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...

Old King Coal. Not so merry.

Coal miners have been around for a awhile. 

Mining is dirty, dangerous work, that doesn't take a lot of education, just mostly muscle and courage. And a desire to take care of your family.
Especially in rural areas where the coal is found, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, to name just a few. Miners generally have a pretty tough life, filthy, back-breaking work, for long hours. As long as the employer can legally require, that's how many hours a coal miner will work.

I just drove through Ludlow, Colorado where an abomination against humanity took place a while back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)

Fortunately, thanks to the unions and the incredible war-like struggles that they went through to get the miners a living-wage and some protections, the miners can enjoy a somewhat normal standard of living. A liveable standard, even though these mines tend to be in horrible, back-woods locations where the boom-town economies inflate all the costs that the miners incur. Many of these miners have worked the mines for generations, so much so that it's the only existence that they've ever known, or that they can even contemplate. The job is so ingrained with the life and the culture, that the miners, not only put up with the horrible conditions that the employers thrust upon them, they defend it against all logic and against their own well-being.
The nation should be getting off coal. And petroleum. And Natural gas.

It's obvious. Coal is a dirty source of fuel and mining kills miners through bad and unsafe practices and disease. There are natural, renewable sources of power generation that we can transition into, and these miners can, with very little adaptation, be transitioned into without the loss of any income. These types of energy can, and will, be in the same rural locations where these workers now live. But there's a catch. Isn't there always? The fossil fuel energy companies have powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies that won't allow that to happen.

Workers need to be educated in these things. (another reason that the rich and the corporations are dead-set against any public education) The Politicians and the corporations aren't your friends. They fought against your rights every step of the way and killed countless miners who only wanted to make life better for their families.

Let's get out there and help these people, because by helping them, we help ourselves.
The best way to get even with the Robber Borons, is to make what they stole from us, and our planet, worthless.
Let's do it.
Baby steps...

It works if YOU work it.

This is exactly the way representative, participatory democracy should work. It's a little slow, admittedly, but the more we participate, the better and faster it will become.

After years of cajoling the White House, the solar panels are back on the White House. The lord and savior of the republican/oligarchic party Ronnie RayGunz spent time, energy and presumably money to remove the solar panels that had been installed by Carter. Had those panels been allowed to remain, who can say where research and development might have taken us by now in the renewable energy industry?
Filthy, polluted water-under-the-bridge.

Bill McKibbon and his group 350.org and their fans have turned the Obama administration around on this one aspect of the argument. Good on 'em!
The Keystone XL Pipeline has coughed it's last disgusting tarry-oily death knell, since The Truth is almost always more powerful than what the Koch's want.

Obama is playing the long-game and in order to do it, he MUST have the grass-roots (you and me) help him. All of this hard work is designed to be a sort of political ju-jitsu, in order to make these changes look natural and organic. And it's working. The bonus is that it also makes all the greedy corporations and politicians look like idiots. I LOVE that.
Keep it up!
Baby Steps...