Water? And not a Drop to Drink. It's now as Clear as Mud.

I've always tried to believe the best of people and their intentions, but, by golly, it's getting more difficult all the time.

Gas prices are very low, in case you haven't noticed, and yet some people are still pushing to get this enormous Keystone XL boondoggle shoved right up our Midwest, without so much as dinner first. It's just a live sacrifice to the supreme gods of greed. No jobs, no oil, just good old fashioned graft. Make-work work that will fill the pockets of a very few, who, by the way, have far too much in their pockets already. But congress gets on their knees and starts sucking.

I used to give the benefit of the doubt to the corporations who put crap into our food, that subsequently turned out to be, let's say, less than healthy. I assumed that they had good intentions originally, but now that they know the risks and side-effects, they will surely mend their ways.
Yeah. That happened.

GMOs are necessary to provide enough food for the world? Bovine Feces! On two counts. We don't give a good rat's pi-tout about feeding the world, just selling to the world. If we farmed the natural way, rotating crops, diverse planting, companion planting, etc., we wouldn't even need pesticides or fertilizers.
GMO corn to feed cows? Are you violently expelling me? Cows eat grass. Period. They don't need hormones. They don't need antibiotics. All of these things go directly into ...wait for it...us.

Then there's the pharmaceutical companies or Big Pharma, as they like to be called, you know, like Big Tony or Big Dick. It's been said that Pharma doesn't make cures, it make customers. Have you paid for a prescription lately? Bring a co-signer.
Ask your doctor? That's what we're supposed to do these days. Even though he's probably a pimp for Pharma, ask him if you should try Bleedmedryim, a new treatment for excess money buildup. Got a boo boo? Take a pill. There was a time when we could do what prescriptions do for us, with food, but now it's even difficult to find real food.  And what do people do when they are done taking their prescriptions? They toss them in the toilet. (Another ill-conceived concept, getting rid of our waste using our drinking water) Then, these chemicals and compounds get into our water supply, so we are all taking them, whether we like it or not.

So it's an accident that everything they do hurts us? So it's an accident that everything they do enriches them? Probably not.
For how long, and at the expense of how many Trillions of dollars have our top minds been trying to find the cure for cancer? Is it easier to believe that these dedicated talented and smart people haven't made any significant progress in all that time, or that some how, the results of their research is being hindered, perhaps, even suppressed? Think about it. If there was a cure for cancer, Big Pharma would lose Trillions in revenue from their victims, I mean patients. Do you think in a billion years that they would ever willingly give that up? Right now, they are taking perfectly good (if you can call them that) compounds, that do what they were intended to do, and changing one or two molecules to create another compound that does virtually the exact same thing as the previous one did. The difference? this new one has a new life as a new compound and therefore a new patent which will allow them to charge non-generic prices to us, for pretty much the same thing they've been selling for year. That's why you should ask your doctor. Your doctor, who is so deep in Big Pharma's pocket that Lint is his neighbor.

As I get older, do I get more Cynical, or achieve more Clarity? For years huge corporations have been having "accidents" involving dumping tons of poisons into our water supply. If they face any consequences, it's a tiny slap on the wrist, you know, like the penalty for "legitimate rape" should be. Given the fact that fresh water, sorta like energy can neither be created or destroyed this practice takes on a whole new level of PURE EVIL.
Big corporations have been testing our willingness to buy water from them. Water. Let me repeat that, in case you weren't paying attention. WATER.  Guess what? We passed. With flying colors. Due to our laziness and love of convenience, they have already conditioned us to pay them ridiculously high prices for a product that we can get free or virtually free. Now what do you suppose will happen when they turn off the tap to the remaining fresh water?
Big corporations have been buying rights to fresh water throughout the world. they already have monopolies in many third world regions, where they SELL water to the poorest of the population. The MOST despicable practice of which I can conceive. And that was just a testing ground, now they're going to bring their show straight to us. Maybe those spills, leaks, and oopsies weren't intentional. Then again, maybe they were.
At least think about these things and do what you can to make our leaders answerable to us, not to their corporate masters.
Baby Steps...

Count your Gas Blessings Carefully.

The cost of fuel (Okay, the price) has gone down a bunch recently. I have to think that it's because the big oil companies are cutting back on their profits in order to help the economies of the world.

HA! Just kidding. But, wouldn't it be nice?

I suspect that the price of gasoline going down is related to many issues, not the least of which is the success of renewable sources of energy. Don't let them fool you. Even the Biggest, Oiliest Oligarchs are divesting from oil. Every one of them uses solar and wind energy generation at their "Dacha's". Why wouldn't they? They like to save money, too. You just won't see it in their, "aren't we responsible?" advertising. According to the ad, BP have invested over 4.5 Billion Dollars in the Gulf for rebuilding. That's not so much an investment, as a court ordered fine to compensate for all the damage that their slovenly practices caused to the people and the environment of the Gulf. It's like me saying, that I invested over $20,000 in the State of Colorado, instead of me saying, I've had three DUIs!

Unfortunately, a huge contributor to this gasoline "discount", is the glut of natural gas, that these very same companies are extracting out of the ground in ways that make oil extraction look like a gentle kiss from a dying grandmother. You've heard of "Fracking", haven't you? This term is short for Hydraulic Fracturing, which is FAR more hideous than you'd ever expect. These oil barons take pipes and force them into the ground under your homes and into "seams" where free methane and propane are trapped as part of the decaying process of ancient organic life. In order to fracture the rock formations, and therefore "free" the trapped gas, they inject millions of gallons of fresh water, because everyone knows that we don't really need water for human life to exist, mixed with a concoction of carcinogenic chemicals and other chemical agents that assist in the destruction of the rock layers. The contents of this mixture are top-secret because Dick Cheney made sure we'd never know what's in it. Thank God, we know we can trust Cheney. Now, historically these oil entrepreneurs, have always looked out for the welfare and well-being of the public, and in these cases, they are just as publicly responsible as they always have been (Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Keystone XL Pipeline, etc).

Take the dip in gas prices with a grain of salt and remember that in Battlestar Galactica if you got "Fracked" it meant something altogether different . Or maybe it didn't.

Baby Steps...

The least I can do.

Most people, if you ask them to recycle their cans will say, "Of course. It's the least I can do."
This is so true. But it's also a start. I've known of people who, because of their home policy of recycling cans, they have passed that practice on to their family and friends. And then it gets passed on and on...
Do the least you can, and then some . We all teach by example. Be that example. It's the little things that make a difference in life. And in the life of the planet.
It starts with cans. Then bottles. Then paper and cardboard. Then Batteries. Then plastic. Then computers and other electronics.....
Do it.
Baby Steps...

Have we started a fire?

Jan 26th, 2012 by Vince Curran
Well, for Christmas this year, Amazon posted some pretty impressive sales numbers, especially on their very popular Kindle.  In the month of December alone, they sold 4 million Kindles.  Now this is a pretty impressive record and I feel it bodes well for the life of trees.  Especially since the sale of electronic books or e-books has gone up 175% in the last year.  Now if everyone used a Kindle for all of their reading, including books, magazines, catalogs, TV schedules, e-mail and school textbooks, that would represent a significant reduction in paper used to produce books.
Now this is a pretty obvious benefit, but there are some benefits that are not quite so obvious, for example, all of those millions upon millions of books don't have to be shipped from the printer to the distributor to the bookstores.  That may not seem like much, but I think anybody who has ever had to move knows.  What's the heaviest thing that you move when you move.  At least in my case, it's always the boxes and boxes and boxes filled with bookses and bookses and bookses.  And those bad boys are heavy.
For those of you who don't know, standard paper weighs approximately 75 pounds per cubic foot.  That means each box of books you carry when you're moving weighs approximately 75 pounds.  Now, when there's a bestseller, the publisher prints up a whole bunch of hardback editions, each one of these weighing between three and 7 pounds and they ship them all over the country, generally by truck.  That's a lot of weight in a lot of trucks requiring a lot of fuel, and a lot of wear and tear on our streets and highways.  Now, if these books aren't actually printed and can be sent zooming through the cloud, that saves a lot of transportation resources and their related costs.  Not to mention all the trees that don't get cut down to produce these books since most printers use virgin pulp.  In addition to the paper being used, paper mills, create an awful lot of waste products, which won't be produced if we're using e-books.
So, this is a pretty impressive technology and it does just what technology should do, save time, resources and money.  It will be interesting to see how the use of e-books evolves over the next several years.  It will be interesting to see if we can actually change the method in which we consume media.  It will also be interesting to see how much paper is actually saved over the next several years.  And how much fuel for trucks, and all that other good stuff.
Here's a great example of what technology can do.  Train us to do the right thing, which we could have been doing all along by just going to the library.  However, I salute Amazon and Kindle and anyone who uses the Internet and technology to consume the media that we have all become addicted to.  Now, if we could only invent some technology to make us stop wearing fur or wasting water.  Or maybe an app to make us stop eating junk food.  Or a gizmo to make us exercise.  Or a program to make us start acting logically and with common sense.  Or a whizbang to keep us from hating others and starting wars.  They may not be big sellers, but at least we can say we tried something.
Baby Steps...

ZPG bees.

Jan 12th, 2012 by Vince Curran
Okay, here's my confession.  Well, it's not really my confession, but my parents’.  My parents, like most Irish Catholic parents, or any kind of American Christian parents, had a large family.  In my family.  There were seven kids.  And that was only one set of twins.  In the grand scheme of things.  Having kids, or at least having a lot of kids, is one of the worst ecological disasters, you can inflict on our planet.  And inflict we did.  I was the first in 1955.  I can say with a certain amount of pride, even though it wasn't up to me, or my parents, we didn't use any disposable diapers.  The primary reason is they didn't exist yet.  Back in those days, you used cloth diapers, and usually contracted a diaper service.  Ours was “Tidy-Didy Diaper Service”, and the driver who came to our house to pick up the diapers and deliver the clean ones, actually wore a Pith-Helmet.  No kidding!  A Pith helmet.  How funny is that?

So, at least for the first five of us born between 1955 in 1961, we didn't use any disposable diapers, a huge ecological problem.  The other thing about children is they tend to become the same type of consumers their parents were.  If the parents are huge meat eaters, the kids probably will be too.  If the parents needed new clothes every week, guess what?  If the parents drive huge cars, the kids probably will too.  If the family had a huge Kentucky bluegrass lawn, that tradition will probably be carried on over and over and over.  The best thing you can do for the planet is to reduce, reuse, recycle.

Reduce the number of kids you have.  Please!

Reuse.  Okay, I know this is using the word little out of context, but there are plenty of children around the world who are already born, and need a home with loving parents.  Adopt!
This is sort of Recycle also, granted, not in the traditional sense.

I have to say, that our family, my siblings and I, have worked to try to balance out the population growth caused by my parents.  My wife and I both decided we wouldn't have any children.  My sister has two daughters, both adopted.  My next brother, no children.  The next two, the twins, have five children between them.  And finally, no children from my last two brothers, either.  A net gain of new people on this planet, minus two.  Not bad for an Irish Catholic family, huh?

Baby Steps...

(originally appeared in Denver Green Streets.com Jan 12th, 2012 by Vince Curran

E P, Eh?

It seems that ALL of the Republican candidates think that the EVIL EPA is one of the main things bringing down our country. This is the agency that tries to assure you don't have mercury, motor oil or detergent in your drinking water. These are things that I, with my limited scientific knowledge, support. Plus, I like the taste of non-motor oil water.

As I understand it, this is also the agency that stops corporations from dumping all of their bi-products into rivers and streams and the ocean and your driveway. Another thing that I support. I don't want animal carcasses or pig-sh*t or mining slag or asbestos in my local swimmin' hole. It tends to then get into your and your loved-one's local holes. Not a good thing, in my mind.
This is also the agency tasked with making sure that these same, or perhaps different, corporations don't release all kinds of toxic smokes and gases into the air.
By all accounts, these enforcement activities by the EPA have saved millions of lives over the last 30 years. I suppose an argument can be made that, because of this Life-Saving effort has forced the GOP to create even more jobs. Plus, there's no way of telling if the people that were saved were gay, or poor or Mexican.

Corporations can police themselves, they say. Sure they can! (I'm looking at you BP!!)
If they want to eliminate the EPA (who I don't think go far enough, can you say fracking fluid?), I say that any politician who opposes environmental regulation, volunteers their children into a program where groups of GOP offspring must drink the water and breathe the air and eat the food around these facilities. As they say, they're safe, so there shouldn't be any objection. All these kids can be home-schooled while on their jobs as "Canaries" and they can learn how Jesus invented the Hummer.
What's the worst that could happen? Stopping the GOP gene-pool?
Baby Steps...