I just watched Coal Country. At some point, this lady is talking about the family cemetary. She's standing on top of a grave. She mentions that the land she lives on currently, an ancestor received as payment for fighting in a war. The government gave land tracts in lieu of money. One the gravestone is the guy's name and "Revolutionary War."
What the what?!
Say it with me: People die. Money gains compound interest.
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Hartford, Haiti, and Help
Reports are that there're mass casualties, that it felt like an earthquake.
Wow.
My prayers and condolences go out to the families involved. This is just horrific. An explosion at a plant that was just under construction. It's just heartrending.
I don't want anyone to misunderstand me. I really do feel for the families. But I gotta get some stuff off my chest.
Wow.
My prayers and condolences go out to the families involved. This is just horrific. An explosion at a plant that was just under construction. It's just heartrending.
I don't want anyone to misunderstand me. I really do feel for the families. But I gotta get some stuff off my chest.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Good News for NOLA
Apparently, the government is going to appeal, but I should hope Pres Obama will do the right thing.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
More on Van Jones
via, colorofchange.org:
Saturday night, Van Jones resigned from his job as the White House special adviser on Green Jobs.1 Van's resignation came after a vicious smear campaign by Fox television host Glenn Beck, and it is the latest evidence of why our campaign against Beck is so important.
Van is a passionate thinker and leader and we are grateful to him for co-founding ColorOfChange. But this campaign is not about Van. It's about stopping Glenn Beck, who has promised to take his witch-hunt to others in the administration. Beck's overall plan is to create an atmosphere in which the White House can accomplish nothing, and he's carrying it out by preying on race-based fears and mobilizing hate.
The good news is that our campaign is working. More than 175,000 of you have stood up, and advertisers have followed suit. As of today, 62 companies have stopped their ads from running on Beck's show. Every national company with a name you'd recognize is gone. What's left are mostly far-right groups and direct marketing companies selling things like gold coins and discounted exercise equipment.
The reality of Beck's attacks on Van
After we launched this campaign, some bloggers and reporters tried to discredit the effort by claiming that the White House or Van was somehow involved, or that we launched the campaign to protect Van. It's an absurd accusation. Van hasn't worked with ColorOfChange in years, and when we decided to launch the campaign we didn't even know that Beck had attacked him. The reality is that we began our campaign for the same reason 175,000 of you have now joined it: Glenn Beck called the president of the United States a "racist" who "has a deep seated hatred for White people," which is part of a pattern of Beck using lies and distortions to race-bait and fear-monger.2
As Beck started losing advertisers in response to our campaign, he went into full-scale attack mode on Van--exaggerating or distorting his record on 23 shows and devoting an entire segment to discrediting him. Beck presented his attacks on Van as honest journalistic inquiry, while dishonestly failing to mention that Van co-founded the group leading a successful advertiser boycott against him.
But Beck's real goals were clear: Take down Van. Undermine the White House. Set the stage for his followers to say our campaign was about protecting Van. And of course, create a distraction from our campaign and the real reasons major companies are ditching Beck's show.
The problem with Beck
Glenn Beck's show is described as news analysis and commentary, and he claims to be bringing his viewers "the facts"; but his attacks on the President's character, agenda and advisers are anything but news. They are political character assassination of the worst form, relying on dishonesty, distortion, exaggeration, and fear. And Beck has promised to launch more attacks on new targets.3 Our country is facing numerous challenges, including a struggling economy, a climate and energy crisis, and a broken health care system. The media should be promoting thoughtful, rational dialogue about how to solve these problems, not launching dishonest political attacks to distract and divide us.
Our team is working hard to use all the tools at our disposal to take away Beck's platform. In the coming weeks there will be more for you to do. But for now, we ask you to do something simple. If you haven't done so already, please email your friends and family, and ask them to sign on to our campaign against Glenn Beck. There's a message you can send them at the link below:
http://colorofchange.org/beck/passalong.html?id=1756-227036
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
September 9th, 2009
Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU -- your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don't share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way. You can contribute here:
https://secure.colorofchange.org/contribute/?id=1756-227036
References
1. "White House Official Resigns After G.O.P. Criticism," New York Times, 9-06-09
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/politics/07vanjones.html
2. "Beck caps off week of race-baiting by calling Obama a 'racist'," Media Matters, 7-30-09
http://mediamatters.org/research/200907300019
3. @glennbeck on Twitter, 9-03-09
http://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/3749169499 (You'll have to copy/paste that on your own.)
Saturday night, Van Jones resigned from his job as the White House special adviser on Green Jobs.1 Van's resignation came after a vicious smear campaign by Fox television host Glenn Beck, and it is the latest evidence of why our campaign against Beck is so important.
Van is a passionate thinker and leader and we are grateful to him for co-founding ColorOfChange. But this campaign is not about Van. It's about stopping Glenn Beck, who has promised to take his witch-hunt to others in the administration. Beck's overall plan is to create an atmosphere in which the White House can accomplish nothing, and he's carrying it out by preying on race-based fears and mobilizing hate.
The good news is that our campaign is working. More than 175,000 of you have stood up, and advertisers have followed suit. As of today, 62 companies have stopped their ads from running on Beck's show. Every national company with a name you'd recognize is gone. What's left are mostly far-right groups and direct marketing companies selling things like gold coins and discounted exercise equipment.
The reality of Beck's attacks on Van
After we launched this campaign, some bloggers and reporters tried to discredit the effort by claiming that the White House or Van was somehow involved, or that we launched the campaign to protect Van. It's an absurd accusation. Van hasn't worked with ColorOfChange in years, and when we decided to launch the campaign we didn't even know that Beck had attacked him. The reality is that we began our campaign for the same reason 175,000 of you have now joined it: Glenn Beck called the president of the United States a "racist" who "has a deep seated hatred for White people," which is part of a pattern of Beck using lies and distortions to race-bait and fear-monger.2
As Beck started losing advertisers in response to our campaign, he went into full-scale attack mode on Van--exaggerating or distorting his record on 23 shows and devoting an entire segment to discrediting him. Beck presented his attacks on Van as honest journalistic inquiry, while dishonestly failing to mention that Van co-founded the group leading a successful advertiser boycott against him.
But Beck's real goals were clear: Take down Van. Undermine the White House. Set the stage for his followers to say our campaign was about protecting Van. And of course, create a distraction from our campaign and the real reasons major companies are ditching Beck's show.
The problem with Beck
Glenn Beck's show is described as news analysis and commentary, and he claims to be bringing his viewers "the facts"; but his attacks on the President's character, agenda and advisers are anything but news. They are political character assassination of the worst form, relying on dishonesty, distortion, exaggeration, and fear. And Beck has promised to launch more attacks on new targets.3 Our country is facing numerous challenges, including a struggling economy, a climate and energy crisis, and a broken health care system. The media should be promoting thoughtful, rational dialogue about how to solve these problems, not launching dishonest political attacks to distract and divide us.
Our team is working hard to use all the tools at our disposal to take away Beck's platform. In the coming weeks there will be more for you to do. But for now, we ask you to do something simple. If you haven't done so already, please email your friends and family, and ask them to sign on to our campaign against Glenn Beck. There's a message you can send them at the link below:
http://colorofchange.org/beck/passalong.html?id=1756-227036
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
September 9th, 2009
Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU -- your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don't share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way. You can contribute here:
https://secure.colorofchange.org/contribute/?id=1756-227036
References
1. "White House Official Resigns After G.O.P. Criticism," New York Times, 9-06-09
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/politics/07vanjones.html
2. "Beck caps off week of race-baiting by calling Obama a 'racist'," Media Matters, 7-30-09
http://mediamatters.org/research/200907300019
3. @glennbeck on Twitter, 9-03-09
http://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/3749169499 (You'll have to copy/paste that on your own.)
This Is a Big Loss
Apparently, fringers on the right are celebrating the resignation of Van Jones as "czar" of green jobs. Now, I can't vouch for the article and refuse to cruise through conservative sites, so you'll either have to take my word for it or google yourself.
Here's where I first came across Van Jones. Van Jones is someone who combines economic justice, eco-activism, and racial equality; basically, he promotes green jobs for inner-city residents. The right based their attacks on him, cause basically they attack everything Pres. Obama does, on his early association with communism and his signing some 9/11 "truthers" petition. Now, when it comes to 9/11 . . . I don't want to believe that BushCo would have allowed thousands of Americans to die as a pretext for war. I don't put it past them; and it's certainly clear that if they didn't know, they should've; so, I don't think his signing the petition is something extraordinarily radical. But you know the right. These are people who block nominations because they have questions the agency the nominee will direct hasn't "adequately" answered. That's what David Vitter did to Craig Fugate. Vitter had questions FEMA hadn't adequately answered so he blocked the nomination. Yes, FEMA would be in a better position to answer Vitter's questions if there were a director; so you get my point.
But anyway, Jones' idea was to protect the environment by going green - windmills, solar panels, retro-fitting buildings to make them greener, etc. Doing that involves lots of stuff I'm not adequately informed about to explain to you. Suffice it to say that moving to a green economy would create a lot of jobs that would be difficult to out-source. So there's that.
What's really exciting to me about Jones' idea is that he wants to base the factories and plants in the inner-city!! Wow! Amazing! It's very rare that you find someone who has a vision for killing three birds with one stone. I gotta admit, even I'm not that bright, and we all know I'm incredibly bright!
The third bird? Well. Let's say racism was completely eradicated, but the basics of our social-economy remained the same: there would still be a drag on the black community. This is because of our disproportionate rate of concentrated poverty. Now, I should probably go through everything that's happened that's lead to the situation, but I don't feel up to it. Just . . . understand that the black unemployment rate was around 10% before the bottom fell out of the economy. Some of that is because there're no jobs in the inner-city. So you get concentrated poverty and from concentrated poverty you get high crime rates and high rates of high school drop-outs, etc and so on. Putting jobs in the inner-city would improve the economic outlook of the black community and diffuse a great deal of our social ills.
Don't misunderstand, he's anti-racist, too. But in the absence of more white people catching a clue, his idea would do just, :sigh:, do so much to improve the lives of soooo many people. And I hate that the right won on this. Glen Beck sucks even more than I originally thought, and what I originally thought, er, lets just say it involves a backhanded insult to teenage girls.
Holla dolla! Get at me!
Here's where I first came across Van Jones. Van Jones is someone who combines economic justice, eco-activism, and racial equality; basically, he promotes green jobs for inner-city residents. The right based their attacks on him, cause basically they attack everything Pres. Obama does, on his early association with communism and his signing some 9/11 "truthers" petition. Now, when it comes to 9/11 . . . I don't want to believe that BushCo would have allowed thousands of Americans to die as a pretext for war. I don't put it past them; and it's certainly clear that if they didn't know, they should've; so, I don't think his signing the petition is something extraordinarily radical. But you know the right. These are people who block nominations because they have questions the agency the nominee will direct hasn't "adequately" answered. That's what David Vitter did to Craig Fugate. Vitter had questions FEMA hadn't adequately answered so he blocked the nomination. Yes, FEMA would be in a better position to answer Vitter's questions if there were a director; so you get my point.
But anyway, Jones' idea was to protect the environment by going green - windmills, solar panels, retro-fitting buildings to make them greener, etc. Doing that involves lots of stuff I'm not adequately informed about to explain to you. Suffice it to say that moving to a green economy would create a lot of jobs that would be difficult to out-source. So there's that.
What's really exciting to me about Jones' idea is that he wants to base the factories and plants in the inner-city!! Wow! Amazing! It's very rare that you find someone who has a vision for killing three birds with one stone. I gotta admit, even I'm not that bright, and we all know I'm incredibly bright!
The third bird? Well. Let's say racism was completely eradicated, but the basics of our social-economy remained the same: there would still be a drag on the black community. This is because of our disproportionate rate of concentrated poverty. Now, I should probably go through everything that's happened that's lead to the situation, but I don't feel up to it. Just . . . understand that the black unemployment rate was around 10% before the bottom fell out of the economy. Some of that is because there're no jobs in the inner-city. So you get concentrated poverty and from concentrated poverty you get high crime rates and high rates of high school drop-outs, etc and so on. Putting jobs in the inner-city would improve the economic outlook of the black community and diffuse a great deal of our social ills.
Don't misunderstand, he's anti-racist, too. But in the absence of more white people catching a clue, his idea would do just, :sigh:, do so much to improve the lives of soooo many people. And I hate that the right won on this. Glen Beck sucks even more than I originally thought, and what I originally thought, er, lets just say it involves a backhanded insult to teenage girls.
Holla dolla! Get at me!
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