Archive for the ‘Women’ Category
Bullying 2.0
I just read a silly screed deploring Matt Taibbi (a great investigative journalist IMHO) for rude/crude behavior many years ago in Russia….
Let it be known, I find rude and crude generally acceptable as long as the door isn’t locked and no one is required to listen in order to keep their job. If we women want to be seen as equal, we have to be able to function in the whole wide world and attempts to edit it to conform to recent Puritanical views are (to me) just a new form of Bullying.
Some years ago I started seeing the Bully as the new American role model. Now I’m seeing it further advance in an onslaught against egalitarianism, free speech and diversity. The very folks we might expect to promote diversity often now complain about ‘micro-aggression’ and demand ‘safe space’ where no contrary opinion is allowed. Those fighting to protect women from assault and intimidation have been joined by a pay-back crowd who seek celebrity based on cheap shots with little justification. American culture at the moment has the character of a mob, bent on witch-burning and bringing down the house.
There are many ‘reasons’ for feelings of rage, impotence and disappointment- but there is only one real point to make here:
GOP: Rapists’ Procreation Protection Platform
Republican Platform Panel Backs Blanket Ban on Abortion Bloomberg News 08/22/12
Republican drafters of their party’s 2012 platform reaffirmed support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion that would allow no exception for terminating pregnancies caused by rape.
US power grid tests approved without public consent (costs and consequences)
By Rosalind Peterson
July 31, 2011
http://newswithviews.com/Peterson/rosalindA.htm
On June 27, 2011, CBS News reported: “…A yearlong experiment with America’s electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast…” [1] CBS News also reported that: “…Tom O’Brian, who heads the time and frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, expects widespread (unspecified) effects…” [1].
The CBS report did not specify who approved this test. This test will begin without public consent, substantial public notice or public debate in mid-July 2011 [1]. This test could disrupt so many businesses, state and local governments, and other government agencies, that it could quickly become a National Security nightmare and a massive public headache.
“A lot of people are going to have things break and they’re not going to know why,” said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping agencies in the federal government…This will be an interesting experiment to see how dependent our timekeeping is on the power grid, Matsakis said. [1-2].
According to CBS News, “…The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), runs the nation’s interlocking web of transmission lines and power plants and they will be conducting the tests…” [1, 3]. Will this company be liable for appliance replacement and other costs associated with these tests?
The disruptions from these tests may have the following consequences according to various news reports:
The future is organic: But it’s more than organic!
Why we can’t afford Industrial Agriculture
INTRODUCTION
Organic will be the conventional agriculture of the future, not because of wishful thinking or because it is the right thing to do, or because of some universal truth revealed from on high.
You don’t need to be a utopian to see the agricultural landscape of the future dominated by organic practitioners – whether in the city or in the country – if you stop to ask yourself …why are we not organic now?
How did we get to where we are now, and not just in farming but in the entire agri-food system?
How did we evolve an agri-food system so centered on specialization, consolidation, and globalization? What drove us to an agri-food system that reportedly consumes 19% of the national energy budget – but only 7 of the 19% are used on the farm, with the remaining 12% incurred by post-farmgate transport, processing, packaging, distribution, and meal preparation (Pimentel, 2006)? Is this all the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand – an inevitable and inescapable result of the unfettered free market or other universal principle in action – or is there more to it?
This paper will present the argument that the future is organic because the design drivers that have shaped and molded the current agri-food system are changing, demanding a wholly new, and largely organic, approach to agriculture. Efforts to make the current model less bad – more sustainable – are counterproductive because they dilute and deflect the creative energy and commitment that are urgently needed to craft productive, ecologically sound systems driven by current solar energy (Pollan, 2008). Although time does not permit coverage, post-oil design drivers will also necessarily demand not just organics but novel agri-food systems emphasizing
Evidence will be presented to show that organic is not enough, however. Ecological soundness[1] will require a de-emphasis on annual cropping coupled with re-integration of livestock, both to mimic the principles that sustain Nature and to dramatically reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Corporate Control? Not in These Communities
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Citizens of Mt. Shasta, California have developed an ordinance to keep corporations from extracting their water.
Photo by Jill Clardy.
Can local laws have a real effect on the power of giant corporations?
by Allen D. Kanner Feb 04, 2011 YESmagazine
Mt. Shasta, a small northern California town of 3,500 residents nestled in the foothills of magnificent Mount Shasta, is taking on corporate power through an unusual process—democracy.
The citizens of Mt. Shasta have developed an extraordinary ordinance, set to be voted on in the next special or general election, that would prohibit corporations such as Nestle and Coca-Cola from extracting water from the local aquifer. But this is only the beginning. The ordinance would also ban energy giant PG&E, and any other corporation, from regional cloud seeding, a process that disrupts weather patterns through the use of toxic chemicals such as silver iodide. More generally, it would refuse to recognize corporate personhood, explicitly place the rights of community and local government above the economic interests of multinational corporations, and recognize the rights of nature to exist, flourish, and evolve.
Mt. Shasta is not alone. Rather, it is part of a (so far) quiet municipal movement making its way across the United States in which communities are directly defying corporate rule and affirming the sovereignty of local government.
Since 1998, more than 125 municipalities have passed ordinances that explicitly put their citizens’ rights ahead of corporate interests, despite the existence of state and federal laws to the contrary. These communities have banned corporations from dumping toxic sludge, building factory farms, mining, and extracting water for bottling. Many have explicitly refused to recognize corporate personhood. Over a dozen townships in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire have recognized the right of nature to exist and flourish (as Ecuador just did in its new national constitution). Four municipalities, including Halifax in Virginia, and Mahoney, Shrewsbury, and Packer in Pennsylvania, have passed laws imposing penalties on corporations for chemical trespass, the involuntary introduction of toxic chemicals into the human body.
Vandana Shiva: Time to end war against the earth
Time to end war against the earth
By Vandana Shiva
When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth’s resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.
G20 cops ‘threatened women with rape’
By Daniel Tencer June 30, 2010
Journalists covering the G20 summit in Toronto, Canada, last weekend have accused the local police of threatening them with rape, using male officers to strip-search young women, and even inappropriately touching an underage girl.
Four reporters have filed complaints with the province of Ontario’s police oversight agency. According to the Canwest News Service, those four include Jesse Rosenfeld, a freelancer for the UK’s Guardian whose alleged beating at the hands of Toronto police was chronicled on Twitter, as well Amy Miller of the Alternative Media Center.
Miller told a press conference earlier this week that she had her press pass ripped away from her and was “throttled by the neck and held down” while trying to record a confrontation between police and protesters. She was detained for 13 hours in a cage in a converted film studio on the city’s east side, along with about 25 other women.
“I was told I was going to be raped, I was told I was going to be gang-banged, I was told that I was never going to want to act as a journalist again by making sure that I would be repeatedly raped while I was in jail,” Miller said.
Miller described the police’s alleged behavior as “repulsive and completely inappropriate.”
Wake-up Call 