Saturday Links for the Week — May 26, 2007

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
ducklings philosopea
Ducklings — photo by my friend & colleague Karen’s twin sister

What’s Important This Week:

AprËs Nous Les Dragons: The experts on Extinction believe that, when we are gone from the planet, Earth will be dominated by insects and birds, two very resilient life forms. The latest story on consequences of The End of Oil (a story which was suddenly and inexplicably pulled after it was published, but is still in the archives) suggests that high gasoline prices are grounding aerial spray planes, leaving entire monoculture crops threatened by insects. We may have to find another way to get our daily dose of malathion poisoning. Oh, and this is the year of the 17 year locusts.

Corporatists and Criminals Bilk the Elderly Together: Big corporations assemble phone lists of vulnerable, lonely and confused elderly people and then pitch them to ‘telemarketers’. ìOnly one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,î said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ìIf someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, itís like putting out a sign saying ëThieves welcome here.í î

Inoculating Yourself Against Disk and Computer Crashes: Slowly but surely I’ve been migrating the content of my machine to cyberspace, so I can do everything that I do on my ‘home’ computer, on any machine anywhere. Thanks to Google and others, we no longer need to retrieve and store e-mail on our machines, nor do we need to buy or maintain MS ‘productivity’ software anymore. I’ve moved ‘My Documents’ to Box.net. My music files and blog backup files are on my mp3 player and flash drive, and I’m migrating all my photos to Flickr or Picasaweb. My bookmarks are on spurl.net and my future podcasts will be on archive.org. Freedom! (Now I need a ‘Google Virtual Desktop’ to find my stuff wherever in cyberspace it is.)

The Real Dangers of Pandemic Outbreaks: An excellent article by Sharon Astyk explains that the greatest threat from pandemic disease is not loss of life, it’s economic collapse, the excuse to institute martial law and further extinguish civil freedoms, and the backburnering of vital work to address Peak Oil, global warming and other threats. She goes on to talk about pandemic preparedness, with a prescription much like mine, except more optimistic that people will actually prepare. Thanks to whoever pointed me to this, and apologies for not noting who that was when I bookmarked/spurled it. If you live in the US and want to speak up on why pandemic preparation is important, Lugon and his Flu wiki colleagues tell us the government says it’s willing to listen.

Big Pharma Pays Doctors to Test Psych Drugs on Child Patients: The young can complain, but they can’t vote or sue, and no one listens to them anyway. So they’re the perfect guinea pigs for testing expensive psychological drugs on, without regard for side effects, and it’s as easy and legal to bribe doctors to do it.

No New China Poisoning Scandals This Week: But maybe that’s because corporatists like Murdoch have the order out to squelch all bad news stories about China.

Another Silent Spring: Meanwhile, the cancer prevention network reports we’re still pretty good at letting domestic corporatists poison us. Excerpt:

It is infinitely harder to identify causal links between the substances that body burden tests say are in our flesh, blood and bones, and their health effects. This complexity has protected the chemical industry for decades, and has served up a perfect excuse for many politicians to avoid taking tough, decisive, preventative action.

The hundreds of millions of dollars donated annually to cancer agencies are funnelled mainly into research for better treatments and “cures” for cancer; far less is targeted to preventing the disease in the first place, and only a negligible fraction to reducing our exposure to carcinogens in everyday products, in our food, water and air, and virtually everywhere. Just last week, researchers from five U.S. institutions named 216 chemicals that can induce breast cancers in animals. Of these, humans are highly exposed to 97 of them, including industrial solvents, pesticides, dyes, gasoline and diesel exhaust compounds, cosmetics ingredients, hormones, pharmaceuticals and radiation.

Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.

Thoughts for the Week:

Grab a coffee or tea and settle in for 45 minutes to watch Robert Newman’s deliciously entertaining and informative History of Oil. It will change the way you understand Middle East and global news forever. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

And then, take a look at what Flemming Funch and Tom Munnecke have to say about framing your conversations around the “Yes, and…” principle instead of “Yes, but…”. It’s all about accepting what you really cannot change, and instead adapting and/or letting yourself change. Excerpt:

It almost never works to negate [argue with] what other people really believe in [no matter how persuasively]…[And] the more enlightened you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else be like [and agree with] you. Ironically, as we could say you had allthe more reason to do so…
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8 Responses to Saturday Links for the Week — May 26, 2007

  1. David Parkinson says:
    May 26, 2007 at 17:13

    Thanks for the hat tip, but unless I’m getting some selective memory loss, I don’t think I pointed you to the Star article. Anyway… I love the Saturday digest. Always something good in there.Have a good week,David

  2. David Parkinson says:
    May 26, 2007 at 17:52

    Thanks for the tip about box.net. I’m going to start using that.David

  3. marc says:
    May 26, 2007 at 17:59

    actually only one poisoning story out related to china this week –from fox newshttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275269,00.html

  4. Daniel says:
    May 27, 2007 at 14:30

    I created a spurl accountI could not import del.icio.us bookmarks as it says it is possible.Also it says one can search on the websites you bookmarked (“It makes your bookmarks available from any computer and enables full-text search of all the content you consume every day on the Web.”)but I don´t see how.Help?. Thanks

  5. Daniel says:
    May 27, 2007 at 14:32

    I forgot to mention I see a limit to bookmark services. They are good, but many times website change URLs or dissapear, so a service that saves a copy of the page is better, like furl or yahoo.

  6. Doug Alder says:
    May 28, 2007 at 18:38

    “Inoculating Yourself Against Disk and Computer Crashes:” – You better keep a backup of everything locally even if you find those services useful. The dotcom crash of 2000 proved just how fast your online data could disappear as online ASP (application service provider) after ASP bit the dust and took all their customer’s data with them.

  7. Doug Alder says:
    May 28, 2007 at 18:43

    Oh and lets not forget – are the servers for those application in the US? Congratulations, you’ve just handed all your private and confidential information over to Homeland Security, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI (notwithstanding any federal regulations prohibiting such)and any hacker who makes their way into your ASPs system (no system connected to the net is unhackable – it’s just a question of how much effort is required).

  8. Daniel says:
    May 29, 2007 at 14:44

    Doug, you can encrypt sensible data before uploading.The same goes for email, most traffic goes through US servers, but very few encrypt email with PGP or else.I would like to read your suggestions. Thanks

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