The Lies of the Plutocracy Volume 42: What's In Your Eggnog?

For my entire generation we have been lied to, mislead, bamboozled and manipulated in so many deadly ways, we have no resolve left. Example?

"When liquid aspartame is stored in temperatures above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, it breaks down into DKP and formaldehyde, both of which are known toxins." http://www.rense.com/general33/legal.htm

Is it in your warm sweet drink? Eggnog or the warm pop from the car? Are our other low-cal sweeteners becoming formaldehyde in our bodies? Why pay to put unnecessary and deadly chemicals in our bodies? Because we are addicted to sweet, conditioned to eat sweets. Our taste buds tell us that sweet is rarely poisonous. Or so it would be in a natural world. But they have repackaged sweet with hidden poisons that we can't taste. And evolution is a bitch.

Aspartame was an accidental discovery. Everyone said no, not in human food. But someone else said, 'Get a new man' in charge so we can sell this thing. New CEO, new scientist, new head of fda, new president, prime minister, king and sheik. Poison peddlers.

Ignore ignore ignore.
Lie lie lie
Even when we die die die.

monsanto owns searle and gives to the ms society. I'd rather crawl than benefit with dirty money. fuck you monsanto.

War and Remembering

I am overwhelmed with Remembering. What do they want me to remember? Dead boys? Girls? Old men? Dead people? Living people? Non-canadians? How about black or native canadians? What if you are a bad soldier? Bad weapons company? What if the Good War killed millions of innocents and degraded their land to torched toxic earth?

What if I would never hit or kill another? Should I still celebrate? Should I celebrate or remember? In 200 years, after 12 more wars, will remembrance day be just another shopping holiday? Like christmas? I wasn't there for that either, yet we remember celebrate and party like it's december 25, 00 AD?

I am glad nazis no longer gas to death groups they don't like.
Yet china kills tibetan monks.
Palestinian children have no homes or food or security.
Vietnamese children still have their legs blown off from mines of wars 40 years ago.
Veterans live lonely lives, crippled and unsupported.
America pours pepper spray into the eyes of young girls who want to save a forest.
Canada can shoot, taser and sound wave you into obedience or death.
Leonard Peltier and Aung San Suu Kyi are still in prison.
Rumsfeld helped coordinate vietnam, cia in iran, central america, korea, nuclear proliferation, gulf war, falklands, iraq, afghanistan, aspartime, tamiflu and searle -monsanto. Cheney's resume includes haliburton.

I remember dead people -by celebrating life, not honouring war or the war machine, mongers or military complex.

Grandpas, brothers, sons. Now daughters. History.
But we need truth in our deliberations. Not emotion and innuendo.
Please don't kill on my behalf, I would rather sacrifice my own life than have the machine kill on mass. And when the taliban or vietcong come for me, I will deal in my own way. I too, am not afraid to die. But I do not want to kill.

Double Double-Cross?

Tim Horton's Revenue Continues To Grow

Annual revenue for 2008 was $2.04 billion, up 7.8 per cent from $1.9 billion in 2007.

Tim Horton's boosts coffee price in some regions; revenue up nearly 11 per cent

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091030/business/tim_hortons

Timmy's wants more for its coffee from you.

Staff's wages are not going up.

It doesn't offer fair trade coffee, so does not directly share profits with farmers.

They increased the dividend to share holders.

Their stock is going up in value.

It pays to be the middleman or the shareholder.

Paid for by low wage workers, farmers and consumers; supported by the faceless hordes of investors looking to make money doing nothing.

Run Like Hell From Fear and Ignorance

Societies have always struggled with fear. Do we have enough? Then our greed and xenophobic fears kick in: 'I want more, those people are different than me'. The fear and ignorance leads society to the worst place we can go - killing our own species.

Writers, artists, whistle blowers and others have been yelling ''Wake-up" for as long as there has been oppression. We can't just sit back and 'thank our lucky stars' we were born in the right place. It's our obligation to fight ignorance whenever we see it or feel it.

This video is one of my favorite cries against oppression whether as a child in school or when you grow up and become an oppressor in your own way. We're all oppressed and we're all oppressors. But we can pay attention to our own ignorance and break the cycle.

In this Guardian article on French oppression of migrants in Calais, "Isarullah, 21, a former student, showed knife scars on his stomach and chest, saying violence had made him leave his village outside Kabul. He had been sleeping in and around the park for a month.

"The conditions here are a nightmare," he said. "I had a blanket, it was stolen. I sleep in my clothes, under bridges, under buildings, moving from night to night. We've got nothing to eat except a bit of bread we get as hand-outs. If we see food, we fall on it like animals, we're so hungry. I can't go back to Afghanistan, it's too dangerous. We're afraid of the French police. There's a whole generation of young Afghans here who just want papers and a chance to work, but it seems more and more hopeless."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/22/afghans-camps-calais-police

Do we close our borders to those who need help? Do we close our eyes and ears too? The problem is we can't close our hearts.

The World is No More

Dubai, UAE and the world's uber-rich came up with this Stupid idea to build luxury living at its largest as only the rich middle east can do. Luxury from sand. But the market fell, the money fell through and people pulled back. The UAE has over $300 billion in development on hold. One of the lesser emirates, a poorer cousin UAE member had massive power outages. But the leader still has his bit of The World.

About a year ago I read that foreigners, read your friends who worked in "the middle east", were abandoning their cars, read luxury sedans and suvs, at the airport as they fled their new found home back to, every western region of the world. Leaving behind now unemployed nannies, and masses of now unemployed downsized foreigners with no better options.

So I welcome back my friends, to their taxable incomes, if they found jobs. And all that Canada has to offer including temperate weather, freedom to drink and all the municipal recycling they can handle.

Do you have a pork tastebud?

Call it umami or 'deliciousness,' no denying the titilation of smoked pork. Mmmm bacon. But really, we can only have a limited effect on our tastebuds. Sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Nope, no pork taste bud. But deliciousness, that's in the mouth of the taster. And the mind.

Caustic Blue Jeans Made For Me and You

Mmm, caustic soda in the water. But we don't do anything about this in Canada. Why worry about Lesotho, Africa? As long as my jeans are cheap.

Why Can't We Truly Love?

14 years old. Allegedly shot 'nice people'. Stephen Harper and reform party people like him would have these kids punished to the full extent of the law. And H. would have those laws get tougher. Meaner.

Today an arsonist in California is sentenced to death. He started fires in southern California. People died. He will die. That's the law.

Would Canada kill these kids if they could? Would it stop them? Will it bring back the dead people?

What did you do when you were 14 that broke the law? Now?

I heard a group home councillor cry as he told a story about a 12 year old boy in the group home. No family, no friends. Just a group home. Just fear.
The councillor had to sit in on the meeting where the mom told her son in person "I just don't love you anymore. I have a new family." You are on your own.

When I was 12 I started my period. Learned to shave my legs. Got grounded for smoking. I never doubted my parent's love. Or thought I could not go home.

This boy cried. And lost his faith in humans. All the councillor could offer was a longer stay at the home and a lock on the door. A couple nights later a different unhappy kid pulled a knife on the councillor. Maybe on the inside isn't safe either.

Maybe these boys have been failed 100%. What H. offers, on behalf of every single Canadian, is further judgment, blame, and evidence that life, especially theirs, is unvaluable. They got nothing, now they have less.

The hard things in life are not hard because they are easy. They are hard cuz they are hard.
Think about it.
Stealing, murder, suicide, abortion, greed, none are easy on our souls, our psyche.

Surely blaming children like they are adults, without any of the 'training' adults get to be good people, will surely make them meaner.

The blame is on every one of us for these deaths. And the adults these kids become is also on us. Every one of us. We take more than we need. We take more than we can afford. We steal from others if it serves our purposes. We sleep not restfully and with one eye open.

I weep for these kids. And the 12 year old whose mom doesn't love him anymore. And those that couldn't love. Why can't we love? Why do we hate ourselves so much?

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty. "
Mother Teresa

One More Letter I Won't Write

Time and space elude me. I can't keep up or be at the right place at the right time. I vibrate at a different frequency than that I try to interact with. We all do. I have relished it my whole life. I don't want to keep up or slow down. I am always at the right place.

I am inspired by much. Stephen Hawking inspires me. His mind, his wonderings, his questions, his answers. His body, his effort, even his genetic material makes me think with wonder.

If only we all had his strength. His ability to see outside of himself.
I work hard to see beyond myself. If I can see beyond myself, I will see the potential in my life, in all life. And that is powerful good if you've ever felt it.

My diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis was emotionally overwhelming for about 2 weeks. I used concepts of eastern philosophy to see beyond myself. Ideas of space and time keep me grounded.
I could be emotional, self-limiting, depressed, sad even. But I see and feel so much more than me. From quasars to slugs to copper ore and back to quasars. With so much to wonder about, how could I spend too much time on my waning ability to walk? While interesting and curious, humans rely too heavily on emotions to guide us. As though there is nothing else; I have to be mad, sad or really glad.

I believe that Stephen Hawking has balance. He wouldn't make it 67 years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis if he did not have balance, or a safe place to go in his mind. And his mind has been shared and powerfully applied to life.

He might be overwhelmed with physics, but not ALS.
This is my letter to Dr. Hawking to say thanks. Enjoy the journey. We'll all catch up some day.

Cultural Change and the Boomers

There will soon come a time when the Boomers are ancient history. That time is closer than we think.

When I see schools closing in BC, Alberta or Nova Scotia, I think "Yeah, demographics change. But what if we need them in the future?" That's no longer likely. The boom of post WW2 babies is slowing towards its death. We don't need as many schools and the days of growth in a mostly white suburban neighborhood with a local school are no more. New neighborhoods grow, new schools are built, where the people are i guess. These days it seems just as likely to be a developer's deal as community planning.

So what will happen to these assets, these schools? Sold off, extension learning, tear downs. (Some active schools and libraries still have asbestos fibre in their structures. Nice pay off for the studious student - greater exposure to known cancer causing agents.)

What happened to our communities? As population continues to grow, Canada keeps shuffling its almost-limited people and numbers to ever newer housing areas. Are they still communities? What makes a community?

Now the Boomers are 60+ and will come into seniorhood for the next 20 years according to some demographics. Twenty years of an aging population. They were the ones with the 'work ethic' and an acceptance of less family and community contact in favor of money and things. Yuck! Uh, thanks. Good choice. Teach us to overvalue youth and money and then get old and poor. Oh they think they're rich, but the great thing about aging is the realization that money is the wrong focus and freedom is free for the taking. We were right in our youth. We always are.

Simplicity and poverty are true freedom. The very thing a 17 year old relishes. Gimme dirty jeans, an open road and not a penny to my name.

Their poet Bob Dylan asked it best.

"Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul"