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...

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...

Sometimes thing happen just like you planned.

In a past post, I mentioned that you might be able to ask your landlord to consider making some changes that would affect our impact on the planet. Well, by golly, my landlord did just that.
Recently our complex installed hot water-on-demand in all of the buildings. Not only does the water operate on this system, so does the heat (which is hot water). I'm not going to pretend that their motives were environmental and altruistic, in fact, I'm sure they are just enjoying the HUGE energy savings, but I'll take what I can get.
In fact, that is exactly how it works. Once businesses realize that they can actually save money by doing the right thing, hey, look at that, they start doing the right thing.
Baby Steps...

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...

Do-do that voodoo.

Here's something we covered on "the Hip and Yucky Show", humanure, or composting ca-ca. I'll admit that it's a little hard-core for most city-folk, but it would save Billions of gallons of water and produce lots of compost. The Loveable Loo has been around for, like, 30 years. I'm an environmentalist and I'm immature (goes without saying, since I'm a guy) so, of course I love the song.  We'll all be singing it soon.
Number 2 with a bullet!

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/kids-view-humanure-compost.php

Water you gonna do?

Whether you've practiced it or not, most Westerners are aware that we are running low on water and really should be conserving it.  There are a lot of ways to conserve water, for example, my wife and I actually shower together every single day.  There are lots of products, which will restrict  the flow of water in your home.  I recommend using some of them. One of the biggest offenders in residential home is the toilet.  Standards for the amount of water per flush toilets have gone up recently, but how many of us have a new toilets?  Every time you flush, you are using anywhere from 1 to 5 gallons of water.  This is fresh water.  Water that we drink.  Just to get rid of your waste.  Doesn't seem right, does it?  I've always thought that one of the smartest things you could put into a home, would be a urinal, because the number one cause of flushing is number one.  I finally feel vindicated.  Now when I go in the shower, I'm an environmentalist, not a pig. 

Not only are we flushing away valuable water, were also flushing away nutrients which are present in male urine.  I'll address this more in a different post, but male urine is now being added to so many compost heaps, because of its nutritional value primarily in nitrogen.

The most wasteful residential use is watering lawns.  Americans have become very enamored of their Kentucky bluegrass lawns.  Acres and acres of the green grass.  And this grass is thirsty.  This is also a huge drain on our water supply in the commercial world, keeping golf courses green.  Recently, a grade school child saved a city that he lived in millions of dollars, just by suggesting they turn down the pressure on water fountains and bathroom sinks in public parks.

Water will be the next scarce resource that human beings are going to fight over.  How are you going to help?