ThinkingBlue

STOP SOPA PIPA

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

AMERICAN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

GOP RESPONSE

2012-01-24T12:27:00.002-05:00

I posted the video 'Thom Hartmann Reveals Tea Party's Winning Secrets --it ain't rocket science--'

on Current TV blog and got this response so, so very typical of the PARTY OF NO.

Mishima

First point:
A healthy 30 year old CHOOSES not to pay for health insurance and he goes into a coma.

Next, “executions.” Perry said, “If you come into our state and kill one of our children, police officers, etc., you will face the ultimate justice.”

Well, what else is an UNBORN CHILD EXCEPT THAT?

---

thinkingblue:

There isn’t anything one can say to a hardened indoctrinated right-winger about life, to change their superficial attitudes. Their idea about the miracle of existence is so one-dimensional, so black & white and so… childlike. To believe that one size fits all is naive; we all come from different backgrounds, different cultures, different economic circumstances, different ideologies and have different perceptions, in other words WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT yet we experience life with a mutual empathetic understanding about one another. We all feel pain and we suffer whether it is mental or physical, therefore we all (should) care about one another. We can’t do it on an individual basis because that would be like trying to save a drowning man alone which would result in the hero drowning along with the victim (panic has no conscience). What is needed is a floatation device to keep the man afloat until you can pull him to safety or wait for trained first responders to arrive. We’re all in this together and we all may need a floatation device thrown our way someday, no matter how rich or poor our economic condition may be. Right-wingers like to blame people for their life misfortunes as if we have the ability to plan our every move second by second. If someone finds himself in a dire life situation, it’s his own fault. The unrealistic Ayn Rand's "Objectivism", (the tendency, to deal with things external to the mind rather than with thoughts or feelings.) is not, down-to-earth nor sensible. If the human animal’s evolutionary course went down that road, I would not be here trying to critique the right-wing form of unconscionable analysis which is… just watch others fall prey to somebody/something and DO NOTHING BUT shake heads and point fingers in judgment claiming IT’S THEIR OWN DAMN FAULT or LET THEM DIE!

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American Indian Philosophy offers Great Wisdom to modern human beings. It spotlights how we treat God’s Creation, our Mother Earth, and how we treat each other.

Words of Black Elk:

“I could see that the Wasichus (whites) did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. http://melungeons.com/articles/american.htm

THE UGLY GOP

STOP SOPA PIPA

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

The Ugly Face Of The GOP

2012-01-24T12:24:00.001-05:00

Isn’t it amazing that so many members of the GOP can tell their followers that they love them and then turn around and DO EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO BRING THEIR FAN CLUB TO ITS KNEES, they seem to know that whatever obnoxious stunt they pull, sooner or later their groupies will forgive them? Newt Gingrich is one such GOP member but he stands out above the rest. His over the top monstrous statements can even shock a battle-scarred, been around the block news media, which makes me shocked over their shock. Now we all know that Newt outwardly is a pretty ugly dude for sure but no one is condemning him for that, we all get somewhat superficially ugly as we age according to our culture’s standard of beauty. Newt’s true ugliness comes from deep inside his frontal lopes but as deplorable as he and his rhetoric is, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg of what the GOP stands for. Sound opinionated? Maybe it is but watching and listening to the leaders of this party and seeing how their offensive language (dog whistles) towards certain groups affect their followers, (with standing ovations)one can’t help but render an opinion that the GOP AND ITS IDEOLOGY IS NASTY TO THE CORE. Please watch the video I uploaded to my youtube channel. With Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina I wanted to circulate a bit of history on this man that the Republican voter has decided to embrace. LOOK OUT, people Newt is a psychopathic sociopath and he will stop at nothing to get what he wants. The only thing that has stopped him in the past was the fact that people started to fear him. Wake up your fears America because HE'S BACK! thinkingblue

PSYCHOPATHIC - a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.

SOCIOPATH - a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

THE UGLY GOP

STOP SOPA PIPA

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

Boycott companies that support SOPA & PIPA

FIGHT AGAINST SOPA & PIPA January 18, 2012

2012-01-18T12:05:00.000-05:00

FIGHT AGAINST SOPA & PIPA January 18, 2012

Who's Going Dark to Protest SOPA, PIPA?

By Chloe Albanesius
January 18, 2012 07:00am EST

Wikipedia SOPA Protest

As many as 7,000 Web sites could go dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), according to community organizers. From major players like Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit to smaller, grass-roots sites, the Web is banding together to battle what they consider to be overly broad and potentially harmful legislation.

Here's a look at just some of the sites that will be closing their doors for 12-24 hours today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. SopaStrike.com also has an extensive list. If you see more throughout the day, let us know in the comments. And chime in on whether you think an Internet blackout is an effective way to battle the bills.

WIKIPEDIA: The English versions of Wikipedia went dark at midnight on Wednesday and will remain that way for 24 hours. "This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!" Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted this week.

BOING BOING: Boing Boing also went dark at midnight. "Boing Boing is offline today, because the US Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement," the site reads.

REDDIT: Reddit shuts down at 8am Eastern time Wednesday morning. "Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action," the site said in a blog post last week.

GOOGLE: "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet," Google said in a statement. "So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page." That includes a large black bar atop the Google logo on Google.com, as well as a link to Google's Take Action Web site.

MOZILLA: Mozilla is redirecting traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English web sites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, Jan. 18 from 8am to 8pm Eastern. Mozilla is also changing the look of the default Firefox start page so that visitors will see a black page with a call to action message to increase awareness of PIPA/SOPA, rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo, though search functionality will remain intact. "We hope the blackout of our U.S. sites will help bring attention to this important issue and encourage users to educate themselves about PIPA and SOPA," Mozilla said in a statement. "All users will still be able to receive security updates and access our technical support website. This will NOT affect Firefox users."

WORDPRESS: "If you want to join the protest by blacking out your WordPress site or applying a ribbon, there is now a variety of blackout plugins in the WordPress.org plugins directory," WordPress said in a blog post. "While joining the protest in this manner is laudable, please don't forget to also make those phone calls to U.S. Senators—they're the ones with the voting power."

TWITPIC: The Twitter pic site currently has a "Stop Censorship" banner across its logo. Clicking on the logo brings you to a SOPA/PIPA information page, including contact information for your representatives in Congress.

CHEEZBURGER NETWORK: "All Cheezburger sites will also be instituting a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and PIPA," CEO Ben Huh tweeted last week.

URBANSPOON: Will black out access to portions of the site's user-generated content (including photos and reviews). When users hover over the black areas, they'll be able to click on anti-SOPA messaging to learn more, and then access the blocked content.

CITYSEARCH: Local guide will be blocking access to multiple parts of the site: Things to Do Nearby; the first review under each business; and the marketing message on the top of the web site; will also link to anti-SOPA messaging.
COULD NOT FIND CITYSEARCH BLACKOUT
ASK.COM: Q&A site is donating ad space on the home page to voice opposition to the act to over 60 million Ask.com users; ad will link to the Open Congress site, giving users a place to directly take action against the bill.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

FAQ
What is the intent of SOPA/PROTECT IP?

The stated intent of the bills is to provide tools for law enforcement and copyright holders to protect their intellectual property rights.
What’s wrong with protecting copyrights?

Nothing! The devil, as they say, is in the details. PROTECT IP and SOPA will cause too much collateral damage, have a high potential for abuse, and won't even be that effective at stopping the crimes they target. Read alienth's examination of where these bills fail.
I'm not in the U.S. Why does this affect me?

Many of the sites that you may use (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) are all affected by this law and will be required to hide offending domains from you.

If a non-U.S. site is blocked in the U.S., the site could suffer financially or even be bankrupted by the loss of U.S. traffic and revenue.
What are the differences between PROTECT IP and SOPA?

At a general level, the bills are very similar. SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act," is from the House of Representatives, while the PROTECT IP Act is from the Senate. Either or both bills may pass a vote in their chamber of congress on their way to becoming law. Both must be defeated to end this threat. There have recently been more detailed explanations in an ELI5 thread and alienth's blog post.
What about ACTA?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is a multi-national agreement with similar goals to the U.S.-only PROTECT IP and SOPA bills. It is criticized for many of the same reasons that PROTECT IP and SOPA are, but is also concerning because it has been drafted in secret. ACTA is not the focus of this blackout but please take the time to learn more about ACTA.
I'm not a U.S. citizen. How can I help?

You can still call or e-mail the U.S. representatives (sponsors of the bills would be a good choice). However, you may want to turn your attention more towards ACTA or other over-zealous copyright bills in your country.
When will reddit be back? What should I do when it comes back?

reddit will return to normal service at 8 PM EST (0100 UTC). While our protest is temporary in nature, PROTECT IP and SOPA are not. Continue to pay attention and join the conversation in /r/SOPA when reddit returns.

Check out the /r/SOPA Community FAQ.

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

WHY DOES THE GOP HATE (everything sane)?

2012-01-17T11:53:00.001-05:00

WHY DOES THE GOP HATE (everything sane)?

This was a letter posted on Daily Kos by one of its members. It was so, to the point, that I felt a need to circulate it around a little more thus this post. It is a rant to all those who like to refer to themselves as members of the Tea Party and their GOP leaders. The GOP has such an easy task when it comes to adapting people's minds so that they will vote for them; Spread hate and they will be yours, is their message and it has worked for more years than I like to remember. Let's stop the hate and bring on common-sense solutions to all our problems. I say ALL because we are ALL the same regardless of what the Republicans would like us to believe. thinkingblue

An open letter to the people who hate Obama more than they love America

By MinistryOfTruth DailyKos

I meet you all the time. You hate Obama. You hate gay people. You hate black people, immigrants, Muslims, labor unions, women who want the right to make choices concerning their bodies, you hate em all. You hate being called racist. You hate being called a bigot. Maybe if you talked about creating jobs more than you talk about why you hate gay people we wouldn't call you bigots. Maybe if you talked about black people without automatically assuming they are on food stamps while demanding their birth certificates we wouldn't call you racist. You hate socialism and social justice. You hate regulations and taxes and spending and the Government. You hate.

You like war. You like torture. You like Jesus. I don't know how in the hell any of that is compatible, but no one ever accused you haters of being over-committed to ideological consistency. You like people who look like you or at least hate most of the things that you hate. You hate everything else.

Now, I know you profess to love our country and the founding fathers (unless you are reminded that they believed in the separation of church and state), but I need to remind you that America is NOT what Fox News says it is. America is a melting pot, it always has been. We are a multi-cultural amalgamation of all kinds of people, and yet you still demonize everyone who is not a rich, white, heterosexual christian male or his submissive and obedient wife.

You hate liberals, moderates, hell, anyone who disagrees with Conservative dogma as espoused by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. You hate em.
Well, here are the facts, Jack. If you hate the Government then you are unqualified to manage it. If you hate gay people more than you love America than you should take your own advice and get the hell out. There are several countries that are openly hostile to gay people, but they are full of brown people and you don't like them much either from what I understand. It looks like you are screwed, but that's not what I am here to tell you.

Now that you have thrown everything and the kitchen sink at President Obama and it still hasn't worked you are panicking. Obama's approval ratings are still near 50% despite your best efforts to undermine the economy and America's recovery at every step you can. You tried to hold the American economy hostage to force America into default on its' debts, debts that YOU rang up under Bush, so you could blame it on Obama and it failed. You've used the filibuster more than any other Congress ever, going so far as to vote against providing health care access to 9/11 first responders. You remember 9/11, don't you, it's that thing you used to lie us into a war in Iraq, and then when Obama killed Bin Laden and ended the war in Iraq you told people that he hates America and wants the troops to fail. You monsters. You hate Obama with a passion, despite the fact that he is a tax cutting, deficit reducing war President who undermines civil rights and delivers corporate friendly watered down reforms that benefit special interests just like a Republican. You call him a Kenyan. You call him a socialist. You dance with your hatred singing it proudly in the rain like it was a 1950's musical.
Frankly, you disgust me. Your hatred nauseates me. Your bigotry offends me. Your racism revolts me.
Dear haters, I am openly questioning your patriotism.
I think you hate gays, Obama, black people, poor people, all of us, women, atheists and agnostics, Latinos, Muslims, Liberals, all of us, I think you hate every one who isn't exactly like you, and I think you hate us more than you love your country.

I think you hate gay soldiers more than you want America to win its wars.

I don't even think you want America to win wars, you just want America to have wars, never ending wars and the war profiteering it generates. You love that kind of spending, you love spending on faith based initiatives and abstinence based sex education (George Carlin would have loved that one), you love spending on subsidies for profitable oil corporations, you spend like drunken sailors when you are in the White House, but if it is a Democrat then suddenly you cheer when America doesn't get the Olympics because it might make the black President look bad. But oooh you love your country, you say, and you want it back. Well listen here skippy, it isn't your country, you don't own it, it is our country, and America is NOT the religiously extremist Foxbots who hate science, elitist professors and having a vibrant and meaningful sex life with someone we love if Rick Santorum doesn't approve of it. Rick Santorum isn't running for America's fucking high school dance chaperone, he should probably just shut the hell up about sex, but he can't because he has nothing else to run on.

Republicans can NOT win on the issues. They've got NOTHING. All they have is a divide and conquer class war that pits ignorant racist and bigoted people against the rest of us in a meaningless battle of wedge issues and the already proven to fail George W. Bush agenda again of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatization and war profiteering and nothing else, so all they can do is blame black people, gays the government, anybody and everyone else for their own failings. The party of personal responsibility, my ass.
But they love multi-national corporations, just ask a gay hating and racist religious extremist if they think Corporations are people and they will gladly agree, but if you ask them if gay people are people they aren't so sure.

Dear haters, you are the cruel, heartless misinformed assholes who would sell America out to Haliburton in a heartbeat, you would rather pay ZERO taxes than you would see a newly born baby get access to quality health care, you cheer when we discuss denying health care to young people with preventable diseases, and you boo when we discuss the First Ladies plan to cut back on childhood obesity. You are a cross to carry and a flag to wrap yourself in away from being the people who Sinclair Lewis warned us about, but I guarantee that if Fox News told you to dress that way you would, because you are the same blind, ignorant and closed minded dunces who drove this country into a civil war years ago because you are bound to the notion that some men are more equal than others. In short, the reason I proudly wear my union army hat is because of seditious sell outs like you who constantly fuck over working class Americans so a foreign entrepreneur like Rupert Murdoch can get a bigger tax break. If corporations are people, they are neither American patriots nor capable of love. Just like you.

So stop wearing your hate with pride. Stop celebrating your anti-science, anti-math ignorance. Stop using code words to mask your bigotry like "family values", especially when you hate my family and when you stand on the same stage as a guy who has had three marriages or if you share a seat in the Senate with a guy who cheated on his wife with hookers while wearing diapers. You should be ashamed. I know that you are just doing this to motivate your misinformed hate cult base because if they actually knew that your ideas will make them poorer than they are now, they would never vote for you. You are doing your best to impoverish your countrymen so rich people can get bigger tax breaks and you can keep on delivering corporate welfare to the special interests who have bribed you, and I am disgusted by the way you gleefully parade your hatred with aplomb. I don't think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn't exactly like you.
You should think about that, and maybe get some help.

And for the record, I do not hate you. I am embarrassed by you and nauseated by your cruel and thoughtless behavior and your all consuming greed, but I do not hate you. I forgive you and I hope you can change someday, but I don't hate you. You have enough hate in you for the rest of us as it is.

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A Message From MinistryOfTruth on dailykos
News Community Action

Dear bullies who can dish it but can't take it & suddenly got sensitive, CRY ME A RIVER!Wednesday, January 11, 2012 2:28 PMOne day when I was in elementary school a bully beat me up because I was fat. I went home crying, and my dad asked me what was wrong. I told him about the bully and about getting beat up and he asked me if I knew how to throw a punch. I was probably 10 years old and I had never been in a real fight before. So my dad took me into my room, took the mattress off of my bed, put it upright against the wall and taught me how to fight. He taught me how to take a punch like a boxer and move with it. He taught me how to throw a punch like a soldier. My dad was a Navy Veteran with a Motorcycle, a union carpenter with a strong back like Paul Bunyan and a laugh to match. After my boxing lesson, my dad told me to go outside and pick a fight with that kid the next time I see him, and he told me that if I didn't do it and go stand up to that kid I was grounded.
The next time I saw that kid I stood up to him. He took a swing at me and missed and I socked him right in the mouth. That was the last time that kid ever bullied me again.
On Monday I wrote An open letter to the people who hate Obama more than they love America In that post, I called the bullies out for who they are. I stand by every word I wrote.
The response I got back was overwhelmingly supportive. By Wednesday afternoon that post has racked up over 2,200 tweets, over 15,000 likes on Facebook. 56,000+ shares on social media networks. 99% of the people who responded to my open letter were vocally supportive of standing up to the bullies. It was the other 1% of responders who were offended that really made me understand finally after all these years have passed since my dad taught me how to stand up to bullies exactly what it is that bullies stand for . . .
And it makes me think of that scene from The Big Lebowski, where the Nihilists burn down the Dude's car and demand a ransom but then whine when Walter stands up to them. I guess what I am trying to say is that these men are nihilists. These men are cowards, there's nothing to fear. These men are cowards. Cowards who can only pick on the weak, but when you show strength and stand up to them they can't take it. They can dish it but they can't take it.

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Word for word, MinistryOfTruth speaks the language we all feel. We, the ones who think and demand better from our leaders. We, who refuse to march in lockstep to outright bigotry perpetrated by propagandist who use fear to make people do what they know in their hearts is wrong. We, who can see the injustice brought on by too many years under Republican/Corporate control. We, who can realize that class warfare is real and disparities between the classes has become overwhelmingly unfair. I don't know if things will ever change but for sure we must stop being silent and join together in rants of anger. Too long we have been controlled by those who wish to enslave us for their own profits and power. We have as silly Herman Cain so comically expressed, BLAMED OURSELVES and remained mum and ashamed. Embarrassed about going bankrupt due to gargantuan medical bills or job layoffs because as Pat Buchanan once said after the GOP changed bankruptcy laws that made it almost impossible for the middle class to use this tool the Corporate World employs all the time, (paraphrasing) “IT’S ABOUT TIME AMERICA DID SOMETHING TO STOP THE DEADBEATS FROM GETTING AWAY WITH NOT PAYING THEIR BILLS”. The inequalities that have overtaken America are not our fault but it will be, if we stay quiet and do as we are told. I salute the OWS groups; they are shedding enlightenment where there was only ignorance, to the utter dismay of the Corporatists’. thinkingblue

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

http://www.wthr.com/story/16530862/gop-launches-ad-against-right-to-work:

Are Some Republican Voters Starting To Finally Wake Up?

2012-01-17T09:42:00.002-05:00

Are Some Republican Voters Starting To Finally Wake Up?

I LOVE it... "LUNCH PAIL REPUBLICANS"

EXCERPT FROM - GOP group launches ad against "Right to Work"

David Fagan is a member of the Lunch Pail Republicans. He says he's been a Republican since he was 18, held office as a Republican, but the debate at the Statehouse has him fighting against his own party leaders and he plans to take that fight to the trenches...

"Right To Work" an Orwellian newspeak term.

Uh Oh, what language will the GOP and Frank Luntz use if their sycophants all get wind of their newspeak terminology? thinkingblue

http://myapologies.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/gop-newspeak/

I use to get so angry at Andrew Sullivan for his pathetic attempt to paint Neocons as heroes but now, since he started THINKING... Believe it or not he's making sense! thinkingblue

Sullivan supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, and was initially hawkish in the war on terror, arguing that weakness would embolden terrorists. Immediately following the September 11 attacks in 2001, he wrote a controversial essay for The Sunday Times, in which he stated, "The middle part of the country — the great red zone that voted for Bush — is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead — and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column."[45] In an October 14, 2001 post, Sullivan announced that recent anthrax attacks had sealed his support for war on Iraq, including the possible use of nuclear weaponry by the United States. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan

Now watch the NEW AND IMPROVED Andrew Sullivan on Hardball:

A CRUSH ON NOAA

GOP HATE 2012

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFA3682R-A

A Crush On NOAA & President Obama

2012-01-17T09:35:00.003-05:00

A Crush On NOAA & President Obama

I caught this magnificent info about President Obama’s plans for NOAA and the Dept. of Commerce on the Rachel Maddow show the other night and thought WOW; this has got to be my first video for the 2012 election. The Republicans with their shrinking Tea Party are trying to take this nation back to the mid 1800's NO, further back to the times of Pharaohs and Monarchs:

{{The first states were mostly monarchies, as far as we can tell. They were ruled by kings or queens. The earliest monarchies that we know about are the ones in Sumer and Egypt. These both began around 3000 BC.}} http://www.nobility-association.com/monarchyhistory.htm

{{Throughout most of history, governments -- usually monarchies headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs, and other major or minor tyrants -- actually owned everything under their rule, including, believe it or not, the people. In those regimes the population was considered to be subjects, not citizens. That means that the people were treated as the underlings, subjected to the will of the ruler.}} http://wordsmith.org/words/pharaoh.html

Do we really want to return to the days when citizens were called subjects and subjected to the wills of the rulers? Whatever you believe DO NOT VOTE IN ANOTHER REPUBLICAN, we’ve been there, done that! If another Republican president from THE PARTY OF NO takes over the helm, brace yourself for a spiral spin downward to a place of no return! Oh, on your way down say BYE Democracy, HELLO Plutocracy/Oligarchy (USA owned & operated by a few rich folks). thinkingblue

---

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (Predictions In 2010) the United States would be ceded to plutocrats and oligarchs if Republicans win next month’s election, referring to the flood of pro-GOP corporate election spending.

“This election is also about our democracy,” Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann.” “If they win — which I fully intend to stop them from doing — but if they win, it would mean we are now a plutocracy and oligarchy.”

“Whatever these few wealthy, secret, unlimited sources of money are can control our entire agenda,” she said.

The first female speaker struck an unmistakably ominous tone about wealthy groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS spending a fortune bankrolling campaigns — overwhelmingly for Republicans — while concealing their sources of funding.

“It is essential and fundamental to our democracy that we not have it be a wholly owned subsidiary of these corporations, and as a part of the Chamber of Commerce,” Pelosi said.

The influx of unlimited and secret election spending, made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling this January, has led to rich business interests mobilizing in an unprecedented way to topple Democrats from power and back the most conservative candidates. THE END http://www.rawstory.com/

Thethinking Blue facebook - This is the first of the 2012 political videos from my channel on youtube:

We The People Of The USA are at a crossroad, if President Obama is not re-elected it will be the end - of Democracy and the beginning of Plutocracy/Oligarchy! No doubt about it. thinkingblue

Bill O'Reilly You're Useless!

2012-01-11T08:49:00.000-05:00

A few videos that illustrate how useless Bill O'Reilly is to the world. Oh, he may have his followers but they are of the ditto-head persuasion that follow Rush Limbaugh. I hate to judge and categorize people in to groups but O'Reilly is an ignoramus and proud of it. The Catholic church should be embarrassed that he so loudly touts that he represents them. thinkingblue

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

A Laugh To Sooth Your New Year Woes

2012-01-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

The holidays are over THANK ALL THAT IS GOOD, and it is now time to get back to normal entertainment as opposed to the fantasy type (Say like the old man in a red suit and his flying reindeer or the manger baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.) If you are of sound mind and in need of a good laugh or two, please read the columnist from The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg's . A Laugh Out Loud and I mean LOUD. thinkingblue

PS: Peace

What's Your Problem?

Ask Jeffrey Goldberg
Back in my day, I was a campus radical. Now my son, who is an Ivy League graduate but mostly unemployed, wants to get more involved in Occupy Wall Street. Based on my history, it’s hard for me to tell him this is a bad idea, but I’m not impressed with this movement’s lack of focus and I think he would better serve his future by getting a job and moving out of our home. I know what I sound like, but I think that since my wife and I still support him financially, he should take what I have to say into consideration, Am I wrong? H.L., Los Angeles, Calif.
--

Dear H.L., Your son’s desire raises several problems, not least of which is that he already lives in a socialist paradise—namely, your house—and so maybe he should stop complaining about the unfairness of life. I’m not critiquing his wish to see the world bettered for others, but might I make a couple of suggestions? Most Ivy League graduates are unaccustomed to pepper spray; perhaps he should spray himself in the face once or twice, to test his tolerance. He should also resist the urge to bring high-end camping equipment to protests—this will make him look fey and elitist.

~~~

I am a single woman in my 30s, and I would like to have a baby on my own. I don’t want to go to a sperm bank —too anonymous—and I’m lucky because I have four very acceptable guy friends, any of whom I think would be a willing donor if I choose to go that route. I’ve made lists of their various attributes, and they all basically, even out in the end. The only place where they really differ is in their level of academic achievement, specifically where they went to college. Two went to Ivy League schools (Harvard, Columbia), one went to Duke, and one went to a second-tier state school, the University of Kansas. I assume their undergraduate choices had to do with their SAT scores (I don’t know how they did on standardized testing, and I think it might be rude to ask), so those choices do seem pertinent. How much should I weigh this in making my decision? D.S., New York, N.Y.
--
Dear D.S., To avoid making such a difficult decision, I suggest you collect sperm from all four men, combine the donations in a test tube, and inject this potent mixture using the traditional turkey-baster method. Whichever sperm outswims, outfights, or outfoxes the others will fertilize your egg, which is as it should be, because I think the most ruthless and mercenary sperm is axiomatically the best sperm for you. I suspect that the University of Kansas sperm will win this competition. Just look at the school’s football program: while not on a par with Auburn or LSU, it could crush Columbia or Harvard. As for Duke, I would guess that the sperm will be too drunk to compete.

~~~

Prompted by various books and movies, I’ve decided to make a bucket list of all the things I want to do before I die. The problem is, I don’t know how to limit myself. I have a fair amount of money, and a good amount of time left (I hope), but there are a million places to visit and a million things to do. How do you think I should organize myself in this endeavor? L.D., Miami, Fla.
--
Dear L.D., I understand why you are flummoxed by the variety of choices before you. My suggestion is that you focus your thinking by making a reverse bucket list of all the things you are positive you don’t want to do. I’ve made a reverse bucket list of my own that you may use as a model. Here are 25 of the things that I hope never to do:

1. Climb Mount Everest

2. See any movie or read any book about self-actualizing rich people who climb Mount Everest

3. See that movie about the guy who cuts off his arm in a ravine that isn’t even on Mount Everest

4. Spend three weeks in a Turkish prison—again

5. Read The Remarkable Millard Fillmore, by George Pendle

6. Adopt small African children for ornamental purposes

7. Obey indoor firearms regulations

8. Retire to Abbottabad

9. Take a photograph of my penis and then tweet it

10. Collateralize a debt obligation

11. Juice cleanse

12. Colon cleanse

13. Ethnic cleanse

14. Go on an ayahuasca bender

15. Create a coat of arms for my family

16. Purchase a Teutonic trophy wife

17. Play golf with John Boehner

18. Play golf

19. Make love at midnight in the dunes on the Cape

20. Swim with dolphins, because swimming with dolphins means swimming in dolphin shit

21. Spend a week in a monastery

22. Spend a day in a monastery

23. Join LinkedIn

24. Update my software

25. Write an advice column

~~~

Now get ready for another LOL!

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

RNC Document Mocks Donors, Plays on 'Fear'

Rick Santorum Shrinks When He Hears MIDDLE CLASS. HUH???

2012-01-09T09:45:00.000-05:00

WHY ARE REPUBLICANS SO FULL OF SHIT?

The Dirty Truth Behind The New Natural Gas - 2010 UPDATE 2012

2012-01-04T10:17:00.001-05:00

After viewing the documentary GASLAND, I was mortified and ashamed of what our species is capable of. If you think this is a free country... THINK AGAIN! The Bush/Cheney administration did everything in their power to take away as many freedoms as possible so doors could be opened to allow THE CORPORATE "BEING" to have free reign on getting at any type of resource no matter who or what was in the way. I know it's hard to believe that they would go so far as to ruin our planet if only to make another buck. But with every dollar, they get a nickel’s worth of power. The Power to Destroy. If you haven't seen Avatar I recommend you rent it. It is a chilling glimpse into the future of what can happen to Mother Earth when all her natural resources are depleted. Think it a fairytale? (Another... THINK AGAIN!) Watch the trailer Gasland below and The Daily Show featuring the filmmaker of Gasland, Josh Fox. Stay enlightened, information may be the only weapon we have to help save our planet against The Corporate World who will kill every living creature upon it, if they are allowed too.
---
2012 - I blogged this page almost 2 years ago, since then we have had Earth tremors and quakes in the Fracking areas that some experts believe are the direct result of Fracking. I know the Republicans want us all to feel that Corporations will do no harm, they care about us and our Earth. To that I say... THE SHIT OF THE BULL! Even in my own hometown there are people who are willing to destroy in order to gain BIG BUCKS for themselves... Go to this link to see how greed is on a steady course of destruction EVERYWHERE. http://www.youtube.com/user/liveoaklandfill

Please watch GASLAND and then watch the propaganda film on HOW WONDERFUL NATURAL GAS IS, brought to you by one of the United Corporations of America.

thinkingblue

PS: 3 Cheers for Montana!!! Montana Supreme Court upholds election spending limits

GASLAND Trailer 2010

Ohio earthquake was not a natural event, expert says

2012 - CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A 4.0 magnitude earthquake in Ohio on New Year's Eve did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production, an expert hired by the state of Ohio said on Tuesday.

Ohio's Department of Natural Resources on Sunday suspended operations at five deep well sites in Youngstown, Ohio, where the injection of water was taking place, while they evaluate seismological data from a rare quake in the area.

The wells are about 9,000 feet deep and are used to dispose of water from oil and gas wells. The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.

Won-Young Kim, a research professor of Seismology Geology and Tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and the high-pressure well activity.

"We know the depth (of the quake on Saturday) is two miles and that is different from a natural earthquake," said Kim, who is advising the state of Ohio.

Data collected from four seismographs set up in November in the area confirm a connection between the quakes and water pressure at the well, Kim said.

"There is circumstantial evidence to connect the two -- in the past we didn't have earthquakes in the area and the proximity in the time and space of the earthquakes matches operations at the well," he said.

A spokesman for Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, a strong supporter of oil and gas exploration in the state, said Ohio could announce a preliminary decision whether to continue the suspension of the wells as early as Wednesday.

The state was already looking into the cause of earlier seismic activity from 10 previous earthquakes, beginning in March, 2011.

According to Kim, this is not the first time Ohio tremors have been linked to human activities. "We have several examples of earthquakes from deep well disposal in the past," Kim said.

A quake of 4.2 magnitude in Ashtabula, Ohio, on January 26, 2001, was believed to be due to deep-well injection, he said. And in 1987 there was an incident with a correlation to high pressure deep well injection, he said.

There are 177 so-called "class two" deep wells in Ohio, according to Tom Stewart, executive vice president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association. They all operate under federal guidelines spelled out by the Clean Water Act.

There is no evidence that the wells in Youngstown were operating at higher pressures than allowed, Stewart said.

"We haven't seen anything from anyone at (the state agency) that would lead us to believe that the well was not operating properly," he said.

Kim said that even though the wells have stopped pumping water into the rock, the area might not have experienced its last earthquake. "It could take a couple of years for the earthquakes to go away. The migration of the fluid injected into the rock takes a long time to leave," Kim said.

Ohio's Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, said the quick response by the state shows it is a serious issue.

"There are things we need to know about drilling and earthquakes," Brown told Reuters on Tuesday.

Brown said he supports new energy exploration that brings jobs to the state but has questions about how companies will handle fracking and wastewater disposal. "They have got to answer the question of what they are going to do with the waste just like nuclear power," Brown said.

(Editing by Greg McCune and Jim Marshall) MORE HERE - http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-earthquake-not-natural-event-expert-says-002703764.html

Natural Gas: The Energy to Move Forward

A Colossal Fracking Mess The dirty truth behind the new natural gas.

Related: A V.F. video look at a town transformed by fracking. Early on a spring morning in the town of Damascus, in northeastern Pennsylvania, the fog on the Delaware River rises to form a mist that hangs above the tree-covered hills on either side. A buzzard swoops in from the northern hills to join a flock ensconced in an evergreen on the river’s southern bank.

Stretching some 400 miles, the Delaware is one of the cleanest free-flowing rivers in the United States, home to some of the best fly-fishing in the country. More than 15 million people, including residents of New York City and Philadelphia, get their water from its pristine watershed. To regard its unspoiled beauty on a spring morning, you might be led to believe that the river is safely off limits from the destructive effects of industrialization. Unfortunately, you’d be mistaken. The Delaware is now the most endangered river in the country, according to the conservation group American Rivers.

A V.F. video look at a town transformed by fracking.

That’s because large swaths of land—private and public—in the watershed have been leased to energy companies eager to drill for natural gas here using a controversial, poorly understood technique called hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. Sixty miles west of Damascus, the town of Dimock, population 1,400, makes all too clear the dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing. You don’t need to drive around Dimock long to notice how the rolling hills and farmland of this Appalachian town are scarred by barren, square-shaped clearings, jagged, newly constructed roads with 18-wheelers driving up and down them, and colorful freight containers labeled “residual waste.” Although there is a moratorium on drilling new wells for the time being, you can still see the occasional active drill site, manned by figures in hazmat suits and surrounded by klieg lights, trailers, and pits of toxic wastewater, the derricks towering over barns, horses, and cows in their shadows.

The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people’s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.

Craig and Julie Sautner moved to Dimock from a nearby town in March 2008. They were in the process of renovating their modest but beautifully situated home on tree-canopied Carter Road when land men from Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas, a midsize player in the energy-exploration industry, came knocking on their door to inquire about leasing the mineral rights to their three and a half acres of land. The Sautners say the land men told them that their neighbors had already signed leases and that the drilling would have no impact whatsoever on their land. (Others in Dimock claim they were told that if they refused to sign a lease, gas would be taken out from under their land anyway, since under Pennsylvania law a well drilled on a leased piece of property can capture gas from neighboring, unleased properties.) They signed the lease, for a onetime payout of $2,500 per acre—better than the $250 per acre a neighbor across the street received—plus royalties on each producing well.

Drilling operations near their property commenced in August 2008. Trees were cleared and the ground leveled to make room for a four-acre drilling site less than 1,000 feet away from their land. The Sautners could feel the earth beneath their home shake whenever the well was fracked.

Within a month, their water had turned brown. It was so corrosive that it scarred dishes in their dishwasher and stained their laundry. They complained to Cabot, which eventually installed a water-filtration system in the basement of their home. It seemed to solve the problem, but when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection came to do further tests, it found that the Sautners’ water still contained high levels of methane. More ad hoc pumps and filtration systems were installed. While the Sautners did not drink the water at this point, they continued to use it for other purposes for a full year.

“It was so bad sometimes that my daughter would be in the shower in the morning, and she’d have to get out of the shower and lay on the floor” because of the dizzying effect the chemicals in the water had on her, recalls Craig Sautner, who has worked as a cable splicer for Frontier Communications his whole life. She didn’t speak up about it for a while, because she wondered whether she was imagining the problem. But she wasn’t the only one in the family suffering. “My son had sores up and down his legs from the water,” Craig says. Craig and Julie also experienced frequent headaches and dizziness.

By October 2009, the D.E.P. had taken all the water wells in the Sautners’ neighborhood offline. It acknowledged that a major contamination of the aquifer had occurred. In addition to methane, dangerously high levels of iron and aluminum were found in the Sautners’ water.

The Sautners now rely on water delivered to them every week by Cabot. The value of their land has been decimated. Their children no longer take showers at home. They desperately want to move but cannot afford to buy a new house on top of their current mortgage.

“Our land is worthless,” says Craig. “Who is going to buy this house?”

MORE HERE

Josh Fox was a guest on The Daily Show Monday night,

coinciding with the HBO release of his new documentary, Gasland. He talks with Jon Stewart about the film, which exposes the toxic chemicals being leeched into water supplies as a consequence of the new natural gas drilling method sweeping the nation, hydraulic fracturing. Some water supplies are so drastically affected by the chemicals that residents are actually able to light their tap water on fire.

Fox explains that we are currently in the biggest natural gas drilling boom in history to which Stewart sardonically replies, "Well, it's natural gas, so it's actually the healthy gas. They actually sell it in whole foods. It's so tasty, this gas."

Fox further talks about the natural gas drilling industry's deceptive tactics to buy the rights to drill on peoples' property and their PR effort to smear the information in his film. He describes the industry's exemption from certain regulations through the "Halliburton loophole", to which Stewart remarks, "That sounds like the worst sex position ever."

WATCH Josh Fox on The Daily Show:

Thom Hartmann on Freespeech TV

New Robes For SCOTUS

Please sign this very important petition "demand question time" (of our political leaders) HERE.. We really need more dialog from those at the top... The Republicans have got to be made to realize they can't hide behind "NO" any longer! thinkingblue

MOVE TO AMEND
NEWS UPDATE: MONTANA
Montana Supreme Court upholds election spending limits

In a 5-2 opinion, the Montana court's majority concluded that the state's long history of well-funded natural resource extractors, small population and historically inexpensive political campaigns allow it to demonstrate compelling government interest in regulating corporate financial muscle. Even one of the justices who dissented — saying that the U.S. Supreme Court left no room for states to exempt themselves — argued forcefully against the broad corporate latitude encompassed in the Citizens United decision.

"Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government," Justice James C. Nelson wrote in his reluctant dissent.

"Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons," he wrote.

Let's keep our heads, while we continue to watch THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

"A SEARCH FOR TRUTH WILL FIND INJUSTICE."thinkingblue

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

http://valetudocafe.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/the-10-smartest-pot-smokers-on-the-planet%E2%80%A6-cool-enough-to-admit-it/

New Year Thoughts For 2012

2012-01-01T11:49:00.000-05:00

Something to ponder on this first day of a New Year.

The 10 Smartest Pot Smokers on the Planet… Cool Enough to Admit It

I the beginning description on this piece...

EXCERPT: {{{You’ve probably seen those “Above The Influence” anti-drug commercials in which they show worst scenario outcomes to people smoking weed. Really depressing sh*t. They always make the person out to be an accidental murderer, or homeless, jobless, friendless. No prospects of anything positive on the horizon. Well, we have a list of the smartest people who ever admitted to smoking pot as a nice complement to the most successful people who owned up to puffin’ dope. Suck it, ATI.}}}

When are we as a population going to demand that our government stop pushing their legal (LETHAL) dope on us...
EXAMPLES BELOW:
MIRAPEX - for "Restless Leg Syndrome"
"...hallucinations may occur..."
"...increased gambling, sexual, or other overpowering urges..."

ABILIFY - bipolar disorder, schizophrenia
"coma or death...And trouble swallowing."

FLOMAX - decreases symptoms from having an enlarged prostate (mainly frequent urination)
* runny nose
* dizziness
* decrease in semen

ALLI - weight loss aid
"These changes may include gas with oily discharge, an increased number of bowel movements, an urgent need to have them, and an inability to control them."

VERAMYSYT - "treats allergy symptoms with a gentle fine mist that is scent-free."
"nasal sores, glaucoma, cataracts and nasal fungal infection"
More disturbingly, ads for Veramyst used to say, "The way VERAMYST works is not entirely understood."

ORTHO-NOVUM - birth control pill
"...benign but dangerous liver tumors. These benign liver tumors can rupture and cause fatal internal bleeding. In addition, some studies report an increased risk of developing liver cancer."

ADVAIR - asthma treatment
"asthma related death"

CHANTIX - anti-smoking aid
"Nausea, sleep disturbance, constipation, flatulence, and vomiting."
{{{That doesn't sound so bad, except "sleep disturbance" is more like psychotic nightmares that persist even after you stop taking the pill.}}} MORE HERE

...and make common-sense drugs LEGAL??? It will be a Happy New Year 2012 when they first legalize medical marijuana (DUH)
and then the recreational kind. thinkingblue

Francis Crick - As a founding member of Soma, a legalize cannabis group, he also experimented pot, which he believed helped to remove the filters of abstract thought.

The 10 Smartest Pot Smokers on the Planet… Cool Enough to Admit It

Steve Jobs

It’s been reported the Apple co-founder smoked pot and took LSD in his first semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972. Since dropping out from the school, he’s only gone on to become one of the most successful and wealthiest people in America. In 1984, he received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named him the most powerful person in business and then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted him into the California Hall of Fame. Fortune also named him CEO of the Decade in 2009 while Forbes ranked him #57 on their list of the World’s Most Powerful People that same year. The Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can have those kind of accolades being dumb. Plus, the guy’s a Beatles fan, dated Joan Baez, and sold one of his houses to Bono from U2. That’s some hip, hip company, my friend.

Carl Sagan

Astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, pothead.

It’s hard to argue for pot slowing you down when you look at Carl Sagan’s record. Apparently a confirmed and admitted stoner, among his many achievements are a Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, a best-selling novel, as well as more than 500 science papers and articles. He was a founding member of the Planetary Society, and he won a pipe load of scientific awards. Hardly surprising, he is said to have believed in the validity of stoned insights. I believe in them too, it’s just that Carl’s revolved around the origins of the cosmos, not which bagel store is open at 3 in the morning.

Stephen Jay Gould

Paleontologist, biologist, science historian.

Most famous scientific contribution was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which says that most evolution is marked by long periods of stability. Kind of like most of us after a good bong hit. One of the most influential and best read writers of popular science, Gould became an advocate for medical marijuana following his diagnosis with cancer. He claimed it had an “important effect” on his recovery. He also testified in court to the benefits of marijuana, and is quoted as saying “it is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simple because others use it for different purposes.”

Gould used pot to help retain his health for twenty years, the same period during which he wrote The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, not what you might call an insignificant work.

Francis Crick

Won a Nobel Prize for figuring out the double-helix structure of DNA. Rumor has it that he was on acid at the time. Crick wasn’t the first to see twin twisted monsters coming at him during an acid plunge, but he was the first to recognize as an important scientific discovery. As a founding member of Soma, a legalize cannabis group, he also experimented pot, which he believed helped to remove the filters of abstract thought.

Margaret Mead

Ok, so it’s probably not totally accurate to describe Margaret Mead as a pothead, but she was a major proponent for marijuana, so we’re going to widen the definition a bit.

When she died in 1978, Mead was possibly the most famous Anthropologist on the planet. Time had named her Mother of the World in 1969. She authored or co-authored around 40 books, received 28 honorary doctorates, and was President of both the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Most famously, she testified before Congress on the legalization of marijuana. She testified on lots of stuff, but it’s this one everyone remembers. Afterwards, she was called a dirty old lady, crazy, and no doubt many other things.

Andrew Weil

Had a mushroom named after him. Do we need to know any more? Well, yes, we do. Although he looks like he’s been binging on an all-night high, Dr. Weil has medical and biology degrees from Harvard, is a naturopath, as well as a widely acknowledged expert on medicinal herbs, alternative medicines, and mind and body interactions. He was on the cover of Time, has written a bunch of books, and used to write for High Times. He talks about the advantages of stoned thinking, as well as an innate need to alter consciousness. Is that him or us? Whatever, it’s clearly worked for him.

Kary Mullis

Another Nobel Prize winner, another stoner. Mullis tried heavier drugs than just pot. He invented the polymerase chain reaction, which if it’s slipped your mind, is the one that allows duplication of parts of DNA. He says acid helped him to develop it, perhaps along with pot, which he allegedly smoked just before his first trip. While most of us have trouble figuring out how a chair works when we’re high, this guy was working out how to mimic nature.

Oliver Sacks

If you’ve seen “Awakenings” with Robin Williams, you already know something of Oliver Sacks’ work. He’s a neurologist, the film based on his book of the same name. He also wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks is an Oxford graduate and professor of neurology at Columbia Medical Center. He’s been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine, and received numerous awards and honorary doctorates in the field of neurological science. Not bad for a man who’s admitted to using marijuana on a more that recreational level, seeing it as a potential gateway to other minds and other consciousnesses.

Richard Feynman

Physicist who helped design the atomic bomb. Well, nobody said anyone on this list was wise, just smarter than average. Feynman used pot to enhance his out of body experiences while in a sensory deprivation tank. When he came out, he won a Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.

Sergey Brin

He has a BS from the University of Maryland, a MS from Stanford and took PhD courses at Stanford before putting that on hiatus to co-found Google with Larry Page. His dad’s a math professor at the University of Maryland. His mom’s a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His wife, Ann Wojcicki, is a biotech analyst who graduated with a B.S. in biology from Yale in 1996. She and Brin are working with leading researchers to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the human genome data and try to repair “bugs” as if DNA were HTML. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is “among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer” and received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the “Highest Award in Engineering”. Like Jobs (see above), he’s among the wealthiest in the world.
I can only imagine the first time he described DNA as HTML to someone, he/she must’ve been like, “are you high?” To which, he responded, “No! Why? You holdin’?”

MORE HERE -http://coedmagazine.com/2011/02/02/the-10-smartest-pot-smokers-on-the-planet-cool-enough-to-admit-it/

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

VETERAN'S DAY - A PICTURE THAT SAYS A 1000 WORDS

Rick Perry's 'Strong' Ad Surpasses Rebecca Black's 'Friday' With More Dislikes On YouTube

Look Back on 2011 Via Jon Stewart

2012-01-01T11:46:00.001-05:00

Jon Stewart looks back on 2011 month by month.
CLICK HERE

Behind The Facade Of Holiday Cheer, Lies A Callous Reality

2011-12-19T11:18:00.002-05:00

What to post on the days before Christmas? There's so much out there in THE INTERNET CLOUD it is hard to choose. I wanted a holiday story that would send warm fuzzies to others, you know the thing you're expected to do during "TIS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY. My first choice was “White House Christmas trees then and now”... But when I opened that headline I thought... HO HUM, how boring (since aging, cynicism has taken over many of my thinking brain cells)... After rejecting THAT one and FAST, I, out of sad curiosity, opened this headline: “9-year-old NYC boy chokes in school cafeteria” http://news.yahoo.com/9-old-nyc-boy-chokes-school-cafeteria-154913556.html

NEW YORK (AP) — Family members and a witness say a New York City fourth grader choked on meatballs during lunch earlier this month while school cafeteria workers stood by. The boy later died. The New York Post (http://nyp.st/td2pmw ) reported Saturday that 9-year-old Jonathan Jewth fell to the ground during lunch Dec. 5 at Public School 47 in the Bronx. He was unconscious before help arrived.A parent at the school, Andrea Perez, told the newspaper she saw the boy choking but cafeteria workers did nothing. She said at one point they yelled at him to put his fingers down his throat."He was on the ground and not moving after a while," Perez said through a Spanish-speaking translator. "Nobody was paying attention and they didn't know how to give aid, nobody knew what to do."She said she did not know how to resuscitate the boy so she called 911 and started screaming for help. Another parent tried to help the boy, the newspaper reported. Jewth was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center. Jonathan's family told the newspaper he suffered brain damage and died Monday. Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said his death was a tragedy. Education officials haven't responded to requests for comment about the family's and Perez's account. Tearful mourners bid farewell to 9-year-old Jonathan Jewth
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tearful-mourners-bid-farewell-9-year-old-jonathan-jewth-article-1.993188

Reading the article made me at first think: HOW COULD THE SCHOOL WORKERS STAND AROUND AND WATCH A LITTLE BOY CHOKING AND DO NOTHING? How in the world could a little boy die in the middle of a busy school cafeteria? Then I thought about how our Nation has become MEANER THAN A JUNK YARD DOG…

Oh, from all appearances, there’s the usual Christmas 'Loving and Sharing Theme' going on… but a closer look will tell a different story… The holidays at the end of each year are mainly full of propagandized greed by the United Corporations of America. Buy this, Buy that, GIVE THIS GIFT OF LOVE (and give us the $$$) it’s enough to make you "CRY AUNT”!

I don’t know the exact moment our country became Grinch (or Gingrich) like, I think maybe it always was there from the moment the Europeans moved in and kicked out the original owners. Perhaps, we humans are incapable of genuine empathetic caring… Maybe we've evolved into MEAN with loving tendencies weaned from our nature by propaganda machines running FULL BLAST 24/7.

‘The Selfish Gene’ By Richard Dawkins – Tells about a theory that we human animals had developed a Selfish Gene, during our evolutionary journey in order to guarantee our species' survival. Below is a summary of this astonishing and enlightening Dawkins' work.

Introduction

We are all just a colony of genes, also to be thought of as survival machines, gene vehicles or "lumbering robots" created by and for the benefit of our genes. We are the vehicles and the genes inside of us are the selfish replicators seeking immortality. This is the same for all living organisms. Of course the genes are not really selfish in the sense that they have a consciousness. However, genes that survive and reproduce are able to live and increase their number, and genes that don't survive and reproduce are eliminated and no longer exist. Genes can therefore be thought of as having a selfish "desire" for immortality through survival and reproduction and as Dawkins states: "The predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness".

What is a Gene?

A gene is NOT DNA and it is NOT a Chromosome. Richard Dawkins explains that a gene is somewhere between a Cistron, which is an extremely small segment of DNA that is is involved in producing proteins, and a Chromosome, which is a very long DNA molecule which contains hundreds or thousands of genes. A gene could be said to be a playing card or a page in a book and a Chromosome could be said to be a deck of playing cards or an entire book. Genes are the fundamental unit of natural selection because they are the most potentially immortal of all of the other known biological self replicating units (i.e. individual organisms, groups of organisms or even chromosomes because of their constant mutation and re-arrangement between sexually reproduced generations). After this foundation has been established, this book is mostly a study of the biology of selfishness and altruism based on the Selfish Gene Theory.

Selfish Behavior in Nature

Richard Dawkins begins by presenting some examples of animals behaving selfishly in nature including:

Female praying mantises eating the heads off of male praying mantises during copulation

Black Headed Gulls eating their neighbors babies right out of their nests

Penguins pushing each other into "unknown and potentially dangerous water" as test guinea pigs

Altruistic Behavior in Nature

He then gives several examples of animals who seem to be behaving altruistically in nature including:

Small birds giving alarm calls to their flock when they see a predator, even at the risk of drawing attention to themselves.

The parents of ground nesting birds who appear to predators as if they have broken their wing and distract the predator away from their nest at high risk to themselves.

Gazelles who leap out in front of predators in order to distract them away from the heard in an act called "strotting"

Kamikaze worker bee's stinging intruders and then dying

Siblings, parents and children looking out for each other and helping one another to survive and reproduce.

Survival of the Stable

Richard Dawkins then introduces a principle called "survival of the stable". He explains that in nature things eventually finds a stable state and once something has found a stable state, it has a tendency to stay that way. This is the case of most species in a population. They have found an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) that allows their genes to survive in their current environment. The stable prevails.
READ MORE: http://www.broderickboyd.com/2009/06/selfish-gene-by-richard-dawkins-summary.html

Although Richard Dawkins possesses a genius ability to convey his enormous intellect and learning in a way that the average person can understand; still it may be a bit confusing or disjointed for those of us who are not Ethologists and Evolutionary Biologists but you can draw a conclusion that in order to survive and evolve for millions of years there must have been an element built-in (like a gene dubbed, SELFISH).

But let us return to the trapped habit laden world where we spend most of our time reading stories like that of school workers watching and doing nothing as a young child chokes to death. I blame a lot of the callousness that has gripped our country on politics and marketing. Most politicians will do anything to gain or retain power and by anything I mean NASTY STUFF… They use fear to promote hatred which subsequently turns us working folk, against each other, or worse, by telling us that empathy is for wimps and the weak. I found this website that IMHO, says it best:

Newspeak and the Corruption of Politics By Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor of The Crisis Papers

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays6p/newspeak.htm

All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find ... that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. George Orwell (1946)
“Politics and the English Language"

Language is the constant yet unnoticed current that conveys our thoughts. Thus, in the game of politics, the party which controls the language controls the contest.
Newt Gingrich knows this, GOP strategist Frank Luntz knows this, and George Orwell, their apparent mentor, knew this.
So why don’t the Democrats know this?

I don’t mean to suggest that we are necessarily captive to the currents of language. Like a skilled navigator, one can factor the currents of language into the calculations of one’s judgment; But only if a person or a party takes the trouble to pause and take notice of the language.

Regrettably, the Democrats have not. For a party that is allegedly preferred by intellectuals, the Democrats have been tactically naïve and stupid, prisoners of their discredited habits. To be sure, astute scholars such as George Lakoff and Geoffrey Nunberg have offered the Democratic Party chiefs the key to their jail cells and have shown them the way out, but they have been told, in effect, “Thanks, but no thanks.” And Noam Chomsky is regarded as “too extreme” and an embarrassment. Never mind that he is the foremost linguist of our time.
Newspeak Lives!

In “The Principles of Newspeak,” an appendix to his novel, 1984, George Orwell wrote this as a warning. The Right has apparently adopted it as its strategy. Thus we find “Newspeak” at work in Newt Gingrich’s self-explanatory memo, “Language as a Political Weapon.” And GOP strategist Frank Luntz has played the English language like Itzhak Perlman plays his Strad.
“Liberalism,” then and now.

Consider, for example, what the word-meisters of The Right have done to the word “liberal.”

Webster’s Dictionary gives us this traditional definition of “liberal:”

“From the latin, liberalis – of or pertaining to a freeman. Favoring reform or progress, as in religion, education, etc.; specifically, favoring political reforms tending toward democracy and personal freedom for the individual. Progressive.”

Throughout our history, up to the late twentieth century, "liberal" has been an honored word, applied approvingly by our founders. George Washington, for example, wrote: "As mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see American among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."

Today, however, the propaganda mills of the right, and especially the regressive screech merchants of AM radio and cable TV, have turned the word “liberal” into an epithet, like a piece of rotten fruit to be hurled at the candidate or political commentator willing to be called a “liberal.” Remember the 2004 GOP ads? “Brie-eating, chardonnay-drinking, latte-sipping, French-speaking, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, elite liberals.” The word connotes “tax and spend,” “welfare cheats,” bureaucratic interference in “free enterprise,” and a weak military. To Ann Coulter, it means nothing less than “treason.”

Thus it is no surprise that when pollsters ask the ordinary citizens to describe their political orientation, “conservative” comes out ahead, followed by “moderate,” with “liberal” a poor third.

And yet, when the same citizens are asked their opinions on Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, public education, economic justice, racial tolerance, and the separation of church and state, by substantial majorities they endorse the traditional liberal agenda. In short, the American public remains liberal, even though it has been persuaded to despise and reject the word “liberal.” And that should be regarded as good news by The Left, for it is the ideology and the program that matter. "Liberal" is merely a word.
Recall the quotation from Orwell:

“... a thought diverging from the principles of [the Party] - should be literally unthinkable... This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words, and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings...”

Now try to explain and defend the “liberal” ideas of Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and the Kennedys. You can no longer do so simply by casually dropping the word "liberal" in conversation and debate. The word “liberal” has been spoiled by the relentless assault upon it by The Right, and thus today it has become useless and even harmful in ordinary discourse. In Orwell’s words, right-wing propaganda has succeeded in “eliminating” this “undesirable word,” “liberal,” thus making its original meaning simply “unthinkable.” And there is no word available yet to take its place. So what is the (old-definition) liberal to do? The remedy is simple: drop the word “liberal” and give the program a new name: “progressive.” Unfortunately, it will take some time for this new word for old ideas to take hold in the general population.

The Right has learned its lesson well from its mentor, George Orwell.

Who is a “Conservative.”

Imagine that you meet a visitor from abroad who is fluent in English and well acquainted with American history. However, he knows nothing about contemporary American politics and its rhetoric, and he is eager to learn about it.

You explain that there are two contending political ideologies:

One ideology is out to uproot the founding documents of our republic, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and take our society and economy back to the condition it was in over a hundred years ago. The other steadfastly endorses and defends those founding documents, and defends the gains in economic and social justice painfully obtained throughout the history of the American republic.

You then tell the visitor that one of these ideologies calls itself “conservative.” Which one would he reasonably conclude that you were referring to? If he selects the second, he is in agreement with Webster's, which thus defines “conservative:” “The practice of preserving what is established; disposition to oppose change in established institutions and methods.”

How then should one describe this first ideology, which advocates and strives to achieve a return to an earlier condition of the economy and society. Clearly “conservative” won’t do. How about “regressive.” That’s what I’ve chosen, and I urge that you do likewise. If the Democrats were to adopt “regressive” to describe the policies of the Republicans, and if they were to use the word “regressive” persistently in their publications, speeches, and media appearances, it might have a devastating effect on the GOP.

In fact, “liberal vs. conservative” is a false dichotomy. It is possible to be both, and indeed a thoughtful progressive is both. Janus-like, the progressive looks both backward and forward in time: backward, by cherishing and preserving the priceless legacies of the past; and forward, identifying injustices to be set right and anticipating problems that must be faced and dealt with. http://www.crisispapers.org/essays6p/newspeak.htm

In any case, how sad for us Americans to live a life of perpetual fear and hate due to the megalomaniacs amongst us whose only objective is winning in order to gain POWER, MONEY and become SLAVE MASTER over us all.

Happy Holidays! thinkingblue.com

PS: One more word from The Summery of Richard Dawkins' of THE SELFISH GENE.

The "A for Andromeda" Analogy

This is another analogy for why genes function the way they do, based on the book "A for Andromeda" by John Elliot and Fred Hoyle. In this book, an intelligent society, 200 light years away from earth devises a plan to communicate with other intelligent civilizations across space. They reason that since it will take a very very long time to communicate with a distant intelligent society (with earth it would take at least 400 years just to get back a response from a message sent out) they came up with a solution. They devise a code that was then transmitted as a constant stream of data out into the universe. 200 years later the data is picked up by humans on earth. The signal is decoded and discovered to be a computer program. The scientists who discovered it then develop the program and find out that it contains instructions to build a more advanced computer with more advanced software. The government soon finds out about the project and takes over and the "Andromeda Computer" is build. They soon find out, however, that the Andromeda computer does not have completely altruistic intentions and soon begins controlling the minds of those around it. It also directs them to construct a new life form which eventually, with the computer's help, works to destroy the human race and take over the earth. The machine and the lifeforms created with it's assistance are soon destroyed by the main character and the story ends shortly thereafter. This whole story is a good example of how our genes work like the broadcasted signal from Andromeda to create us, their lumbering robot machines, to do their bidding.

In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his account of a selective explanation for cultural behaviors. A meme is a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultural counterpart of genes." This theory serves as an explanation by bypassing biological fitness altogether. It is not necessary for an idea to truly be beneficial to the person who has it, it only need to have appeal, "fitness," of it's own right.

Sincere condolences' to the Jewth family, there truly are no words that could ease the pain of losing one so young but many thoughts are with you in your time of sorrow.

Rick Perry 'Strong' More Dislikes On Youtube Than Rebecca Black 'Friday'

2011-12-12T10:31:00.002-05:00

Rick Perry 'Strong' More Dislikes On Youtube Than Rebecca Black 'Friday'

The Republican Party has always represented HATE but during this presidential election period the GOP has gone over the cliff in the HATE category. Rick Perry is an example of this HATE and ANYONE who thinks of old Ricky Boy as ethical, straightforward and just a regular kind of a guy should hang their head in shame. By choosing to stand with this despicable disgraceful, dishonorable, embarrassing ignoramus, one is saying to the world “Hey world, I’m just as disgusting as Rick Perry!”
Why a person would want to go through their short lives as a miserable xenophobic … BTHOM?
Below is a video I put together using Rick Perry's hateful propaganda film he dubbed 'STRONG'... Strange he used the word STRONG when the only strength of this ad is its SMELL!
thinkingblue

Rick Perry's controversial anti-gay ad, titled "Strong," has officially upset people.

The reaction has actually been so negative that the posting of the ad on YouTube has just achieved the record for the most dislikes on a single video. The clip surpassed Rebecca Black's now infamous "Friday" music video to claim the top spot as YouTube's most hated video.

Currently, Perry's video has approximately 300,000 "dislikes," while Black's has a little over 253,000. However, at this point, while over 10 million people have viewed "Friday," only about 750,000 have viewed Perry's ad, meaning a stagering 40 percent of viewers have not only disapproved of the spot, but openly expressed their dislike online.

Needless to say, the Perry campaign isn't happy. Their previous ad "Faith" is also posted on YouTube, doesn't prominently display the "Likes" versus "Dislikes" count, and still has over 25,000 "dislikes."

The video itself has been so controversial, that Perry's own staff is divided over it. Sources close to the Perry campaign have told the Huffington Post that even top officials in the campaign were uncomfortable with the language of the ad. Nonetheless, it began running in Iowa on Wednesday.

The Perry campaign's newest ad, "Repeal," which touts Perry's promise to "repeal Obamacare," doesn't give YouTube viewers the option of to Like, Dislike or even post comments below the video, as pointed out by the Perry Presidential blog, maintained by the Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers.

You can watch both Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Rick Perry's "Strong" videos (below). Scroll past the clips to view a screenshots (take at press time) confirming the "dislike" counts on Perry's ad vs. Black's music video. More Here

RICK PERRY 'STRONG' MORE DISLIKES THAN REBECCA BLACK 'FRIDAY' ON YOUTUBE

STOP THE BILL THAT WILL DESTROY THE WHOLE FREAKEN INTERNET

REALITY FICTION - A STRANGE TALE OF POVERTY by STEPHEN KING

BIG GARBAGE DUMP RAMPED DOWN THROATS OF A SMALL TOWN

STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

To Newt Gingrich & All Idiots Who Make Light Of Poverty

To Newt Gingrich & All Idiots Who Make Light Of Poverty

2011-12-07T12:11:00.003-05:00

This is reality, not a reality show

Herman Wouk Is Still Alive (A strange tale based on a true story by Stephen King)

I wish the hell Newt Gingrich would read this Stephen King's short story and breathe in some of the foul air of poverty. But he knows the stink; he's just playing the game that Republicans like to play. Feed them (their R disciples) what they want to hear and they will follow you as if you were a god. Now that's one big STINK for sure. Anyway, this is an intriguing read based on a true story but get ready for some sadness because that's 90% of what you get when born into poverty.

(“This is reality, not a reality show”.) With this ending quote, I have to wonder if the woman driving the van, contemplated in a moment of time her suicide and the murder of her friend and their 7 children. It's a sad statement and an assertion I do not believe the Gingrichs and the Trumps of this world could ever understand. thinkingblue

Herman Wouk Is Still Alive

Special Report: How Genius Works Brenda should be happy. The kids are quiet, the road stretches ahead of her like an airport runway, she's behind the wheel of a brand-new van. The speedometer reads 70. Nonetheless, that grayness has begun to creep over her again. The van isn't hers, after all. She'll have to give it back. A foolish expense, really, because what's at the far end of this trip, up in Mars Hill? She looks at her old friend. Jasmine is looking back at her. The van, now doing almost a hundred miles an hour, begins to drift. Jasmine gives a small nod. Brenda nods back. Then she pushes down harder with her foot, trying to find the van's carpeted floor.
By Stephen King

Image credit: From The Portland Press Herald, September 19, 2009

I. BRENDA HITS PICK-4 FOR $2,700 AND RESISTS HER FIRST IMPULSE.

Instead of going out for a bottle of Orange Driver to celebrate with, she pays off the MasterCard, which has been maxed like forever. Then calls Hertz and asks a question. Then calls her friend Jasmine, who lives in North Berwick, and tells her about the Pick-4. Jasmine screams and says, “Girl, you’re rich!”

If only. Brenda explains how she paid off the credit card so she can rent a Chevy Express if she wants to. It’s a van that seats nine, that’s what the Hertz girl told her. “We could get all the kids in there and drive up to Mars Hill. See your folks and mine. Show off the grandchildren. Squeeze ’em for a little more dough. What do you think?”

Jasmine is dubious. The glorified shack her folks call home doesn’t have room, and she wouldn’t want to stay with them even if it did. She hates those two. With good reason, Brenda knows; her own father broke Jasmine in at fifteen. Her mother knew what was going on and did nothing. When Jasmine went to her in tears, her ma said, “You got nothing to worry about, he’s had his nuts cut.”

Jas married Mitch Robicheau to get away from them, and now, three men, four kids, and eight years later, she’s on her own. And on welfare, although she gets sixteen hours a week at the Roll Around, handing out skates and making change for the video arcade, where the machines take only special tokens. They let her bring her two youngest. Delight sleeps in the office and Truth, her three-year-old, wanders around in the arcade hitching at his diapers. He doesn’t get into too much trouble, although last year he got head lice and the two women had to shave all his hair off. How he howled.

“There’s six hundred left over after I paid off the credit balance,” Brenda says. “Well, four hundred if you count the rental, only I don’t, because I can put that on MasterCard. We could stay at the Red Roof, watch Home Box. It’s free. We can get takeout from downstreet and the kids can swim in the pool. What do you say?”

From behind her comes yelling. Brenda raises her voice and screams, “Freddy, you stop teasing your sister and give that back!” Then, oh goody, their squabbling wakes up the baby. Either that or Freedom has messed in her diapers and awakened herself. Freedom always messes in her diapers. To Brenda it seems like Free is making poop her life’s work. Takes after her father that way.

“I suppose …” Jasmine says, drawing suppose out to four syllables. Maybe five.

“Come on, girl! Road trip! Get with the program! We take the bus down to the Jetport and rent the van. Three hundred miles, we can be there in four hours. The girl says they can watch DVDs. The Little Mermaid and all that good stuff.”

“Maybe I could get some of that government money from my ma before it’s all gone,” Jasmine says thoughtfully. Her brother Tommy died the year before, in Afghanistan. IED. Her ma and dad got eighty thousand out of it. Her ma has promised her some, although not when the old man is in hearing distance of the phone. Of course it may be gone already. Probably is. She knows Mr. Romance bought a Yamaha rice rocket, although what he wants with a thing like that at his age, Jasmine has no idea. And she knows things like government money are mostly a mirage. This is something they both know. Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.

“Come on,” Brenda says. She has fallen in love with the idea of loading up the van with kids and her best (her only) friend from high school, who ended up living just one town over. Both of them on their own, seven kids between them, too many lousy men in the rearview, but sometimes they still have a little fun.

She hears a thunk sound. Freddy starts to scream. Glory has whopped him in the eye with an action figure.

“Glory you stop that or I’ll tear you a new one!” Brenda screams.

“He won’t give back my Powerpuff!” Glory shrieks, and she starts to cry. Now they’re all crying—Freddy, Glory, and Freedom—and for a moment grayness creeps over Brenda’s vision. She’s seen a lot of that grayness lately. Here they are in a three-room third-floor apartment, no guy in the picture (Tim, the latest in her life, took off six months ago), living pretty much on noodles and Pepsi and that cheap ice cream they sell at Walmart, no air-conditioning, no cable TV, she had a job at the Quik-Flash store but the company went busted and now the store’s an On the Run and the manager hired some Taco Paco to do her job because Taco Paco can work twelve or fourteen hours a day. Taco Paco wears a do-rag on his head and a nasty little mustache on his upper lip and he’s never been pregnant. Taco Paco’s job is to get girls pregnant. They fall for that little mustache and then boom, the line in the little drugstore testing gadget turns blue and here comes another one, just like the other one.

Brenda has personal experience; she tells people she knows who Freddy’s father is, but she really doesn’t, she had a few drunk nights when they all looked good, and really, come on, how is she supposed to look for a job anyway? She’s got these kids. What’s she supposed to do, leave Freddy to mind Glory and take Freedom to the goddamn job interviews? Sure, that’ll work. And what is there, besides drive-up-window girl at Mickey D’s or the Booger King? Portland has a couple of strip clubs, but wide loads like her don’t get that kind of work, and everyone else is broke.

She reminds herself she hit the lottery. She reminds herself they could be in a couple of air-conditioned rooms tonight at the Red Roof—three, even! Why not? Things are turning around!

“Brennie?” Her friend sounds more doubtful than ever. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Come on, girl, I’m approved. The Hertz chick says the van is red.” She lowers her voice and adds: “Your lucky color.”

“Did you pay off the credit card online? How’d you do that?” Jasmine knows what happened to Brenda’s laptop. Freddy and Glory got fighting last month and knocked Brenda’s laptop off the bed. It fell on the floor and broke.

“I used the one at the library.” She says it the way she grew up in Mars Hill saying it: liberry. “I had to wait awhile to get on, but it’s worth it. It’s free. So what do you say?”

“Maybe we could get a bottle of Allen’s,” her friend says. Jasmine loves that Allen’s Coffee Brandy, when she can get it. In truth, Jasmine loves anything when she can get it.

“Apple-solutely,” Brenda says. “And a bottle of Driver for me. But I won’t drink while I’m behind the wheel, Jas. You can, but I’ll wait. I have to keep my license. It’s about all I got left.”

“Can you really get any money out of your folks, do you think?”

Brenda tells herself that once they see the kids—assuming the kids can be bribed (or intimidated) into good behavior—she can. “But not a word about the lottery,” she says.

“No way,” Jasmine says. “I was born at night but it wasn’t last night.”

They yuk at this one, an oldie but a goodie.

“So what do you think?”

“I’ll have to take Eddie and Rosellen out of school …”

“BFD,” Brenda says. “So what do you think, girl?”

After a long pause on the other end, Jasmine says, “Road trip!”

“Road trip!” Brenda hollers back.

Then they are chanting it while the three kids bawl in Brenda’s Sanford apartment and at least one (maybe two) is bawling in Jasmine’s North Berwick apartment. These are the fat women nobody wants to see when they’re on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there’s nobody better in sight. What men think when they’re drunk—Brenda and Jasmine both know this—is that thunder thighs are better than no thighs at all. They went to high school together in Mars Hill and now they’re downstate and they help each other when they can. They are the fat women nobody wants to see, they have a litter of children between them, and they are chanting Road trip, road trip like a couple of cheerleading fools. READ MORE HERE

~~~~~~~~~~
Another very sad tale of poverty

Poverty is a bitter reality that mankind has lived with since the time he became a conscience being. How dare they, who haven't a clue as to the suffering this economic condition causes, make light and sarcastic judgments upon. The below link is one of the saddest results of being too poor. Let's see Newt Gingrich and the rest of the heartless idiots make light of this tragedy.

http://news.yahoo.com/2nd-child-shot-mom-texas-welfare-office-dies-033254062.html

STOP THE BILL THAT WILL DESTROY THE WHOLE FREAKEN INTERNET

REALITY FICTION - A STRANGE TALE OF POVERTY by STEPHEN KING

BIG GARBAGE DUMP RAMPED DOWN THROATS OF A SMALL TOWN

STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

Want a Real Economic Stimulus and Jobs Plan? Forgive Student Loan Debt!

Stop The Bill THAT WOULD DESTROY the Whole Freaken INTERNET!

2011-12-06T09:40:00.002-05:00

When I first heard of this bill, The Stop Online Piracy Act “SOPA” (which was last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann), I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I thought all the greedy copyright BS was over and everyone was getting their cut, even if someone else was profiting from their hard work. Silly me, NO WAY JOSE!

Who and why introduced such a foolish and harmful bill? The Internet has opened doors, windows and cracks in the wall, for so many. It has shed light upon all those who possess some creative knowledge; (you know, those who also like to think of themselves as geniuses, while they sit in their Ivory Towers, thinking NO ONE CAN DO WHAT I DO).

Well because of the Internet and its websites( like DailyKos, Youtube, Amplify and countless others) people have been finding out that “HEY THIS IS FUN, I CAN ALSO CREATE A MOVIE OR A SONG OR A POEM OR A POLITICAL ARTICLE”. I know because I’m one of those people. I have been using the Internet to hone my hidden creativity (and curiosity) for years and years and I must add... HAVING A BALL WHILE DOING SO.More here: http://www.thethinkingblue.com/actnowtostopSOPA.html

thinkingblue

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Stop
The Bill, Being Pushed In Congress THAT WOULD DESTROY
youtube,twitter, myspace, clipmarks, amplify, and the whole
freaken INTERNET!

Act Now : This Bill Seriously Screws with the
Internet

To make it worse, SOPA is ineffective. So the question is, is an
ineffective bill worth the risk of damaging free speech and the
functioning of the Internet? We say no.

JOIN NOW: http://publicknowledge.org/

When I first heard of this bill, The Stop Online Piracy Act
“SOPA” (which was last night on Countdown with Keith
Olbermann), I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I thought all
the greedy copyright BS was over and everyone was getting their cut, even if someone else was profiting from their hard work. Silly me, NO WAY JOSE!

See more at www.thethinkingblue.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1jfej

Want a Real Economic Stimulus and Job Plan?

2011-12-01T10:58:00.003-05:00

By Robert Applebaum (Contact)

To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate and President Barack Obama
Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate stimulative effect on our economy. With the stroke of the President's pen, millions of Americans would suddenly have hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of extra dollars in their pockets each and every month with which to spend on ailing sectors of the economy. As consumer spending increases, businesses will begin to hire, jobs will be created and a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship and prosperity will be ushered in for all. A rising tide does, in fact, lift all boats - forgiving student loan debt, rather than tax cuts for corporations, millionaires and billionaires, has a MUCH greater chance of helping to rise that tide in a MUCH shorter time-frame. The future economic success of this country is wholly dependent upon a well-educated, prosperous middle class. Instead of saddling entire generations with debt from which there is no escape, let's empower the American people to grow this economy on their own!

~~~

The Student Loan Debacle is so outrageous it’s beyond words but I will try to conjure up a few to relieve the pressure that has built up in my brain over the lack of common sense concerning these loans. First of all, using the tool called 'common sense' (which Republicans seem to lack) to illustrate: When an economy makes education very expensive and out of reach for most of its citizens 'the powers that be' conjure up a remedy (bandaid) to allow students to take out exorbitant loans (government backed of course) and the only collateral needed is a promise of a career upon graduation for payback, which… MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL! These loans in essence tell the borrower that PIE IN THE SKY awaits them and it doesn’t matter how large a loan they make because an affluent job $$$$ will be their reward at the end and they will be able to pay the loan back in no time at all. Say what? Of course the loan industry doesn’t seem to worry that they are pushing a preposterously optimistic goal because if the student finds he cannot pay the loan back the government will pay it for them. Who the hell thought this flimflam up? It leaves we-the-people holding the bag either way. How gloomy for a young man or woman to complete all the hard work it takes to get a college degree only to find out they’ve been hoodwinked and the careers promised are not there. What Is there... is this enormous personal debt which will plague them for the rest of their lives; like I said DISGUSTING BEYOND WORDS.

If bankruptcy does not become a tool for this debacle, our educated... the doctors, lawyers and all those schooled to help a Nation prosper will slip into poverty; and our government will, without a doubt, become A Plutocracy (the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy.) (a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.) (a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.) (These descriptions sound like we are ALREADY THERE or almost there, to me!!!)

Please read the interesting article (somewhat related to the Student Loan fiasco) below which outlines where the OWS is now headed, AND consider signing the petition to FORGIVE STUDENT LOAN DEBT. Thanks, thinkingblue

After tent cities fade, Occupy turns to specifics

After tent cities fade, Occupy turns to specifics
APBy AMY WESTFELDT | AP – 31 mins ago

NEW YORK (AP) — For more than two months, they were open-air communes where people came to rebuild society and start a nationwide discussion on how to close the wide gap between the rich and the poor. But as Occupy Wall Street tent cities fade away, a growing number of protesters are pushing to put a clear message ahead of the movement.

Alan Collinge has his list ready — return bankruptcy protection to student loans. Bring back regulations that were removed from the Glass-Steagall Act. End corporate personhood.

"They should come up with a short term list of no brainer agenda items," said Collinge, wearing a huge sign in the rain at New York's Zuccotti Park calling for student loan reforms.

More than a dozen other protesters interviewed by The Associated Press also came up with a wish list of specifics to address what they say is corporate greed and economic inequality. The list of demands ranged from the simple — get corporate money out of politics — to the ethereal (make sure Washington politicians act with a moral conscience).

Asking Occupy protesters what, exactly, they would do to reform government and the financial system is a loaded question and a source of internal conflict. Collinge, 41, of Tacoma, Wash., said he has unsuccessfully lobbied Occupy's general assembly meetings in New York to develop a strong platform, but has been rebuffed.

"A lot of people, they think that this should be sort of a catchall" for every issue, he said, the goal being to expose the economic problems in the country, not solve them.

Other cities' movements have held meetings of committees with titles like "cohesive messaging" to discuss strategy, but haven't agreed on listing specifics as a movement. The greater purpose isn't to influence the government or the financial system through classic demands, but to foster broad cultural changes that will gradually empower people to stop depending on big corporations and Wall Street money.

"All the energy has gone into an outcry over economic conditions, with the hope that others will join us and pick up issues they care about," says Bill Dobbs, press liaison for Occupy Wall Street in New York. "Our best hope is inspiring other people to take action to bring economic justice."

Some observers and experts predict that Occupy groups may spend the next few months focusing on smaller actions while waiting for the summer when the Republican and Democratic conventions would give Occupiers a world-wide audience.

But ask around, and protesters who spent weeks living in encampments and talking about the country's woes have a clear idea of what they want.

A number have called for limiting campaign donations and getting big money out of politics. Some Occupy members want to limit the amount of money a person is allowed to give a politician. Others want to ban corporate donations specifically, or the number of campaign ads.

"How did Abraham Lincoln ever become president without a television set?" asked Ryan Peterson, an entertainment company worker from Chicago who lived for weeks in Zuccotti Park. Paul Lemaire, a 20-year-old visual arts student from Brooklyn, wants the two-party system eliminated.

The influence of money in politics is one of the greatest factors behind the gap between the superrich and the poor, said James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, which published a report last year on economic disparity. It shows "that they're very focused in understanding the root causes" of the country's economic issues, he said.

The call for tighter regulation of campaign contributions won't gain traction anytime soon. The Supreme Court, in its landmark Citizens United decision in January 2010, cleared the way for corporations to spend unlimited funds to influence elections, often using money from anonymous donors. The court struck down most of the so-called McCain-Feingold law that had set tight restrictions on such donations, arguing that government did not have the right to regulate political speech.

Campaign regulation, stopping wars that strain resources, halting corporate personhood — the spending power given to corporations in the 2010 Supreme Court ruling — and addressing higher education costs have emerged as key goals of the Occupy movement in Los Angeles. Organizers say they are now focusing on sharpening their objectives, as police moved in to shut down the two-month-old encampment this week. MORE HERE

PLEASE SIGN PETITION HERE:

Want a Real Economic Stimulus and Jobs Plan? Forgive Student Loan Debt!

By Robert Applebaum (Contact)

To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate and President Barack Obama
Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate stimulative effect on our economy. With the stroke of the President's pen, millions of Americans would suddenly have hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of extra dollars in their pockets each and every month with which to spend on ailing sectors of the economy. As consumer spending increases, businesses will begin to hire, jobs will be created and a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship and prosperity will be ushered in for all. A rising tide does, in fact, lift all boats - forgiving student loan debt, rather than tax cuts for corporations, millionaires and billionaires, has a MUCH greater chance of helping to rise that tide in a MUCH shorter time-frame. The future economic success of this country is wholly dependent upon a well-educated, prosperous middle class. Instead of saddling entire generations with debt from which there is no escape, let's empower the American people to grow this economy on their own!

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK SIX - We Shall Overcome

Welcome To Live Oak Florida - Home Of The New Live Oak Garbage Dump!

2011-11-28T12:50:00.001-05:00

Live Oak Florida was hoodwinked into allowing a Garbage Dump right at its entrance and near a newly erected water tower and well. The people don't like it, the businesses don't like it, and the city commissioners don't like it, so why can't it be STOPPED?

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Welcome To Live Oak
Florida - Home Of The New Live Oak Garbage Dump!

A Poem:

A rich stranger entered the town of
Live Oak, looking to purchase a plot.

He chose land at the town’s
archway, with a hole in the center of its lot.

The townsfolk thought this strange,
who would live on land with a hole.

They fast learned that he wanted to
turn this big hole, into a large toilet bowl.

Please see videos
on youtube - key word liveoaklandfill

Live
Oak Landfill on Youtube
Read more at www.thethinkingblue.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1j3jo

Welcome To Live Oak Florida - Home Of The New Live Oak Garbage Dump!

2011-11-28T12:25:00.001-05:00

Live Oak Florida was hoodwinked into erecting a Garbage Dump right at its entrance and near a newly erected water tower and well. The people don't like it, the businesses don't like it, and the city commissioners don't like it, so why can't it be STOPPED?

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Welcome To Live Oak
Florida - Home Of The New Live Oak Garbage Dump !

A Poem:

WELCOME TO LIVE OAK

A rich stranger entered the town of
Live Oak, looking to purchase a plot.

He chose land at the town’s
archway, with a hole in the center of its lot.

The townsfolk thought this strange,
who would live on land with a hole.

They fast learned that he wanted to
turn this big hole, into a large toilet bowl.

Please see videos
on youtube - key word liveoaklandfill

Live
Oak Landfill on Youtube
Read more at www.thethinkingblue.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1j3iy

A Thanksgiving Gift - Rev Al's Turkey Tips

2011-11-25T07:00:00.001-05:00

A cup of enlightenment with a dash of humor. thinkingblue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqVGQl6zK24

Amplify’d from www.dailykos.com

A Thanksgiving Gift - Rev Al's Turkey Tips

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving in spite of the hard times so many of us 99%ers are going through. But even during Holidays, politics never seems to take a break, so with the help of Rev. Al Sharpton I thought it apropos to send his Turkey Tips your way.

A cup of enlightenment with a dash of humor. thinkingblue

See more at www.dailykos.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1iy3u

Is OWS Getting Stuck In The Corporatist GOP's Craw?

2011-11-20T09:31:00.001-05:00

It’s starting, the GOP, along with their (collective corporations) counterparts is getting a little nervous. “OWS” is making the little darlings skittish and this in turn is starting some exorcist head spins. This could be a good sign or a bad one; bad because they have the loot to pull out all stops that possibly can drown out the voices of the 99%. Look out “Occupy”, masses are not suppose to unite and agree that something is wrong with a system that makes the upper-class richer and the middle-class slip, slip slipping away to a lower income rung on ye old ladder of success, bringing each downward slide a little less chance for opportunity.

Ignorance is bliss to a corporatist nation that needs a misinformed, unaware and unknowing populous to feed their greed. They have to keep creating a steady stream of unintelligent dribble to keep the hoi polloi spiritless and asunder,(Fox News comes to mind) so they can go through their lives without questioning why they keep climbing a greased pole while the upper crust enjoy the fruit of the 99%’s labor.

This grassroots’ movement is troubling to those at the top; the Tea Party was so easy to seize because so many members had what it takes to be gobbled up by the Fat Cats: FEAR AND HATE!

Occupy Wall Street doesn’t possess such vulnerable emotions, what they feel is disquiet and worry about the injustices they are suffering that bring more inequality and desperation for them and for their future generations. Their movement is authentic and will not be so easily crushed by the usual LOBBY FORCES that have forever slapped the 99% around and literally have committed terrorism without any retribution… NONE whatsoever! thinkingblue

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Is
OWS Getting Stuck In The Corporatist GOP's Craw?

Look Out OWS The Lobbies Are Coming, The
Lobbies Are Coming!

The memo is from Clark Lytle Geduldig's four name partners.

the memo said:

"It may be easy to dismiss OWS as a ragtag group of
protesters but they have demonstrated that they should be
treated more like an organized competitor who is very nimble
and capable of working the media, coordinating third party
support and engaging office holders to do their bidding. To
counter that, we have to do the same.

U.S.
banks should "undermine" Occupy protesters: memo

See more at www.thethinkingblue.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1im0q

The NY Gangbusters (1%-ers) Order Police (99%-ers) To Annihilate The 'Occupy' Camp - November 15, 2011

2011-11-15T10:51:00.003-05:00

The Powers That Be, (The One Percenters) are still ordering the breakup of the Occupy Movement under the guise of health concerns. It's funny the only health problems I've seen so far has been police mace/pepper spraying victims while punching others in the face or hitting them over the head with batons, or just having good old fashion fun picking out faces in the crowd, who are standing peaceably, to shoot a teargas projectile, point-blank at.

1%-ers motto: "THE MASSES MUST BE HERDED AND CONTAINED FOR THEIR OWN GOOD!" thinkingblue

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Police arrest 70 Wall Street protesters
NEW YORK (AP) — Police arrested 70 protesters at New York's Zuccotti Park early Tuesday, including some who chained themselves together, while clearing the park so that sanitation crews could clean it.

Concerns about health and safety issues at Occupy Wall Street camps around the country have intensified, and protesters have been ordered to take down their shelters, adhere to curfews and relocate so that parks can be cleaned.

At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, New York City police handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous. Protesters were told they could return in several hours, but without sleeping bags, tarps or tents.

Paul Brown, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, said the park had been cleared by 4:30 a.m. and that about 70 people who'd been inside it had been arrested, including a group who chained themselves together. One person was taken to a local hospital for evaluation because of breathing problems.

Police in riot gear filled the streets, car lights flashing and sirens blaring. Protesters, some of whom shouted angrily at police, began marching to two locations in Lower Manhattan where they planned to hold rallies.

Some protesters refused to leave the park, but many left peacefully.

Ben Hamilton, 29, said he was arrested "and I was just trying to get away" from the fray.

Rabbi Chaim Gruber, an Occupy Wall Street member, said police officers were clearing the streets near Zuccotti Park.

"The police are forming a human shield, and are pushing everyone away," he said.

Jake Rozak, another protester, said police "had their pepper spray out and were ready to use it."

Notices given to the protesters said the park "poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard to those camped in the park, the city's first responders and the surrounding community."

It said that tents, sleeping bags and other items had to be removed because "the storage of these materials at this location is not allowed." Anything left behind would be taken away, the notices said, giving an address at a sanitation department building where items could be picked up.

Alex Hall, 21, of Brooklyn, said police walked into the park "stepping on tents and ripping them out."

MORE HERE: http://news.yahoo.com/police-arrest-70-wall-street-protesters-094303924.htm

~~~~~

Police Clear Out Downtown Occupy Oakland Camp
by Terry Collins

OAKLAND, Calif.— Riot-clad law enforcement officers cleared out a weeks-old anti-Wall Street encampment in Oakland just before dawn Monday, arresting dozens of Occupy demonstrators and clearing out tents from a downtown plaza after issuing several warnings over the weekend.

PS: This may seem quite OVER THE TOP but when I view the pictures and watch the video I can't help but think about the opening scene in LITTLE BIG MAN, which to this day, tears me up emotionally. thinkingblue

OCUUPY WALL STREET 4TH WEEK UPDATE

OCCUPY WALL STREET - WE SHALL OVERCOME!

The Question Is Not 'WHO IS MAD' It's 'WHO IS NOT MAD?' (Pakistan)

2011-11-14T09:51:00.003-05:00

We Americans for the most part cannot understand what is might be like to live in a world dominated by total insanity. Oh, we have our share of craziness unfolding before our very eyes, just watch the rhetoric and gestures coming from Backmann, Perry, Cain and too many other delusional right-wing demagogues. And when I hear some of the statements made by so called pundits from the far right like, Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter… (Again) too many other delusional small minded conservatives, I want to shout "How and When Did This Ship I'm Sailing On, Land In ‘La La Land’?”… But then I realize I didn't leave reality THEY DID! Anyhow, I came upon this article from The Atlantic Magazine and thought it worthy of a few minutes of our time on Earth. It's today's nourishment for the brain. thinkingblue

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

The Question Is Not 'WHO IS MAD' It's 'WHO IS
NOT MAD?' (Pakistan)

Running the Asylum

A schizophrenic tries to save the mentally ill in Pakistan, a
land gone mad.

By Graeme Wood

Running the Asylum
A schizophrenic tries to save the mentally ill in Pakistan, a land gone mad.
By Graeme Wood

Gulzar Wazir, 61, a retired Pakistani army major and the founder of Peshawar’s only community mental-health clinic, was introducing me to Raja, one of his favorite lunatics, when we heard the soft whine of a single-engine plane, flying low and getting closer. Northwest Pakistan—land of suicide bombers, kidnappings, and American drone strikes—is not a relaxing place, and the background violence is enough to nudge the merely jittery into little episodes of paranoia. In the United States, that lawn-mower whine overhead might be a student pilot getting his wings, or a cardiologist at play. Here, for a visitor with dangers on the mind, it sounded like death from above, and it gave me a shiver.

What does it take to be counted as paranoid in such a place? “The question is not ‘Who is mad?,’” Wazir says. “The question is ‘Who is not mad?’” All of Pakistan—a nation of 185 million people—has no more than 350 psychiatrists, or roughly the same number as in a few blocks of the Upper West Side.

Peshawar’s hospital for the mentally ill lacks the capacity to treat patients for more than a month. Wazir’s clinic treats them indefinitely. Currently supported by the government of Norway, the clinic has ministered to the mentally ill in the poverty-stricken Tehkal Payan area since 2004. Known to donors as “Friends of the Mind” and to locals as “the crazy-people hospital,” it sees about a dozen of its 5,000 outpatients on any given day. Some visit daily for medical care and tea in its courtyard. Psychologists are on staff, as is a full-time psychiatrist trained in China’s Henan province. Most patients are depressed, addicted to hashish or opium, paranoid, or schizophrenic—or worse yet, some combination of the above.

Raja, in his early 30s, is a typical case. He has been out of his mind and addicted to hash for most of his adult life. He’s tall and skinny, with a film of dirt on his face that suggests he can’t quite look after himself. Wazir says Raja routinely relapses by leaving the hospital and hanging out at a nearby shrine close to a police station, where addicts gather to smoke hash and opium. (Wazir blames the hash for worsening Raja’s mental problems. Research does indicate that some schizophrenics decline faster if they smoke hash. Other research, however, shows that cannabidiol, one of the psychoactive chemicals in hashish, has antipsychotic properties. Perhaps it’s a wash.)

Today is a good day for Raja. His eyes bug out, and his lips are pulled back in a huge grin that reveals teeth the color of brown sugar, looking so rotten that a swig of water might wash them away entirely. On bad days, he flies into uncontrollable schizophrenic rages. “If he is violent or too talkative or too mischievous,” Wazir says, “we put him again in the mental hospital, and if he requires it, he gets electric shocks.” He has gone through about 15 rounds of shock therapy. “But he’s young, so he can sustain it.”

Wazir says his countrymen have been mentally traumatized more or less continuously for the past 35 years. “First it was Afghan jihad, then it was Kashmiri jihad, then it was the nuclear issue, then it was terrorism and suicide bombings, and now floods,” he says. “I have not heard any good news coming to me in Pakistan.”

A native of Waziristan (a frequent target of U.S. drone attacks), Wazir is himself schizophrenic. He had a promising military career and became an adviser to General Zia-ul-Haq, then the president of Pakistan. In 1981, he began suspecting that Zia was plotting to kill him. “I was convinced that he had spies against me, that he was stealing my thoughts, that he wanted to court-martial me and arrest me,” Wazir says. Zia was, according to Wazir, himself terrified of plots against him, and was plotting against almost everyone. But on evaluation, doctors decided Wazir was indeed crazy, invalided him out of the army in 1983, and began a regime of medication that continues today. After recovery, Wazir resolved to set up an organization “for the mentally ill, of the mentally ill, by the mentally ill.”

Craziness carries a strong stigma in Pakistan, and many friends and families of the afflicted react by turning them out onto the street, or confining them. Wazir’s staff found one mentally ill man, Inam, chained in a basement. Now on his meds, Inam keeps returning to Friends of the Mind, but he has recovered enough to hold down jobs as a day laborer. Far better to be in the chaos of Peshawar’s streets and on the brink of insanity than in a basement and in the abyss.
Graeme Wood is an Atlantic contributing editor. MORE HERE http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/05/running-the-asylum/8450/

friendsofthemind.org.pk
The website is currently under construction. It will be online soon. Thank you for your patience while we build our website. Please visit us again.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE TRUTH

Mentally Ill Seek Afghan Shrines, Not Hospitals

OCCUPY WALL STREET - NOT YOUR ORDINARY PROTEST

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK 4 UPDATE

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK 6 - WE SHALL OVERCOME
Read more at www.thethinkingblue.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1hzn1

An American War Veteran on Veterans' day 11.11.11

2011-11-11T12:49:00.003-05:00

An American War Veteran

Tommy
By Rudyard Kipling

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
~~~

This is a picture from a facebook member on Veterans' Day 11.11.11
It says a lot about our country, don't you think? thinkingblue

Dan Kenney - Facebook

Based on various estimates, 500,000 to 840,000 veterans are homeless at some time during the year. It is also estimated by the VA that a veteran dies by suicide every 80 minutes. And nearly 20% of the returning forces from Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from either PTSD or major depression. This Veterans' Day four or five veterans will commit suicide. The price of war continues throughout the life of a veteran. Today reach out a hand to a vet.

Rick Perry Sill Doing What He Does Best (that is if you don't include his #'s on executions).

2011-11-11T08:57:00.003-05:00

Rick Perry Sill Doing What He Does Best (that is if you don't include his #'s on executions).

Oh, the GOP sure has learned how to gush (more like squirt) out the rhetoric that will perhaps get them a vote or two from the uninformed, intolerant and cantankerous few that comprise their base. But do they ever delve into or even maybe learn a few facts as to what their BIG TALKING hyperbole is all about? I doubt it! Their HYPE is only a sideshow to their dog and pony spectacle and we all have learned (most of us who pay attention to FACTS) that no self respecting reality would ever show up there.

Please read this little article that brings to light what the department of COMMERCE, EDUCATION & (the brain fart one) ‘ENERGY’ is all about. thinkingblue

DOG AND PONY SHOW -The term has come to mean a highly promoted, often over-staged performance, presentation, or event designed to sway or convince opinion for political, or less often, commercial ends.

Rick Perry wants to scrap three government departments. What would that mean?

Rick Perry's excruciating brain freeze as he tried to remember which government department he wants to eliminate was clearly the YouTube moment of last night's debate. But lost in the hilarity was the question of what Perry's plan would actually mean.

Perry said he wants to scrap the federal Departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy (even though that last one eluded him for a while). So it's worth asking: What do those departments do?

The Department of Commerce contains the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which runs our system of intellectual property. Without it, America would have no way to ensure that inventors could fully profit from their inventions, giving them little incentive to spend the time and money needed for breakthroughs. The pace of American innovation would likely take a huge hit.

Commerce also includes the Census Bureau. The accurate count of Americans that the department provides each decade lets leaders and policymakers know how to allocate resources--housing, roads, utilities--around the country. And Commerce also encompasses the National Weather Service (NWS), which issues crucial warnings about severe weather like hurricanes and floods. When state and local officials make decisions about how and when to evacuate, they're generally going off NWS information.

The Department of Energy, created during the Carter administration, protects U.S. nuclear weapons from accidents or terrorist attacks that could release dangerous radioactive material, killing thousands. Without the oversight that the Energy Department presently provides, it would be difficult to maintain a nuclear weapons program at all. The Energy Department also plays a key role in funding and promoting the civilian use of nuclear power.

As for the Department of Education--likewise created under President Carter--its role is more limited, because the U.S. education system is highly decentralized. Indeed, Perry is hardly the first conservative to pledge to abolish it. The Education Department does have a role in shaping education policy, however, by handing out funds to states that adopt its preferred reforms, and it also enforces privacy and civil rights laws in schools.

Of course, Perry could eliminate the departments but maintain all these functions, by simply shifting them into different agencies. The Pentagon, for instance, might take over management over nuclear weapons. His economic plan, "Cut, Balance, and Grow," doesn't mention his plan to eliminate specific departments. Some agency functions might also devolve to state or local authorities in Perry's plan, but it's hard to see how major initiatives could get funded at the state or local level--particularly in rough economic times like the present. But we'll learn more about Perry's plan next week when he plans to give a speech on "government reform," a Perry spokesman told Yahoo News.

Until then, it's fair to say that doing what Perry recommends would mean either scrapping, or fundamentally reassigning, some key government functions.

MORE: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/rick-perry-wants-scrap-three-government-departments-mean-212919120.html

OCCUPY WALL STREET - NOT YOUR ORDINARY PROTEST

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK 4 UPDATE

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEEK 6 - WE SHALL OVERCOME

Elizabeth Warren Vs. Ignorance Personified!

2011-11-06T09:54:00.004-05:00

Elizabeth Warren Vs. Tea Party Member!

This is so typical of what we have encountered since the Republican base (ashamed of what had happened to our country after they clawed their way to get one, George W. Bush appointed to the highest office in the land) CHANGED THEIR NAME TO THE TEA PARTY. In the video below you will see the typical ignorance that emanates from the Tea Party by its members. If it wasn’t so vile it would be laughable (and possibly pitied). Please watch videos and read article. Elizabeth Warren is leading champion of working people. thinkingblue

Elizabeth Warren Heckled By Tea Party Supporter
BROCKTON, Mass. -- Moments into a speech before volunteers here Wednesday evening, Elizabeth Warren was interrupted by a Tea Party supporter who hurled a gender-based epithet at the Senate candidate. The man, who said he'd been unemployed since February 2010, objected to Warren's expressed affiliation with the frustrations of Occupy Wall Street, and argued that the Tea Party has been protesting Wall Street excess for longer than the nascent global movement.

The crowd tried to shout the man down, but Warren told her supporters to let him speak. "No, no, it's alright. Let me say two things," she said. "I'm very sorry that you've been out of work. I'm also very sorry that the recent jobs bill that would've brought 22,000 jobs to Massachusetts did not pass in the Senate."

Speaking in a packed VFW hall, Warren went on to address his question about her association with Occupy Wall Street. "I've been protesting what's been going on on Wall Street for a very long time," she said, but added that the movement has its own independent agenda and will proceed along its own course.

"Yeah, so has the Tea Party," the man said, before losing his cool.

"Well, if you're the intellectual creator of that so-called party," he said, "you're a socialist whore. I don't want anything to do with you." The crowd shouted him down as he added that Warren's "boss," presumably referring to the president, was "foreign-born." He then attempted to storm out through a side door. Finding it locked, he retreated out the back of the VFW hall instead.

In April, before President Obama released his "long form" birth certificate, 43 percent of Republicans said that the president was either definitely or probably born in a foreign country, according to a Gallup survey. After he released the birth certificate, the number dropped, but still held at roughly one in four when polled in May.

Warren took the challenge in stride. "So, we are here to do work, and I think we have a reminder that we have a lot of work to do," she said as the heckler struggled with the door.

The Tea Party was founded on a sense that something ephemeral had been stolen by someone and that a movement was needed to "take the country back." Occupy Wall Street is now getting media attention the Tea Party believes is rightfully theirs, and the perceived slight can only inflame the movement's sense of victimhood. They didn't just lose the country as they knew it. Now they've lost coverage on CNN, too.

After the event, Warren reflected on the man's outburst, which she said was her first such encounter. "I actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did. He's been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names," she told HuffPost.

The assault stuck with Warren, and she continued to think about it throughout the night. Hours later, she said she wasn't upset with the man himself, but rather with those who attempt to channel his anger in a malevolent direction. "I was thinking more about the heckler. I'm not angry with him, but he didn't come up with the idea that his biggest problem was Occupy Wall Street. There's someone else pre-packaging that poison -- and that's who makes me angry," she said.
MORE HERE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/03/elizabeth-warren-heckler_n_1073755.html

Uploaded by tjwalker on Nov 4, 2011

"Let me state for the record again, "I love
Elizabeth Warren!" This woman scares and frightens the
Right, and she brings out their lowest, crudest essence. Yes,
because Elizabeth Warren supports a graduated income tax,
something every conservative Republican President in the 20th
Century supported, she is automatically a
"socialist" and she allegedly sells her body for
money in exchange for sex even though, as her opponent Sen.
Scott Brown helpfully points out, people wouldn't want to see
her naked." tjwaker of the http://dailynational.com/

~~~~~~

Occupy Wall Street Begins With Police Brutality

Occupy Wall Street Week 4

Occupy Wall Street Week 6

What Makes People Vote Against Their Own Best Interests?

2011-11-01T10:58:00.002-04:00

This is an excellent read. Most of us liberals have been perplexed as to why any working class stiff (especially those in the lower income brackets) would vote against his/her own best interest and vote for corporate and wealthy interests instead. I am so glad to read that there are those in the field of psychology who are also perplexed enough to research this phenomenon and try making sense as to the WHY people willingly hurt themselves and their families in this political conundrum? Perhaps armed with some answers to this riddle, those who vote against their interests will be able to open their eyes and realize, they are doing themselves in little by little, republican by republican. There I go again DREAMING… thinkingblue

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

WHAT
MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working
class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business
Republicans when their economic interests would seem better
served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been
examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us
Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that
strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work
together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and
progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and
unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our
diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality
trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible,
fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty,
change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans
offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and
evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate.
Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded
explorations of policy options for a complex world.
MORE HERE

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A Very Scary Halloween 2011

2011-10-31T09:52:00.002-04:00

{{{I wanted to blog something REALLY scary and frightening this year for Halloween. I thought of the usual icons of Halloween: Frankenstein, Ghosts, or perhaps Freddie Cruger of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ fame but when I saw the article 'Various '7 billionth' babies celebrated worldwide' I thought... 'THERE AIN'T NUTTIN SCARIER THAN THAT"!

Please read the article, it's a real eye-opener and should awake every one of us to the realization that something has to be done about this fiasco and FAST! The pain and anguish that awaits our kind will be of epic proportions, in the not so distant future. }}}

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It's Halloween and a little baby girl is born (a symbol of the Earth's human population reaching 7B). WOW, THAT'S SCARY; 7 billion homo-sapiens running around, drinking and devouring Earth's limited resources. Should say volumes to the anti-choice people who are now trying to pass ignorant and delusional laws that say personhood begins at conception (fertilization of the egg).

I wonder, will this law make them all start to label their belief systems’, God, a murderer for spontaneous abortion (miscarriage)?

The parent of this 7 billionth Earthling says it best...

"The number of homeless children I see on the streets keeps multiplying," Camacho said. "When I see them, I'm bothered because I eat and maybe they don't."

I wish the so called 'Pro Lifers" could conjure up such compassion and empathy for all those future babies who will be born into a world that cannot feed and nourish their humongous number' thus, condemning them a life of misery and suffering. Please read this informative but startling article.

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Various '7 billionth' babies celebrated worldwide
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — She came into the world at two minutes before midnight, a tiny, wrinkled girl born into a struggling Manila family. On Monday, she became a symbol of the world's population reaching 7 billion people and all the worries that entails for the planet's future.

Danica May Camacho, born in a crowded public hospital, was welcomed with a chocolate cake marked "7B Philippines" and a gift certificate for free shoes. There were bursts of photographers' flashes, and speeches by local officials.

The celebrations, though, reflected symbolism more than demography.

Amid the millions of births and deaths around the world each day, it is impossible to pinpoint the arrival of the globe's 7 billionth occupant. But the U.N. chose Monday to mark the day with a string of festivities worldwide, and a series of symbolic 7-billionth babies being born.

Danica was the first, arriving at Manila's Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital at two minutes before midnight Sunday — but doctors say that was close enough to count for a Monday birthday.

"She looks so lovely," the mother, Camille Galura, whispered as she cradled the 2.5-kilo (5.5-pound) baby, who was born about a month premature.

The baby was the second for Galura and her partner, Florante Camacho, a driver who supports the family on a tiny salary driving a 'jeepney,' ubiquitous four-wheel drive vehicles used by many poor and working-class Filipinos.

Dr. Eric Tayag of the Philippines' Department of Health said later that the birth came with a warning.

"Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply," he said.

"We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child," he said. "If the answer is 'no,' it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion."

In the Philippines, much of the population question revolves around birth control. The government backs a program that includes artificial birth control. The powerful Roman Catholic church, though, vehemently opposes contraception.

Camacho, a Catholic like her husband, said she was aware of the church's position but had decided to begin using a birth control device.

"The number of homeless children I see on the streets keeps multiplying," Camacho said. "When I see them, I'm bothered because I eat and maybe they don't."

MORE HERE: http://news.yahoo.com/various-7-billionth-babies-celebrated-worldwide-064439018.html

Occupy Wall Street - We Shall Overcome

2011-10-30T10:59:00.003-04:00

Occupy Wall Street 6 Weeks - We Shall Overcome

Occupy Wall Street, still going strong in spite of police brutality.

Scott Olsen, Iraq vet, just standing and watching gets shot in head with a teargas canister projectile, (pointblank) by police; tons of arrests; teargas fired into non-violent crowds of American citizens; batons and pepper spray used to control peaceful people. They, who work for the 1%, want to control the 99%, the masses that they (those who don't realize they are also part of the 99%)were always so readily able to do but this time they have hit a roadblock.

This time WE THE PEOPLE are tired of being hoodwinked and bulldozed.

This time the 1% and all their money and lobbies cannot stop a movement by the people for the people, thus far. It is a shame that it had to come to this, all we, the 99% ever wanted was an equal playing field, a chance to work for a living wage but greed was the winning force. Let us hope this will soon end and THE 99%, THE WE THE PEOPLE SHALL OVERCOME!

Below I made a video using various photos and youtube videos that are posted on the WWW, putting music to the peaceful march for fairness, the song Pete Seeger made so famous, many years ago during movements of peace that helped make this Nation of ours a better place to live. Pete Seeger does again, what he does so well, giving those at the bottom that elusive feeling of HOPE. thinkingblue

The peaceful movement called, ‘Occupy Wall Street’ is continuing, in spite of efforts by those who are supposed to respect the constitutional rights of the people, to end it. Rights we all share (including the police). Police brutality has become the headline of the day. It's initiated by those who wish to control and extinguish the light illuminating from a movement that has long been in hibernation. Too many Americans have felt isolated, alone in their suffering, not realizing that suffering has become a part of everyday life for countless others. The middleclass in America is disappearing and is being replaced by indentured servants, indebted slaves to a wealthy corporate ruling class. There really is strength in number and it is time for that strength to show itself and be silent no more to the corporate 1% who rule over us like gods and kings. Their weapon is money; our weapon is a voice that cries out in unison that we have had enough. thinkingblue

OCUUPY WALL STREET 4TH WEEK UPDATE