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Winterglas:
Ditto.
PB
Move along. Nothing to see here, Folks. Just another chapter out of the best selling novel: THE HISTORY OF PHONY DEMOCKRACY IN THE U. S.
Phil Bittle
I think the whole idea of the TPP is bad....the corpulation of the world is the intended effect of it, and similar trade deals....I think we should outlaw corporations entirely, and have a single person liable for each company.
Frisbeeguitar, thank you for the book recommendations, I've read many, but not yet those. Another book, I can't remember the author, "Why Eat Eat Pigs, not Dogs".
I've been following many vegan and vegan/gluten-free blogs for the past years, all varied. Thankfully the research continues to show the benefits of a plant-based diet, not just for us, but why it is necessary for us all to survive in the future.
Gordal, I respectfully disagree with you. There is plenty evidence to date that is proving a plant-based diet is extremely healthy, if not for many people, especially with genetically proven health risks for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. I had genomic testing done 10 years ago, and it showed even tho I'm a woman, I have a great risk for heart disease. My paternal grandfather and father both died of heart disease, my father 10 years after having a sextuple bypass. He was a country doctor, specializing in cardiology, and tho once practiced a healthy duet and lifestyle, after his surgery at 75, reverted to the SAD in my opinion due to stress and comfort the SAD diet brought him.
Eight years ago I became vegan. By husband has 4 family members who have had cancer, two lived, two died. I've strived to cook a wholesome, unprocessed, nutritionally balanced plant-based diet for us because of our family history of cancer (not mine), heart disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol. My husband is an omnivore at home 90% of the time, and eats whatever he wants with his family or friends, even at home I do not restrict what he chooses to eat. He is a hunter, so his philosophy about eating animals has not changed, as mine has.
I started as a vegan for health reasons, and as I read more about factory farms, animal husbandry, slaughterhouses, SAD food processes, my views increased to my inability to comprehend how we contribute to animal suffering. I became for me to see the disconnect I'd had with consuming animals and everything involved with that.
Even as a vegetarian, ie macrobiotic and Ayurvedic, I never ate processed foods except corn chips. I have always cooked from scratch, as did my mother and grandmothers, no packaged foods as I was never drawn to them, they all were wonderful gourmet cooks. Even omnivores can be deficient in the vitamins, trace minerals needed for healthy functioning cells, even B12. I feel vegetarians and vegans eat a far more varied diet than omnivores. My husbands family here in "beef" country, Idaho, are a case in point. Breakfast, bacon/free-range home grown eggs, and/or pancakes for breakfast. Oatmeal? Heck no, "didn't reduce my cholesterol"...tho my brother-in-law in question didn't reduce the bacon/eggs, lunch meat, pork, beef or chicken he consumed so how was an occasional oatmeal breakfast helpful? He has only 1/2 of his teeth at 65, as he also doesn't believe in doctors, having never been to one. Vegetables, all his sibs and their families, consist of lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes or carrots. Always some packaged cake, homemade pie or cookies for dinner, fruit never. Salads, "never think of that". Most Amercans eating a SAD diet consume more processed foods than a vegetarian or vegan.
I don't use vegetable oil and know omnivores whole use/consume much more (I used to use olive only), only flaxseed oil (good supply of omega 3's) for salad dressing. I sauté veggies in homemade veggie brith or water or cooking sherry. I've done my research for years, and know of oxaliic acid/some greens, as well as phytic acid/grains. I learned to soak my grains and actually seeds/nuts before cooking. How soybeans and wheat, as well as some of our vegetables are hybridized and over-pesticide grown today, affects us all. Omnivores consume as much, if possibly not more wheat than nonvegans/vegetarians. I consume more grain varieties (I'm not typically celiac but through an ALCAT found to be allergic to gluten and gliadin as I have the same celiac symptoms as a celiac), nuts, seeds and vegetables than most all omnivores I know, just as evidenced by my husband's family and our friends. I have 5 siblings, 3 of us eat a vegan, homemade, unprocessed diet, all for various reasons.
It does take a commitment to cook a varied, wholesome, unprocessed meal. Many of us do it, even some omnivore cooks. There are many cultures around the world that are vegetarian or vegan, that are not at risk for the Western diseases we are.
Yes, an omnivore can eat a healthy, varied, rotational diet, if you can't give up meat, with as much commitment and research. I feel most don't or won't take the time to do so, as processed foods are easier to use, as well as continue to consume the same meats and veggies that one was raised with or has gotten accustomed to preparing.
Not taking drugs is probably your biggest factor, love. I'm pretty healthy, I've haven't been to a doctor in 30 years, and I eat some meat (though not daily hamburgers or anything like that), but I avoid even aspirin and cough syrup if I can help it.
We don't need so much to talk about race as to talk with people of another race. We can get around to the topic of race after we're more comfortable just shooting the breeze. I talk to people in the grocery line and the cashiers (frequently of another race) as a regular practice. Jokes about groceries and prices are easy. Did you hear the one about the package of cookies in the bottom of the grocery sack? Crummy story! (I didn't say they were good jokes.)
Rand Paul is another not funny joke from the repugnants. He is a real politician and says what his audience wants to hear. Anybody who is considering him as a candidate needs to look at his voting record. He's a straight up teabagger. Walk the walk, Rand, and stop talking the talk. You are taking advantage of the ignorance of the American voter just like the rest of your partyl I still don't understand why he and his father fail to run on the Libertarian ticket instead of the repugnants. That in itself speaks volumes.
I could write pages on this but I won't! Protein is something we don't need near as much as you might think. Beans are a complete protein and easy to prepare, I fix them all different ways putting in fresh veggies. I became a vegan in my mid-20's, many moons ago now. I look muchyounger, still have long blond hair and never, ever take any drugs for anything! For me, the biggest issue was the unconscionable horrors that continue in factory farming. How can anyone eat something, that a fellow sentient being has been so abused for us to enjoy? I also use natural products in my house to clean & never, ever use animal tested make-up. Really cooking meat is not easier.......the grease over everything is disgusting. Start by becoming a vegetarian; that is an easy process, kids won't miss the meat, and you will be amazed how much better you will begin to feel. Hey, it's cheaper! Thanks Thom for bringing this HUGE issue up. Sorry I missed the conference two weeks ago, darn I live and teach in the OC.
I would like to have the opportunity to vote for Kucinich but the Progressive wing of the Democrat Party remains subdued by the party's Neoliberal leadership. It appears that many of these Progressive groups remain frozen at the state level possibly fearing retribution from the national leadership. This could be a good thing if they are working together to build a consensus at the state level that would let them introduce their chosen candidate at the national convention in the summer of 2016. Both Clinton's have the disadvantage of accumulating a national record that is less than stellar and continues to take hits on a regular basis. No doubt that the Right can take some responsibility for this but there's a growing segment on the Left that have looked back at Bill's record that includes blowing a chance to pass a single payer healthcare plan, signing off on NAFTA, and eliminating a vital portion of the welfare system that provided child support for working single mothers in his first term. Bringing Wall Street Big Whig Robert Rubin into his administration just added to the public's perception that the Neoliberal Democrat Leadership had moved further to the Right than the GOP ! Then he completed his two terms as president by signing off on the elimination of the 80 year old Glass-Steagall Act that opened a door to a major collapse of the economy just seven years later. In general, voters tend to look at Hillary as the Apple that doesn't fall far from the Slick Willy Tree !
If you're for continued concentration of wealth, more deregulation for the super rich, global warming, government shutdowns costing billions......if you stand against the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act...then by all means vote for Rand Paul.....Mr urbane citizen who like his Daddy fancies himself a leader of men.
I wish I could view Paul's obsession with power as just laughable and innocuous, but I see a dark side.....a crazed cult leader out of touch with all manner of foreign policy and economic reality.
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liz banker ~ Undoing the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Education and Labor are far more than a few "kooky" ideas. I don't know about you; but, some of us have been forking over 10-25% of our income our entire lives for these programs. The future of our elderly, our children, their children, and their children's children depend upon them. Our way of life--at least what is left of it--depends upon them.
I agree with Thom that Rand's policies on drugs, drones, and spying are spot on. However, the rest of them are bat crap crazy. I refuse to accept an election that would make us chose between those extremes of evil when much greater progressive solutions to these problems exist. I don't want Mrs. 'Artillery' Clinton in office anymore that you do, for even more reasons than you mentioned; however, I would cast my vote for her in a second if needed to keep Paul out of office. There's no way I'm gonna forfeit 25% of my income, my future, and the future of our children out of fear of another potential war in the middle east. The USA has already done so much harm and created so many enemies in that region that I doubt anyone is going to keep this country 100% safe in the future.
That being said... let's do everything we can so that we don't have to make such an ugly choice.
It's not about morality or deeply held religious beliefs, society has a right to demand the people be civil when doing business in public accommodations, that's all this is about. If I own a stationery store, and I sell an evangelical a pen and paper, and they use it to spread hate, I am in no way responsible for them spreading hate or supporting the fact that they are spreading hate. Some people just want it to be known that they think you're less than they are, and that is why they won't sell a gay person a wedding cake. It's not against the law to fart at the dinner table, but most of us understand it's something you don't do. What evangelicals are doing in their store is basically that, just on a more damaging level.
Thom, which would be "worse" a President Rand Paul that takes the country back to the 1929 economic policies; or a Madame President; Hillary Clinton willing to let either Israel or American foreign policy (aka Empire) drop the nuclear bomb on Iran? Ron and his son, Rand Paul, may have their "kooky" ideas but I would take those crazies over the cynical and phony-on-principles Hillary Clinton any day, Hillary would actually be more dangerous since she is also actually a lot smarter than the average joe, learning quickly how to triangulate on the issues Progressive say they care about in order keep them in her political camp; otherwise, her thinking is about as elitist as the best of them in Congress.
Both sides will be sharing opposition dirt on each other: http://www.politico.com/ magazine/story/2015/04/clinton-white-house-the-residence-excerpt-116706.html?ml=po#.VSW5lJez2iF . “Some on the staff have said that Hillary knew about Lewinsky long before it came out, and that what really upset her was not the affair itself but its discovery and the media feeding frenzy that followed.” ….. kind of sums up the “real” Hillary, I would think.
Thoms right and it might just work because most of the Democrats are DEMO-RATS! They are afraid of EVERYTHING especially people forming UNIONS because when THEY WERE THE MAJORITY THEY DIDN'T DO ANYTHING FOR LABOR!
All the way back to TRUMAN! and now they are worse! So I don't think they're smart enough to realize where they are at is because their bought and paid for status won't allow them to even ACT like they care about working families let alone do enough to convince people to get off their ass up to vote like it makes a difference.
The TEA-CRACKERS would never had happened if StatusQuOBAMA had moved against the Banks and BAILED OUT OUR MORTGAGES (Like FDR!) intead of the Banks and Wall Street.
REPEAL TAFT-HARTLEY !! Or you're making believe about INEQUALITY!
I have a login here because I read Thom's book "The Crash Of 2016". It is without question the finest literature on current economics I have seen. This is the policy that needs to be placed #1 on everybody's list; unless we get out of the path of destruction known as Reaganomics, the U.S. will one day become a 3rd-world country for the vast majority of its citizens, and all those social issues you think are important will become as naught. The mean household income has gone from $58K in 1999 to $52K in 2013, not adjusted for inflation, yet supply-side still gets about 45% of the popular vote; while voters whine about liberal economic policies that don't even exist anymore! They continue to defend the wealthy as over-taxed when income taxes only make up about 37% of taxes collected as a whole. They lie about the fact lowering taxes on the wealthy does not create jobs in America because there is no incentive to invest domestically. Sure, they will die off at some point, & younger voters are more self-aware of these issues, but currrently the train is still full of steam, to the detriment of our country.
There is no such thing as "white privilege". There is a profound disparity between the way white people and black people are treated generally in our culture, but the source of that disparity is not white privilege. It is not a positive for white people; it is a negative for black people. I don't believe that is an unimportant distinction. The absence of a negative is not the same thing as the presence of a positive.
I am 65 years old, southern, male and white. For several months I have been thinking back through my life and trying to remember and identify a single event in my life when something good happened to me because I am a white male. I cannot think of a single one. It's true that I haven't had to deal with the kind of discrimination black people have to deal with, but again, that's not the presence of a positive for white people, it's the absence of a negative.
I know somebody is going to say that white people just don't understand white privilege, but that's because racial discrimination is something that doesn't happen to them. It's something that happens to black people; that's why white people have no personal experience of it.
Whenever somebody mentions white privilege, what they are really talking about is black dis-privilege.
Ron
"Police" does not come from the word "policy", but they both come from the Greek word for "city"--"polis", with the stem "polit-". This is also the source of "politics". This is parallel to anything like "civic" or "civil", from the Latin word "civitas", which was slurred over the course of centuries into the French word "cité", leading to the English "city".
I've never figured out if the countryside was just left ungoverned, or if it's because the Greek city-states (and the city of Rome) were the highesl level of government, or if there was some other reason why the city was the source of these concepts.
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The labor movement was still pretty strong in the 1950s and I don't recall Truman and Eisenhower being anti-labor. So libertarianism had a tough row to hoe in those years. It got a shot in the arm with the Powell Memo in 1971 with every major company in the U.S. having a copy in their files. Almost every member of management in the Fortune 500 were "educated" about the contents of this memo and it became the basis of their ideology. If it didn't, they didn't last long in their managerial position.
The big corporate ideology, which by necessity demonizes government, has become so powerful that since the time of the Powell Memo we have had a constant stream of big corporate presidents that continues to the present day uninterrupted.
Your idea for a community kitchen sounds good--wish we had one around here (Texas)! Why don't you organize one?
I've been vegan for twenty-some years, hate to cook on a day to day basis (for a family of five), but the benefits are so very worth it!! LIke any new skill/change, vegan cooking gets easier with practice and experience, but it does require commitment. There is now an amazing array of pre-prepared vegan meat substitutes and vegan cheese, etc. In most grocery stores. The internet is exploding with vegan recipes and 'how-to,' and such an abundance of beautiful cookbooks: fast and easy thru truly gourmet, oh my!! It's not as difficult as you might suppose even for us non--1%er's.
There is also another thing Thom didn't mention: I became vegan as a result of the work I did in overcoming physical and sexual abuse. During that time I learned that those who were abused themselves are at higher risk of becoming abusers of others later. I know first hand what it is like to suffer in full view of people who for some reason did nothing about it. Having been raised on a farm and having worked in animal-based medical research, I had also seen animals suffer. 'All of a sudden' (after much work) I understood that their suffering in full view of people and my suffering were the same--pain and surrering and pain and suffering are the same regardless of who is doing the feeling. I had only heard about people didn't eat or use animals, but didn't know any; however, I decided to become one (later I discover they were called vegans) as an external marker of the inner psychological commitment I was making to not causing harm to others---human or animal. And now that includes the earth, too.
Recently, I read the quote from Tolstoy: "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be war."
P.S. Try cooking beans with a BAY Leaf--helps immensely!
mathboy wrote: "It would mean nothing to say that senators each have one vote (and that states get equal suffrage), if you can just weight the votes. BTW, since only the proportionality matters, the weighting doesn't have to be half the states' populations."
The only reason I suggested each senator's vote be worth half their state's population is because the two senators from any given state might be from different parties. The other possibility is to weight the votes by how many votes each senator received. But then those elected in off year elections get fewer than those elected during presidential elections when the voter turnout is about 50-55% instead of 35%.
Here are some numbers that show actual vote for Senators by party and who ends up controlling the Senate http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2014/01/does-constitution-give-gop-unf...
Being active politically is vital to protecting our food supply.
However, LED grow lamps get cheaper and aeroponic methods simpler.
Converted warehouses in Chicago, underground farms in Saudi Arabia, and high rise units in Hong Kong show they can profitably solve age old farm problems:
no preservatives or treatments
no long distance shipping
no suspect standards of sanitation
no polluted water and air
no reliance on nutrient depleted soil
no pests or bugs
no weather worries
no storage facilities
Keep one eye on food prices, and the other on LED prices, and at some point
we may all need a new indoor hobby.
ct
Rand Paul isn't all that popular here in Kentucky, and the Tea Party isn't especially strong (supposedly it's infused with the religious right, which the Tea Party isn't asupposed to be). He has also change his position on illegal immigrates, which won't fly---either in Kentucky or within the conservative movement nationally. Also, Paul needs friends with really deep pockets since he doesn't have the money personally. Politically, he is at least as experienced as Obama was politically when he ran for President; perhaps more so. His father, Ron Paul, have "been there done that", so hell prove to be a hugh asset to Rand's campaign. As more get into the race, I think his star fades.