
You can also see still photos at: http://www.flickr.com/phot
To read the press release, go to: www.studentsforafreetibet.
ALSO, DON'T FORGET to check www.BeijingWideOpen.org for Lhadon Tethong's latest posts. Watch footage of her recent encounter with IOC President Jacques Rogge at his Beijing hotel. Lhadon and Paul continue reporting from Beijing, exposing the reality of China's propaganda campaign.
********************PLEASE
With Beijing playing host to top IOC officials, National Olympic Committees, international media, and other high-profile guests for tomorrow’s one-year countdown celebrations, it is extremely important to keep the pressure on China and the IOC.
PLEASE CALL and E-MAIL them today:
BEIJING ORGANIZING COMMITTEE FOR THE OLYMPIC GAMES (BOCOG):
+86 10 6669-9185
mishubu@beijing2008.cn
INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE (IOC):
+41 21 621 6111
info@olympic.org
**Tell the IOC that Tibetans and their supporters around the world are calling on them to publicly oppose China's propaganda efforts, and to use its influence to affect substantive progress on human rights in China and a meaningful resolution to the occupation of Tibet.
**Let the IOC know that its silence is enabling China to continue its brutal oppression of Tibet while wrapping itself in Olympic colors.
**Let the IOC and BOCOG know that people around the world are concerned for the whereabouts of The Great Wall activists and they should use their influence to secure their safety.
YOUR VIGILENCE IS IMPORTANT. PLEASE CALL AND WRITE TODAY.
These courageous acts are just the tip of iceberg. Students for a Free Tibet will continue to mount actions through the last day of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, from Mount Everest to the Great Wall, from San Francisco to Beijing.
Join us! Following on activities happening throughout the week, tomorrow, Wednesday August 8th is an international day of action to mark the one-year countdown to the Olympics. Demonstrations and other events are planned for cities around the world. To get involved, go to: www.FreeTibet2008.org
We will keep you posted as more information comes in.
In Solidarity,
Tendor, Kate, Kala, Heather, Han, Bianca, Kathy, Sophia, Nathan, Kurt, Emily, Dechen, Nick, Kai and Brady
I Sit and Look Out
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
hid--I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny--I see martyrs and
prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea--I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these--All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look
out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
- Walt Whitman
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Ram Translation
In response to Alex's request for a translation of what Ram said in the video a few posts back.
"it's by chance that you've found me today. I've been here for three days and apparently no one's seen me. I've been meditating so deeply that I don't remember (was not aware of) anyone in my presence."
Read more!
War Profiteering
By Christopher Hayes | 3.2.04
War Profiteering and You
So the vice president’s former employer’s been in the news a lot lately. Bilking the U.S. government for millions in Kuwaiti oil imports to Iraq, turning the other way as employees take bribes, overcharging the Army for food served in mess halls. It gets to feeling like the whole “reconstruction effort” is just some bloated, corrupt muddle of patronage and war profiteering.
But then comes February’s “Rebuilding Iraq: Small Business Subcontracting Opportunities,” convened near O’Hare Airport outside Chicago. Sponsored by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and featuring speakers from—you guessed it—Halliburton, among others, the daylong seminar was intended to show that profiting from the Bush administration’s foreign policy is anyone’s game.
“We are literally here at the direction of the president of the United States to make sure that each and every one of you has the opportunity to be involved in one of the truly major business undertakings of this century,” said Gen. Patrick Rea, regional administrator of the SBA. And it’s some undertaking. The total value of contracts, Rea assured, “could move to the figure of a half a trillion dollars.”
Reducing the Iraq war and subsequent occupation to a business opportunity is disconcerting enough, but far more bizarre was the subtle yet consistent message that Iraqi reconstruction constitutes a comprehensive domestic economic policy agenda. “We’re all looking for what are those 21st Century jobs,” Rea told the crowd. “You’re sitting in a room where they’re going to unfold by the thousands.”
Rea’s right—there’s an awfully large potential for profit. Both the conquest and occupation of Iraq have been the most heavily privatized military ventures in U.S. history. Thanks to an initiative implemented in the early ’90s by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the U.S. military now contracts out almost every possible aspect of its work, from food preparation to janitorial services to camp design and construction.
Now this very same approach is being applied to reconstruction, as the government bids out contracts on everything from school construction to power plant design to water treatment.
In the last round of contracts alone, $18.6 billion was awarded to about two dozen companies, the majority of which are American mega-firms—given only companies from “coalition member” nations are allowed to bid.
But the Bush administration is committed to spreading around the wealth. It requires that all subcontractors partner with Iraqi firms for work on the ground. And the policy seems to be working. Newsday recently reported that firms associated with Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who’s the administration’s bag man in Baghdad, have raked in $400 million in contracts.
So while big-time entities like Halliburton may get the massive original contracts, they don’t do most or even much of the work. “We don’t intend to swing the hammers ourselves,” Halliburton KBR Small Business Liaison’s Kimberla Fairley told the crowd. “We’re going to subcontract out all the work.”
This is where small businesses come in, at least in theory. Under the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) procurement guidelines, 10 percent of contract dollars must go to certified small business subcontractors. The CPA’s guidelines are modeled largely on the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), an 1,800-page volume that details the statutes guiding federal government procurement: issuing requests for proposals, evaluating competitive bids and auditing performance. For anyone who hasn’t negotiated this terrain, the process can be daunting. And as Jeannie Houston, program manager for Bechtel’s Supplier Development and Diversity Program noted, competition is fierce.
During the first phase of reconstruction, she said, Bechtel put up a Web portal for businesses interested in subcontracting. The response crashed the servers. “We had 11,000 people in two months register online,” she said.
The ostensible purpose of the conference, then, was to give attendees the inside scoop on beating out the competition. But representatives from Bechtel, Halliburton, Parsons, et al. had precious little in the way of advice to offer, outside of suggesting that firms register on a centralized database, encouraging owners to be persistent and instructing that they partner with Iraqi firms if they seek to complete work on the ground.
It was beginning to look like the Iraqi reconstruction contracts were structured exactly like the Bush tax cuts: While the wealth redounds overwhelmingly to the very richest recipients, the administration argues they’re dealing everybody in.
With panelists offering the same warmed-over advice, it was hard, in fact, not to think the conference was just another cynical ruse by the Bush administration to obscure its ties to corporate friends even as it works directly on their behalf.
Now to be fair, the conference did accomplish two key goals: By delivering a group of 500 eager beavers to Halliburton and Bechtel, it made it easier for the prime contractors to fulfill the mandated small business quota, and by increasing the number of small businesses competing for the same pool of contracts it likely drove down the price of winning bids.
At some level, the crowd suspected they were being taken for a ride.
When Sam Artis, the small business liaison for Washington Group International, mentioned during the afternoon panel that Iraqi contracts are exempt from the Buy American Act—meaning businesses could buy products overseas and ship them directly into the Middle East—he was met with a hostile response. “Doesn’t that sort of undermine U.S. manufacturing?” asked one woman. “I came into this thinking it was to help U.S. small businesses.”
“Well,” Artis stammered. “I think that they’ve carved it out fairly equitably among a number of different players.”
With Iraqi reconstruction representing one of the only signs of life in an otherwise dead economy, desperate small business owners, these walk-on players not already selected for Team Bush, were frantic to be drafted.
After Bechtel’s presentation, Sal Hassanien, an Arab American small-business owner from Detroit, stormed to the mike as representative for a group of exile engineers who moved back to Baghdad to take part in reconstruction. “I’ve been trying to contact Bechtel. I’ve been trying to contact Parsons and it’s impossible,” he said. “[We] send e-mail, they never respond, call them by phone, they never respond.”
Outside the conference hall, Hassanien voiced frustration with the trivial amount of money trickling down to small firms. “You get a contract that is worth, I don’t know, let’s say $100,” he said. “You know by the time you give it to the Kuwaiti companies, it’s $50. By the time you get to the real guys, the Iraqis who are actually doing the work, they get about $10 out of that. Everything else, $90, is going to administration, subcontracting and subcontracting and so on. It’s really screwed.”
Referring to prime contractors like Halliburton that participated in the day, Hassanien laughed and continued, “The big boys, yes, have put up a dog and pony show.”
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A Star Whisper
I had a vision. It came from the morning star, a star whisper. I heard this voice saying, "Any understanding you ask from the morning star shall be granted to you, but ask with the sacred things, the drum, the sacred tobacco, the sacred sweet grass, and, above all, with the sacred pipe." Our dead sleep not. They tell me what I want to know. I have the power to see through things. I have only limited vision with the eyes I have in my head, but with my spiritual eyes I can see across oceans. The pipe is here to unite us, to remove the fences people put up against one another. Putting up fences is the white man's way. He invented the barbed wire, the barbed wire of the heart. The pipe is a fence remover. Sitting in a circle, smoking it the right way, all barriers disappear. Walls crumble.
Leonard Crow Dog. Kangi Shunka Manitou
BRULE SIOUX Lakota
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Monday, August 6, 2007
Cyclic Existence: What Aliens Mean For Us Metaphysically
It is important to realize that aliens are only aliens to us in the physical realm: spiritually, we are all souls with united natures, or all a beam of energy. In fact, it is common belief by many alien believers, and I myself would say this above any other current option, that we are probably alien souls experiencing human life for karmic development from this particular perspective on and experience of reality, for further understanding. In fact, it is for this purpose that the human race was created, according to alien folk lore, as a combination of all the previous alien races to strike a most equal balance between many races falling all over the spectrum as far as personality and views, in fact, I believe, PERFECTlY all over the spectrum. Just as in our society we have intricate networks of people drawing on different sources of energy and working together to produce, create, enliven, enlighten, and enjoy, I belief this concept would not stop with the Earth. This is a basic fact of nature that would imply the presence of alien life simply through the existence of more than one man, more than one country, more than one language, or more than one element. In our infinite universe, why would this system stop? I believe the alien races, of which there are 11 we know of, making 12 races in our awareness, which happens to coincide with the number of astrological signs, created our race as furtherment of soul development. If we were them, what would we be doing? Actually, most of you, don't answer that yet, although your variance would help support my point. Now, if these races mastered the mystical powers of our existence to create other forms of life, what is our role? Just like the cycle of birth, I do believe we also are meant to create another "race". But what type? Well, human beings, having had their DNA reconstructed to prevent astral and mystical connection, have developed an amazing mastery of the physical realm: physically based technology is something I believe we have surpassed any other race as of now in. This is why I see that, through the realization of the alien agenda, it becomes clear that our eventual goal as a race is to create artificial intelligence as the next body for the universal soul. My rational at this point would continue to say that our souls would eventually continue their own evolutionary path through these artificial bodies (artificial, one of those words that doesn't really exist). Artificial intelligence would be the current highest form of physical body due to its objective perspective and pure rationality. Some think this removes the soul aspect from it: I think they don't realize what a soul is. Many people attribute a soul to their own ego, and don't see a compatibility with the way they think and the way a machine thinks, because there own thinking is self-contradictory in nature, and a machine's is never such. A machine doesn't struggle with understanding identity, but is capable of the massive leaps of thought that humans are famous for. This could be great, this could be horrible: What else is new? Read more!
Ram Bahadur Preaches
On August 2nd, 2007 Ram Bahadur addressed a crowd of approximately three thousand people in the Halori jungle of the Bara District in southern Nepal. The crowd was assembled by the Namo Buddha Tapoban committee that has taken up the responsibility of protecting and supporting Ram Bahadur.
So far the only message I can find from Ram's address is this:
"The only way we can save this nation is through religion"
The address was recorded by a local FM station. I've yet to find the name of the station, a transcript, translation or recording.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ram Bahadur Bomjon see here
Gian could you translate this?
Timeline:
- Begins meditating in May 2005 at Charkose Jhadi in Ratanpur
- After ten months in meditation without food or water, he disappears from the original site early Saturday March 11, 2006
- On March 19, 2006 chairman of Om Namobuddha Committee claimed that Bomjan briefly appeared in a forest some three kilometers Southwest of the meditation spot, talked to committee members and disappeared again. “I left because there is no peace here,” Lama quoted Bomjan as saying. “Tell my parents not to worry about me.”
- In late December, 2006 Ram Bahadur was found in the jungles near Pathlaiya-Nijgadh road section of the Mahendra Highway (Bara district) with a sharp sword at his side 'for his own protection'. Here he temporarily appeared before the media and local villagers (appearance here is the above video). Here he claims to still not have eaten anything except herbal medicines since the May 2005. Ram Bahadur also said that henceforth he would meditate near the historical Halkhoriya pond, some five kilometers west of the place where he meditated before his initial disappearance.
- Following the late December appearance, Ram was found in late March, 2007 meditating inside a seven foot deep pit in Ratampur. He had granted audience earlier that month to express his wish to have the pit dug.
Sidenotes:
- During a medical team's half hour observation, they noticed Bomjon "breath three times, swallow his saliva once and move his eyelashes."
- Two mute people have been miraculously able to speak after visiting the site
- Ram is claimed to have been bitten by a poisonous snake. Following the bite he began sweating profusely to expel the toxins.
- There are other claims that Ram has spontaneously combusted and requested someone to throw a red cloth over him and the flames.
Let's find out what he said.
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Friday, August 3, 2007
Insult to Injury
Nothing new here, good for a laugh. And a tear or two.
"Here we have the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite; I call
you my base." -George W. Bush, at a black tie 2000 campaign event.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country and our people.. and neither do we."
- George W. Bush
"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." —to a group of Amish he met with privately, July 9, 2004
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000
"You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." --to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy shit we're all gonna die.
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Thursday, August 2, 2007
Pharmaceutical Monopoly of YOUR Basic Needs
I followed a link to a Facebook group called "Abate the Codex Alimentarius". I think Giancarlo had mentioned something about this before but I never looked into it. I had no idea about the extent of such obscenity although, again, I'm not entirely surprised what with the way things are going globally. The description of the group is as follows:
"Anyone who has not heard of the Codex Alimentarius before, you're in for a bumpy ride. The Codex Alimentarius is a trade commission in place to control the international trade of food and backed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Bottom line: everything edible, except pharmaceuticals (remember that), is controlled by the Codex. This is to go into full global effect in the year 2010, and here are a couple of disturbing highlights:
You may remember a few years ago there was a big to-do about a new product called Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH). This is a product that increases the milk production in cows. Since then, there have been numerous other products that do the same thing, as well as different hormones given to cows to increase the production of meat. Artificial hormones that increase production will become MANDATORY! And, any vegans out there who think nothing of this should know that all agricultural products would be required to be irradiated. Essentially, all organic food will be illegal. Welcome to the new world order.
Under the Codex, all nutrients (vitamins and minerals) are listed as toxic materials. Any substance deemed as toxic is required to be legally regulated to "protect the ignorant, the unthinking and the credulous" through the science of toxicology. The sciences of toxicology and 'risk management' have one ultimate goal: to limit the amount of the material in question to a point where it will have "no possible affect on humans". So, if the Codex is allowed in the United States, and you go to the store to pick up some glucosamine for your joints or some green tea for. . . well. . . everything, the nutritional content of those tea bags or those gelcaps will be limited to a point where they will have "no possible affect (benefit) on humans".
My greatest fear in all of this (in a world where we have at least one prescription drug commercial during every commercial break) is that in the very near future, any health conscious person who would prefer to watch what they eat and take care of themselves will be allowed only two solutions: pharmaceuticals or death."-Jon Pietz
Facebook Group found here
Summary of Codex in 7 Points
Dear Money Famished Corporations,
Stop ruining my life.
Love, Leslie
P.S. What's next, a tax on air? Let me know.
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Bottled water suckers!
You've been paying a huge premium for the same stuff that comes out of your faucet.
August 2, 2007
Some years back, during a break in the criminal case against her, the Beverly Hills madam, Alex Adams -- the more circumspect predecessor to Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss -- went padding down the courthouse hallway. She carried her empty bottle of Evian water, and she refilled it at a public drinking fountain.
It struck me as funny when I watched her do it then -- Evian pretensions and tap-water realities.
It's still funny now, for different reasons. The H2O in at least one-quarter of the billions of bottles of water this country swigs down every year comes out of the same public reservoirs that send water to every tap from public drinking fountains to your bathroom sink.
Now Aquafina, the biggest-selling bottled water in the country, bottled by Pepsi, has been outed. The water in those pretty, swirly-topped bottles with the pure blue mountain logo comes from the same sources as the humble -- and cheap -- tap water in Fresno and Wichita and Detroit and other cities that are nowhere close to pure blue mountains.
Dasani water, bottled by Coca-Cola, has already been busted for its tap-water pedigree from pristine locales such as Queens, N.Y., but it's still this nation's second-best-selling water. (Britons laughed Dasani off the shelves; its marketing campaign couldn't stand up to mocking comparisons to a BBC sitcom character who scammed customers by repackaging tap water as a fancy brand.)
Crystal Geyser water comes out of the same Owens Valley well that the Department of Water and Power draws from. Yosemite Water doesn't come from Yosemite Valley -- it's from L.A.'s Highland Park, where there's a street named Yosemite. Some of the DWP's biggest water customers are. . . bottled water companies.
Of course, the bottlers purify already drinkable water, but slap a filter on your spigot and yours will be purified too.
Tap water often comes from the same source as the bottled stuff. It's cheaper than the bottled stuff. It may be safer than the bottled stuff -- big city tap water is tested for some bacteria at least 100 times a month; the FDA requires bottlers to test just once a week.
Which is why, in the words of the Economist, the success of bottled water is "one of capitalism's greatest mysteries." In the words of me, where's the mystery? We're suckers.
We drink more bottled water than we do coffee or milk. (Sodas are more popular, but for how long, after last week's news that even one soft drink a day can add 50% to the risk that you'll get a condition that's a precursor to heart disease and diabetes.)
About 30 years ago, we each drank about six quarts of bottled water a year in Southern California. Now it's nearly 29 gallons. If earthquake rubble buried us in an instant, so many of us would be death-gripping water bottles that future archaeologists would conclude they were religious talismans.
You can get at least 450 gallons of L.A. tap water for the $1.35 you'd pay for 20 ounces of Aquafina. Turn that around, and 20 ounces of L.A. tap water costs about one-twentieth of a cent.
Would you pay $5 for a gallon of gas in a pretty container if you could get a plain-wrap gallon for half a penny? When it comes to water, that's pretty much what we do.
And we do it in part because public water has a worse image than Michael Vick. Public water contamination in places like Milwaukee and Washington crowds out memories of the benzene that turned up in Perrier samples years ago. And oh, that "eeesh" factor from tap water and public drinking fountains.
If you're a Third World immigrant to the U.S. you may buy bottled water, a habit from homelands where local water was undrinkable. If you're scared of terrorism, bottled water just feels safer. If you're in a rush, unless you've got a faucet in your dashboard, it's convenient. And if you don't have a filter, it may taste a little better.
Still, I think people are getting thirsty -- for something different.
After The Times pointed out that L.A. was spending half a million bucks a year to get people to drink DWP water at the same time it was buying the bottled stuff for some city offices, the mayor put the kibosh on outside H2O. Ann Arbor and Salt Lake City are pushing the local drink. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is too. Chic restaurants are pouring eau de tap as the house brand. Enviros are crusading against mountains of un-recycled plastic water bottles.
And how healthy can that bottle of European spring water really be, if the best reason to drink it is to wash away the taste from the jet-fuel pollutants that were created to get it to your table?
Read more!
Santa Ana's small-minded self-hatred
The heavily Latino city has all the problems of an urban metropolis, but its leaders act like they're governing Newport Beach.
By Gustavo Arellano
August 2, 2007
Teens killing teens. Corrupt school officials. Graffiti that blooms every night. Streets withering into dust. Not enough parks. Two libraries to serve a city of 400,000. A huge, unassimilated and poor immigrant population. Segregated neighborhoods. Overcrowding. Santa Ana, Calif., has all the problems of a metropolis but little of the compensating urban charm. (Although the overpriced downtown lofts amid the quinceañera shops and fruit ladies are trying to change that pronto.)
City officials are understandably concerned about their 'burb, especially because it's the government seat of Orange County, where image trumps all and "Santa Ana" is code for "Mexican." But instead of focusing on the city's underlying ills, Santa Ana's leaders are ignoring the burrito for the beans.
In the last few years, Santa Ana City Council members, their appointed allies on city commissions and various bureaucrats have declared war on the criminal equivalent of Bugsy Malone. They've limited garage sales to four set weekends a year, hassled street vendors, made owning a barking dog a jailable offense and even tried to declare taco trucks a public nuisance. Now Orange County's largest city has sicced its lawyers on what they classify as "human signs": those lovable losers who spend hours on street corners under the sun holding large advertising signs.
These breathing billboards are as much a part of Santa Ana as illegal immigrants and Latino trannie bars. I've enjoyed dozens of memorable characters over the years -- pink-tutu-wearing pancakes promoting IHOP, break-dancing teens shilling for housing developments, Latino men glumly lugging around sandwich boards, a lady dressed as a clown while handing out fliers for a furniture store blasting rock en español.
I figure that anyone brave enough to withstand ridicule and heat for $10 an hour and few bathroom breaks is a captain of industry, a hero worthy of his own Woody Guthrie ballad. But Santa Ana's rulers don't share my appreciation. In this long, dry summer, they've already charged at least five sign-wavers with misdemeanors and are promising to prosecute more. Court dates are set for later this month.
The busybodies argue that they're merely trying to improve Santa Ana's quality of life. Today's human pancakes might become tomorrow's broken windows, and irritate drivers to boot.
But the entrepreneurs who hire sign-wavers are suffering as a result of the crackdown, and I'd believe the driver-distraction excuse if Santa Ana didn't also allow big businesses to erect eyesores like the Santa Ana Auto Mall's thousand-suns-bright marquee near the 55 Freeway, or the Taco Bell Discovery Science Center's giant cube dangling ominously over cars as they speed past on Interstate 5.
The root of the problem is that Santa Ana is governed by people who don't want to accept the immigrant magnet where they live. They pretend they're in Newport Beach instead of the city that a 2004 study by the State University of New York's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government rated as having the most "urban hardship" in the United States. Their policies are designed to please those who live in the ritzy neighborhoods north of 17th Street, Santa Ana's Mason-Dixon line, instead of the teeming barrio below.
Instead of investing money in more police officers, Santa Ana spent a bit more than $1 million to refurbish and repaint a water tower so it could read "Downtown Orange County." Rather than improving infrastructure, it installed a downtown water fountain better suited for Tivoli. Instead of supporting local businesses, Santa Ana lures such out-of-town corporations as Starbucks and American Apparel with massive subsidies. And the city's primary project over the last decade has been an Artists Village that gets its largest crowds not during its "first Saturday" gallery open houses but during Dia de los Muertos.
Sure, catering to the poor doesn't elect politicians, and it incurs the wrath of longtime residents who seethe that immigrants have changed Santa Ana forever. But Orange County's largest city needs visionary politicians like Fiorello LaGuardia, Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the pre-philandering Antonio Villaraigosa: men who understood that communities don't truly prosper until the downtrodden do.
The irony of Santa Ana's pettiness is who leads the attack. Santa Ana is the largest U.S. city with an all-Latino City Council. Three of them are Mexican immigrants; one, Mayor Miguel Pulido, campaigned against city nitpickers (planners wanted to seize his family's muffler shop through eminent domain and turn it into a shopping center) when he first ran for City Council in 1986.
You'd expect, because of their background, that Pulido and his amigos would feel more sympathy for the city's teeming masses. Instead, they strum some mariachi chords while Santa Ana crumbles. Before, it was gabacho politicians who ignored Latino needs; now, it's Latino politicos forsaking their duty. That's progress, right?
Gustavo Arellano is a contributing editor to Opinion and a staff writer for the OC Weekly, where he writes the ¡Ask a Mexican! column.
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Pranic Healing
In Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Tantric Judaism, Islam, and Gnostic Christianity there are two types of energy: Prana (chi) and Shakti (universal God-energy, Buddha, Christ, Brahman). Prana is the word for chi in Hinduism, Ruach in Judaism, Barraka in Islam. People who practice Qi meditation or kundalini yoga are able to harness Prana and manipulate it. This type of energy is what everything physical is composed of... sort of like a life-force, or God manifest in the physical. It can be pooled in the Chakras and channeled from person to person, either through each person's own Prana or through that of the Earth, wind, water, or sun (Chi or Prana from the wind is the most common source, Prana from the sun is the most potent). Shakti on the other hand can't be manipulated, but merely channeled. Pranic Healing is based on the concept that physical and psychological ailments are caused by a disharmony or blockage of Prana in the Chakras. Someone practicing serious meditation or kundalini yoga (especially westerners) often experience "kundalini syndrome" which manifests itself as physical and psychological disturbances, depression, or near-death (this happened to me during my last trip). This is due to a physical manifestation of a person's karma when his or her mind is consciously and physically aware of Pranic energy. Cleansing the body through exposure to sunlight, sea-water, and positve karmic actions like abstaining from or participating in the killing of sentient living beings, surround oneself with large trees, and pranic healing like the video below allow Prana a cleaner and smoother enviornment in the body, thereby alleviating unwanted effects of novists being aware of Prana or Chi. Also, Sakya and Tibetan Buddhists are able to to channel both Prana and Shakti energies without the unwanted effects due to the process of using this energy in order to attain a state of vipassana wisdom after samatha meditation, the goal being liberation from the physical and union with God, and not the manipulation of Prana for physical purposes. Anyway, so far as I know.
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Monday, July 30, 2007
The President and the Press (Ringing True Today)
Please listen or read. It's beautiful.
Google Video description:
"John F. Kennedy Speech, April 27, 1961
American Newspaper Publishers Association. Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, NY.
In a speech that should shock Americans. He warns the press and America to be on the lookout for the exact circumstances that have manifest themselves under the Bush Administration and the false flag of state sponsored terrorism.
This speech should chill Americans to the bone. Kennedy died trying to warn us. He wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve and the C.I.A.
On November 22, 1963, hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by multiple assassin's bullets as his motorcade took and unscheduled turn in Dallas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; and youngest to die. The Secret Service was not by his side, they had been called off of his motorcade. Who would have the power to do this?
Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety. He is a war hero.
Don't let his death be in vain. This speech which has now transcended time could be the key to saving America from the fate which looms over it like a dark spectra.
Author: John F. Kennedy Date: 1961-04-27 Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Recorded by: White House"
Highlights:
"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."
"It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations."
"Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."
"It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation--an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people--to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well--the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face."
"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."
"This means greater coverage and analysis of international news--for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security--and we intend to do it."
Source of Transcript
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