NFB film imperative viewing for all activists

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/

this film whacked me in the head bone by virtue of default astonishment even tho i thought i was informed: the Whole Earth is being affected by the gmo revolution that is led by the corporate "powers that be" as shown in the above excellent & imperative movie for everyone-- who eats anything-- to watch!

NFB source:
http://search.nfb.ca/search?q=The+World+According+to+Canada&btnG=Search&entqr=0&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&client=beta_onfb&ud=1&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=beta_onfb&proxyreload=1&hl=en&lr=lang_en&site=beta_onfb

other related links to monsanto:
http://theyrule.net/drupal/map_633
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
http://organicconsumers.org/monsanto/index.cfm

forwardstl posted this post 4 me:
 http://www.forwardstl.org/post/26291252915/nfb-film-imperative-viewing-for-all-activists-write

google where did you hide my contact list for gmail <"_?

The only info i could find on the loss of gmail contact is that as always they will fill them into the address bar for you when you start to type in the names . . . . 
K. i tried it. N found it guilty of perjury.

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Subject: what on earth happened to my contacts on my gmail page, google ????????

From: Pat Berg <pat.rivercritter@gmail.com>
To: google@blogspot.com
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--
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our
civilization.
Mohandas Gandhi

--
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our civilization.  
Mohandas Gandhi

I JUST CANNOT BELIEVE HR1540 IS SIGNED

                                   

Well, fb friends, i have been looking over some posts on my fb page & wondering how & why it has happened that the HR1540 was supposedly signed by President Barack Obama into "Law," with a supposed signing statement attached to it.

According to govtrac, it has not yet been checked off.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-1540

On the White comment that was issued by The President, the signature is blank, lol.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/31/statement-president-hr-1540

Just because he issued the above statement about it does not mean that it has actually been officially signed by him, with all his gift pens handed out and so forth. Afterall, by that day & time most of Congress was home for New Years, wasn't it <"_?

Bloomberg, e.g., "Wallstreet," asserts it was signed in an article dated 12/31/11 but posted on 1/2/12. What, the White House doesn't quit for a week or until Congress is back in session <"_?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-02/obama-signs-defense-spending-law-with-interpretations.html

The timing was just so well planned to get all the consternation on earth over it out in the open-- the story is mind boggling to bloggers and thinkers-- but it could not be put off at all because of threat of government shut-down, which could be a huge issue to the Administration, among others.

I watched the Weekly Address, & he did not even mention this major piece of legislation as having been signed, although it seems like everyone on the left is up in arms over it. His ears do look a little red. Maybe that is just the usual for a President who is living in the White House at such a time.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/31/weekly-address-working-together-new-year

STILL, I JUST CANNOT BELIEVE IT!!!! I NEED PROOF!!!  Where are the photos of the signing, the video, the pens he handed out to the victorious members of Congress <"_? 

I'm from MISSOURI!!!!! SHOW ME!

Floods of emotions

So why would I be so intrepidly following the news of the flooding on the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers? Actually I was on an inner alert about it when I heard the weather forecasts last week saying we would have rain with heavy thunderstorm over the course of four days. That was a heck of a clue. Then it turned out that a funnel cloud translated into a minor disaster at Lambert Field. Within two days we were hearing all the details of tornadoes a bit further south, especially in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where lives had been lost as a result of a mile wide swath of horrifying sweep across that territory. And now even more forecasts of rain for the coming week are out there.

While people, including President Obama, investigated and intervened in the disaster areas,  I was still noting that the rivers were certainly rising rapidly. This is partly because of having lived in Missouri for more of my life than any other state, and knowing that people around here are now and again suddenly jumping into their boots to go sandbag someplace along one of our rivers.

When I was a kid I lived in Union, Missouri for four years. My friends and I would often get together on a Sunday afternoon and hike along the Bourboise River, a small stream compared to the Mississippi. Back then it was still wild and untamed. Farmlands were adjacent to the Bourboise along our hike, but usually the foliage was underbrush along the edge of any existing fields. We also found some rocky hills and small cliffs that we climbed up, imaginings all sorts of adventures by exaggerating stories about what we were doing, and laughing all along the way. We learned to take snacks along because we used up so much energy.  We were ordinarily hungry at that age. Using our minimally learned Spanish, we joked about walking to St. Louis with people we met, then tiptoed across a rail trestle.  Afterwards I wished  that I hadn't gone there. I had just discovered fear of heights watching water gurgling underneath me.

Eventually we arrived at a prominent rock that reached out into the river, which we clambered up onto and took seats overlooking the stream while chattering about everything important and facetious that came up among us. We may have waded in a bit, but never actually swam there. We had a pool in town for that.

Sometimes I found mussel shells or picked up an interesting rock. By the time we all got back to town I often went up to my room and slept all night, missing supper entirely, which worried my Mom a couple of times before she gave up on making me come to the dinner table. Did I have all my homework done? Oh maybe.

One May  many years since then we woke up in St. Louis to the Flood of '93, which many remember as the stress of their lives around here. Services of the community were stretched thin over that time, and day after day images of the rivers, the breached levies, houses sometimes washing away or inundated to a degree that they might never be livable again met out eyes on the news. People donated food, money, clothing and helped however they could. That is how disasters usually affect us, as the people in Alabama have been doing. Everyone who escaped in one piece kicks in to help the others. In some ways it is an example of community kindness and spirit that renews our faith in humanity, oddly enough showing up a little better for the wear.

This is the first time in my life that I have ever heard of States going to court to attempt to protect their own residences and land from the ravages of a shared flood. It seems like a territorial struggle that one might have wished could have been avoided by a conference call or something. So, Your Honor, what's up with this Army Corps of Engineers thinking that we have to lose out?  And some foolish notions spoken in Jefferson City that were truly regrettable to most of the people I know. Of course, having lived in small towns, I know such stuff might come up, but usually the spirit of cooperation overrides displays of territoriality. That aspect of the currently rising flood levels has puzzled the dickens out of me. My father had always loved the country and used to tell me that the bottom lands next to a river were especially rich and productive to growth because of the years they had flooded, leaving the rich river sediment as a topsoil for the years after.

In our current history, though, political drama is essential, I suppose, to ride on the rising currency of the news media, since campaign funds come with all sorts of strings. Personally I have been watching the water height rise at the levees south of here, wondering day by day how tough it is to decide when to blast a levy open. Our large rivers are so channelized nowadays that they can barely create their own path like they did in the days of Samuel Clemons.

On the other hand, some of the infrastructure may be a little wobbly in places, and the increasing pressure of the weight up against levies, which are mainly dirt and sand, doesn't compare to a flood wall like we have in  downtown St. Louis. As time goes on, with climate change events becoming more recognizable and frequent, we may have to rethink how we manage resources regarding some places which are populous and others that are mainly farm lands. These decisions could be viewed as precedent setting. Scoping them out from the point of view of educated engineering principals seems to be a vital part of the process, and shouldn't be lightly dismissed by joking about which scene is more worthy. No teenage jokes please about small towns in another state.

As of now we are still watching day by day what level the river will get up to, with more rain on the way. Sixty feet above flood level is the marker which the engineers are holding to, which is a tremendously huge amount of water pressure against any structure built by man. And to some extent they need to judge ahead of time when it will reach that target.

Suppose you were a Supreme Court Justice. Would you want to have anything to do with making such an imperatively reasoned judgement, that is ordinarily made by highly trained engineers?

Reading the news, fighting the blues. . . .

Some days and times I feel discouraged by the events in the world. Who cannot, while we still wage wars, and produce environmental changes that imperil other species besides humans? Somewhere I heard that our human population will be around 10 billion by the end of the current century. That is certainly supposition, considering that we will in the interim face our own survival threats. In many places people already do. We consider ourselves blessed in the United States, somewhat overly optimistically, as though we can continue the same mistakes indefinitely without cruel consequences to our children's children. We are taking little responsibility for our errors. And the whole world sees those errors as American. We plant denial rather than objective reasoning in our media through the prevalent advertising campaigns of large business.

Despite all the knowledge we have accumulated we continue to exceed ourselves in numbers while simultaneously waging long wars, disrupting the balance of nature by recklessly using resources. The wars are aimed at obtaining access to resources. To say they are defensive is a universally understood lie. Corporate raids on other continents are seen by local peoples as outright robbery, with environmental consequences in Nigeria, Mexico, South and Central America, plus elsewhere, that serve our consumerist culture.

Sometimes I have to just laugh outright about political ideas that are so naive and sometimes backwards, being voiced by leadership inside D.C.

Plant bioengineering, which is extremely expensive, is being seen as quite successful by some people in political positions. Meanwhile, in reality, the use of genetically modified (GM) seeds has been resisted in Europe while it "seems" extremely popular among growers in the USA. As to all the ins and outs of why this is so, let's just boil it down to money versus common sense. Monsanto, an International Corporation based in St. Louis, has been The major producer of GM seeds. How many citizens here even know this story?? Among the most vilified of corporations on earth by environmental and justice activists, Monsanto is rich enough to fight any opposition to the use of their seeds in court, including in Canada.

Just from a purely personal perspective I have found that eating corn based foods that are produced, processed and packaged in the USA is hazardous to my digestive processes. Some sort of corn is widely distributed in all sorts of prepared and packaged foods. Blue corn I do tolerate, but not yellow. This is only my own minor evidence that it doesn't suit me well, of course. But scientists do recognized that bio-engineered plants are not being investigated adequately for adverse affects to human consumers. No, I never watched the movie KING CORN, but I think I get the picture.

We have a stunning lot of money available to research certain areas of human life, including food production, commercial and manufacturing products like computers, machinery, electronic gadgets, and the sciences. How much time and success, on the other hand, do we devote to social investigation, conflict resolution, conflict intervention and diplomacy that have proven positive outcomes? Are we simply a genetically impaired species that cannot make any sense out of ourselves and how we relate? Why exactly does a world leader not envision his or her own country boundaries as friendly territory with a neighbor rather than as a challenge to be overwhelmed by dominance?

Isn't it obvious, when you are watching old episodes of Star Trek, that the science of a live future is human communication?

Maybe I am just naive, even in old age.

we create lines of distinction between ourselves

Free Gaza Movement Actions

Could you do me a favor and pass this Fox 2 News interview of Hedy Epstein around to your Jewish friends please? Pertzborn asks how the Jewish community reacts to her, and I believe more of our local Jewish people would support her views than she realizes.

Contact info & other stuff about her can be found on her website.
http://www.hedyepstein.com/

Fox 2 News video.
http://www.myfoxstl.com/myfox/pages/InsideFox/Detail?contentId=8172270&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=5.2.1
Some of the articles I have read from the UK & other places suggest that this current conflict was initiated by Israel, not the other way around. There are also vigils being held around town by IOW.

Here also is a petition offered by Ramsey Clark. And thank you to all who can help.

Urgent Appeal for Israel to Immediately Cease Its Murderous Bombing, Siege and Threatened Invasion of Palestinian Gaza!

To: President George W. Bush, President-Elect Barack Obama, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State Designate Hillary Clinton, Vice President Richard Cheney, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Congressional leaders, U.N. Secretary General Ban, U.N. General Assembly President d'Escoto-Brockmann, members of the U.N. Security Council, U.N. member states, the President, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Opposition leader of Israel, and Major media representatives:

For 60 years, Israel has persecuted the Palestinian people with impunity in defiance of United Nations General Assembly and United Nations Security Council Resolutions, orders of the International Court of Justice, International Law and fundamental human rights.

Throughout the years, Israel has proclaimed itself the victim as it grew richer, more powerful and more violent, while

URGENT! The International Action Center is mobilizing for demonstrations across the U.S. to stop the attack on Gaza, and we are networking with activists across the globe who are taking to the streets against U.S./Israeli war crimes. To view a roundup of the growing number of international actions, see: http://www.iacenter.org/palestine/gazademos123108. Please consider making an emergency donation at http://www.iacenter.org/donate to help with the costs of organizing and mobilizing. NYC: Gaza Massacre: Emergency Demonstration - Sat. Jan. 3, 1 pm, Times Square Emergency Demo in Boston, Sat, Jan 3: Stop the US/Israeli Attack on Gaza! Solidarity with heroic Gaza: Statement from the International Action Center - Dec. 27, 2008 / also en Español

Palestinians were abused, impoverished, divided and demeaned.

A consistent tactic of Israel through all the years has been to divide Palestinians against their most effective organizations. Through most of the recent years Israel has attacked Fatah. Now it is Hamas that Israel attacks. But there is only one Palestinian people and there can be only one Palestinian State. This has been the guiding principle of the PLO. Israel's policy has always been to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian State. Its criminal assault on Hamas is in truth Israel's continuing assault on the possibility of a Palestinian State: divide and conquer.

Now in the waning days of the disastrous Bush Administration, the government of Israel with its Prime Minister under criminal indictment, is testing whether world opinion will permit it to escalate its isolation and impoverishment of Palestine and selective and systematic assassination of Palestinian leadership in Gaza to a genocidal, indiscriminate assault and invasion of Palestinian Gaza, knowing full well its acts will inflame passions throughout the Middle East and Arab and Muslim worlds risking conflict of disastrous magnitude in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, even between India and Pakistan.

Beyond crushing Gaza's capacity to resist and imposing its final solution on Palestinians, Israel is seeking confrontation that will lead to war with the U.S., the European Union, and NATO fighting for Israel against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan to impair their ability to prevent expansion of Israel's domination of the region while the "only one President at a time" the U.S. has, George W. Bush, will support Israel, finding all fault with Gaza.

In these dangerous and difficult days and hours the undersigned call upon the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, NATO members, and European countries independently, the governments of Asia, foremost China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, the nations of Africa, and the Americas to demand an immediate ceasefire throughout Israel and Palestine and the assurance of peace. All borders to Gaza, Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, must be opened for humanitarian relief and a complete arms and trade embargo on Israel until it fully complies with all the requirements of permanent peace.

We call upon all the people, the ultimate power in every nation when organized and energized, to take to the streets where they live and demand that their governments do all in their power to cause Israel to stop its war of aggression against Palestine and for all parties to pursue peace and for Israel, the U.S. and other nations who have provided material support for Israel's aggression to be held accountable for the deaths, injuries and damage Israel has inflicted.

We call upon governments and humanitarian agencies to provide all needed emergency relief to Palestine - medical care, food, humanitarian supplies, shelter; and on all the media that truly seeks peace, justice and respect for the equal dignity of every child, woman and man on earth to headline the demand that Israel stop its aggression immediately. All parties must engage in continuous negotiation with all Palestinians until a one state solution is agreed or the state of Palestine as mandated not later than October 1948 in UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947) is created, fully implemented, and Palestine thrives.

Sincerely,

Initiated and signed by
Ramsey Clark, winner, 2008 U.N.Human Rights Award and Founder, International Action Center

Add your signature to this letter now - go to http://www.iacenter.org/gazapetition

IAC | About the IAC | IAC Books and Resources | Contact Us | Donate

"The Price of Silence" video celebration and call to action

http://us.oneworld.net/article/359165-the-price-silence-music-video

Nothing to lose but walls

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell underneath
And spills the upper boulders in the sun.
--Robert Frost

We used to see and hear the stories on TV, black and white back in the early sixties, of people trying to climb the Berlin Wall and being shot down, of others tunneling under, and we cheered them on. To us in our middle class neighborhoods these scenes were cruel aspects of some life far away from us, while we lived in freedom in America.

The Diary of Anne Frank, televised version, ended with that creepy up and down siren that lived on in the imagination afterward, even though that detail was actually a fiction. All of us little white children could never have imagined the horrors even in our own country of segregationist policies that kept some people out of the halls of power. Until they too showed up on that little screen in the living room, most of us were excruciatingly naïve. We had not yet comprehended our own shame, far less that of others, far less that of governments.

Oh, it was all in the Bible, those verses that we memorized and sought to practice against reprimands from our parents. But we had very little other context than our own back yards, the swing sets, the doll houses, the teeny little green rubber soldiers that engaged in make believe battles on the sidewalk or on the living room rug. A lot of us had fathers who were soldiers in World War II.

Across the street from where I was a new little house went up next to the giant oak tree and a family moved in with a couple of girls around my age and their little brother. Their father was a “Mason,” or so my mother told me with a touch of disdain in her voice. I never was sure what that meant or why it angered her. Maybe she was jealous.

But clearly it was some kind of distaste which was not even something described in the Ten Commandments, to my knowledge. I wanted her to be friends with the mother because one of those girls and I hit it off over making mud pies together. Before we moved away from there when I was twelve that family was already in another new house, bigger and better, around the block from us, and my first real friendship with someone outside the family had vanished into thin air. I never really knew what had happened. My first best friend had to be substituted for by some girls at school who were, presumably, of the right sort of Christian like us.

Where do those kinds of wall come from, the ones that prevent people from speaking their minds and honestly working out their problems, leaving some things unsaid with the blessing of humane acceptance? Those subtle walls known as prejudices slowly build over time into physical structures, separating us from the benefit of alternatives to our own rigid thinking. In the U.S. we now have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and are building actual physical walls on our southern border.

Now, nearly half a century later than making my first solid friendship, everything on the computer screen is in color and you will not be able to watch TV next year if you have not yet made some adjustments for high definition. Oh yeah, it is all still about money. Some of us have access to information, political power, education and jobs and others do not.

And now we have businesses such as Boeing, a corporation which is a member of Dwight D. Eisenhauer's predicted military-industrial complex, benefiting from the current rage in building walls to keep people from crossing borders to our south, just like Israel has around Palestine. Here we have the effects of so-called “free trade” at work, along with climate change. Well, you know, it is all for our safety against terrorism (one of those “isms” in the same class as racism). And building walls provides Americans with jobs, not to mention gives some specific contractors access to government handouts. Who gives a deflated dollar if it hurts them there foreigners or does virtually no real good for us? For the most part it is kept totally out of our eyesight anyway, since the corporately owned media will not let us know what we are doing as a nation. And that keeps us innocent of any crime as individuals, at least in our imaginations.. It is all the property of the Homeland Security office or some foreign state that we underwrite. None of us need get our own hands dirty if we don't want to. It is just the way things are. We gotta have walls.

During my last couple of years in high school I lived in a southern state, not the Deep South, but close enough. We were some of the first students to go to the now desegregated school. The town was still divided, as it probably remains to this day, into black and white neighborhoods. Moving back to St. Louis again not long after graduation-- and even up until today-- our neighborhoods are still generally ethnically divided. People say that they want to live by people who are like them, but that is not the whole story and we know it, everyone who has half a brain. Yeah, we still have these walls, which we work together to maintain, despite those noble words of Robert Frost. If only they could tumble down so readily among us creatures so easily divided by hierarchical heritage with our fearful brains and hairless bodies hiding under clothes. Each of us insists we are some special breed because of the small piece of land upon which we were bred by circumstance outside of our command. Sometimes I feel lucky to be able to answer the eternally famous St. Louis question, “Where did you go to school?” with two words, ”Not here.”

Because I don't fit in anywhere. Because I started out working in the trenches with the least among us and did so for years and years, and I always wanted to learn something new. So I found out at a young age what dying was like, what a corpse actually looks like, how people are terrified by death and work like hell to bring someone back, rarely entertaining the idea that for some it might actually be an improvement over what they are experiencing on this plane.

And I went from hospitals to homes and usually made friends with the “lower class” workers and patients because they were more like me in many ways, despite some advantages that I have benefited from. In my own early life there had been violence, a lesson that imprints itself indelibly on the organism's physical body forever after, leaving trust of others always in question. Besides that I was “shy,” a quiet person who didn't talk excessively like most “leaders” do, so I became an astonishingly good observer, since that was my job, and also my lifestyle.

Politics are everywhere and nearly always involve dirt. When they sink to violence we might consider them animal, but the truth is that no other species is as self destructive as we are to ourselves. When Mr. Gorbachev “tore down those walls'” in 1989 as leader of the Soviet Union he was just a few years past the Chernobyl incident in the Ukraine. Reagan may have taken credit for it but internal pressure was probably more likely the cause of democratic moves in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps I have spent most of my life looking for something that will always remain totally inexplicable and elusive. We apparently cannot escape the despicable ways that humans beings behave so that we find lasting peace.

But this week I was given renewed hope by a small band of international human rights workers who sailed on a couple of fishing vessels into Gaza, opening the Palestinian citizens there to outsiders for the first time in forty-one years. The Free Gaza Movement had arrived.

On Saturday, August 23, two boats landed on the beach where they were welcomed by enthusiastic Palestinians, who have been blockaded into their small borders by the Israelis since 1967. Perhaps facing the devastation of ensuing global climate disruption will bring us forward into a new era of peace, working together for our common interests.

We really don't have much to lose in hoping.