Good call. We shouldn’t be using tax-payer money to fund private armies to be placed in the service of foreign states. This is simply outrageous.
Five members of Congress have called on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to clarify if Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s recently disclosed deal to provide a small mercenary army to the United Arab Emirates complies with US law and export regulations.
via Lawmakers Ask Hillary Clinton to Explain Erik Prince’s Mercenaries in the UAE | The Nation.
Are we looking at a major cultural change?
Green has gone mainstream. Not too long ago, just a small group of deep green consumers existed. Today, 83% of consumers (Source: Natural Marketing Institute, 2009) – representing four generations, Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen Ys and Gen Zs – are some shade of green. Each in their own way, these generations are quickly transforming what used to be a fringe market that appealed to a faction of eco-hippies is now a bona fide $290 billion industry ranging from organic foods to hybrid cars, ecotourism to green home furnishings.
It’s politics as usual in this, the century of the Perpetual War on Terrorism. Both the Democratic and the Republican leadership want to renew provisions of the Patriot Act that gives the government broad powers to snoop on private citizens.
If the Congress approves the deal being pushed by the congressional leaders, Richardson said, work by civil libertarians, constitutional scholars and citizens across the United States to address the worst abuses associated with the Patriot Act—and, ultimately, to guard against those abuses—will end with “no reform and no long-lasting institutional oversight.”
via Patriot Act Extension Scheme Sells Out the Constitution | The Nation.
The Pentagon is America’s single largest consumer of energy. As such
…the fastest, most immediate and most efficient way for the Pentagon to mitigate the environmental crises that come from energy consumption is to simply move America away from its energy-draining policy of permanent war.
via The Pentagon’s attempt to greenwash the military – Pentagon – Salon.com.
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.S. T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”
Chet Wickwire was one of the most remarkable men I’ve known. He was Chaplain of The Johns Hopkins University in the third quarter of the last century. It’s in that capacity that I came to know him. He was central to both the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s; he established a tutorial program that worked with inner city children, and he organized a wide variety of programs that benefited Johns Hopkins students and the local community. I worked for him as a program assistant for two or three years in the early 1970s.
One day during a meeting in his office – it may have been the weekly staff meeting – someone pointed out a possibly injured bee on the floor. My impulse – this is what I thought – was simply to kill it and throw the body into the trash. Chet’s was different. He gently picked the bee up and set it on the window sill. It then flew away.
That simple act of kindness, to a mere insect, impressed me deeply. Every time I think to kill an insect, I think of Chet and the bee. Sometimes I refrain and do what little I can to help the insect along, though often enough I kill the insect. But not without a twinge of guilt and angst, which is distinct from any disgust over contact with squishy insect guts.
But why was Chet unwilling to kill the bee? It is, after all, only an animal, and a rather lowly one at that? The only reasonable answer to that question is that he respected the bee as a living being. And if you ask: Why that? Well, is that not a reasonable why for an adult human being to act?
Just how are we to conduct our relations with other living beings? What degree of respect do we accord to their life? The answers to those questions, of course, vary from one culture to another. One concern here – it’s lurking in the background – is that the answer of the industrialized West, the agribusiness factory farming West is: None. None at all. No respect for other life forms. Is that answer anything less than a suicide pact?
Let me retell a story about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.
Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they’d raised. I’m told that when Sue and her husband sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said “baaa” in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.
“Plastic transformed the modern world as powerfully as the atomic bomb,” Freinkel said. “But now, we’re starting to see the fall out — from the massive swirls of plastic debris in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to the rising rates of chronic illnesses – -diabetes, heart disease, asthma, infertility and other ailments, that researchers are tracking back to chemicals contained in plastics – -and now in us as well.”
via Plastic: 10 things you may not know – chicagotribune.com.
& maybe he’s a fit for the TNT Party. Not perfect, but then who is?
It is difficult to attach a political label to Mr. Davis, whose views combine economic populism (he abhors free trade) with libertarianism (he supports both gun rights and abortion rights).
Mr. Davis started off as a Republican in the mold of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But he left the party in 2004, largely because he felt it did not share his concerns over multinational corporations benefiting from trade policies that hurt American workers.
And he can draw Republicans:
Mary Ann Reisdorf, 70, of Varysburg, attended the Davis rally and left with a more favorable opinion of him than of Ms. Corwin, the Republican.
“Jack is a lot more forthright, I think, and I like that,” Ms. Reisdorf said.
Clayton Ehrenreich, 53, a Republican and the former mayor of the village of Medina, had a similar view.
“Davis is somebody different than the status quo in Washington,” Mr. Ehrenreich said. “He’s not controlled by either party.”
via Jack Davis Makes Tea Party Bid in N.Y. Congressional Race – NYTimes.com.
Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture quarantined 28 cattle belonging to Don and Carol Johnson, who farm about 175 miles southwest of Jaffe. The animals had come into wastewater that leaked from a nearby well that showed concentrations of chlorine, barium, magnesium, potassium, and radioactive strontium. In Louisiana, 16 cows that drank fluid from a fracked well began bellowing, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, then dropped dead. Homeowners near fracked sites complain about a host of frightening consequences, from poisoned wells to sickened pets to debilitating illnesses.
via How gas drilling contaminates your food – Sustainable food – Salon.com.
Why am I NOT surprised?
TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.
via Reactor Vents That Failed in Japan Are Used in U.S. – NYTimes.com.
Truth and Traditions 