Tag Archives: community activism

Busy Tuesdays

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Tuesdays are always the busiest days of the week for me. Today was no exception. I woke up early (0430). I had to leave the house by 0530 to get to the training center on time. It’s all the way up in NW Houston, it takes me about an hour and a half if there’s traffic.

I spent the morning role playing for one of the training sessions. We have more and more of these required courses every year. This one was to assess how the trainee would handle emergency situations at work.

As a role player, I act the part of one of the bridge team. Today my job was to keep track of what was done as things progressed. I had to make note of the times certain things were done, for example: what time did the incident start, what time did they call for muster, was anybody missing, who, was help called, when, were the fire pumps started, etc.

It’s actually a pretty interesting ‘job’. I enjoy it. It will definitely help me when it’s my turn to take the class.

I stopped on the way home to get rid of some of my books at the Half Price Books store. Hard to believe, but they only offered me $6 for 9 (very good condition and great to read) books! I took 2 of them back after that. I’ll donate them to the library.

I got home in time to make a few phone calls (check to see if any news on the job that was supposed to start on March 4th, figure out why the pharmacy gave me the wrong prescription yesterday, call and message about another possible job). No satisfaction on any of them, I’ll have to try again tomorrow.

I went for my daily walk. The weather is still really nice and cool. I wish it lasted longer. We’re supposed to have another cold front come through tomorrow so it might last a few days more. 🙂

I checked out my plants. My lemon tree is blooming like crazy and is already making tiny little lemons. A bunch of them got blown off in the wind today. The lime tree didn’t have so much damage, but it’s right up next to the house. I’ve got 4-5 strawberries that look like they’ll be ready for picking in a few more days. I’ll have to keep a close eye out to get them before the birds do.

Came in and tried to check my email, in between the internet dropping off every few minutes. Nothing too important in the mail (nothing about work).

Off to the weekly Campaign for Liberty meeting for our usual political discussion. Last week we had a new guy show up. He had some interesting things to say. He sounded pretty hard core socialist to me, but we did agree on a lot of things (corporations have too much power, GMO labeling, fiat money, sky high debt levels). I have to admire him for sticking around for the entire meeting and holding his own when everybody else was on the opposite side on a lot of issues. Sorry to say, he didn’t come back tonight. 🙁

Too bad. We really need to work together to find a way to fix what’s wrong. We really all do agree on a lot of issues but it seems like we just can never focus on that. We always wind up fighting over the few little things we disagree on. We’ll never win the real fight if we can’t figure out that we should not be fighting each other, we need to concentrate on the real enemy.

We’re going to try again to get the word out about our weekly meetings and to inform people about some of the concerns we have. It’s hard. We’re still a very small group and everybody is always so busy. Nobody really has any time to concentrate on this stuff and we have a lot of things we’re involved in (community garden, radios, GMOs, etc).

I promised to make a Facebook page. I hope I can remember how to do that. 😉

I hope to heck I’ll be at work next Tuesday! If not, I’ll go to painting class instead of role playing, they don’t have anything else scheduled up there til April 11th. I hope I don’t have to wait that long to go to work again.

Climate Activists, Eco-Terrorism, and the Green Scare

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Climate Activists, Eco-Terrorism, and the Green Scare – Politics – Utne Reader.

Another great article from Utne Reader. I really love that magazine, even tho I usually don’t agree with how they state the problem or the solutions they come up with. They are usually VERY statist and I am the opposite. Sometimes they are communitarian (people choosing to live together in a voluntary manner and helping each other by CHOICE), which I DO agree with and support. There is a world of difference between voluntary cooperation and all other systems which are based on force. I will not support any of those in any way (which includes “our” system here in the USA now, since it has utterly violated the original constitution set up and intended to PROTECT our rights, and instead it now constantly violates them).

As for the article, it reports on the usual cooperation between big government and big business to keep the people in their places. Lots of spying on anyone engaged in community organizing or otherwise politically active by both private companies and government to benefit the corporations . Of course, this damages the ability to get anything useful done. They talk a lot about fracking specifically but also mention the Keystone pipeline and animal rights, factory farming,etc. I really can’t say I’ve made up my mind which side of the fracking issue I’ll take.

I DO like the fact that it is helping us get off the Arabic tit and become energy independent again. I like that very much! I would LOVE to be able to say to the entire Middle East to go jump in a lake! They’ve had us over the barrel (of oil) for so long and we’ve been sucking up to them for years because of it. We spend BILLIONS of dollars “protecting” their countries so we can get access to that oil. I say let them keep their oil! We should’ve spent all those billions developing alternative energy all those years and we’d be a HELL of a lot better off by now.

So, now our oil people have come up with directional drilling and fracking to get more of our own oil out of the ground. I’m happy about that. Lets concentrate on making fracking safer, if the environmentalists concerns about groundwater pollution are valid, we need to fix that problem somehow before we continue fracking near any problem areas. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, lets FIX the specific problems with fracking and use it for our benefit. Since we have NOT developed our alternative energy supplies to where they’re anywhere near competitive yet, it gives us some control over our foreign policy again, IF our politicians will just THINK about things and do whats right for the country for once instead of being their own usual greedy pandering selves.

I would LOVE to see solar, wind, geothermal, ocean current, fuel cell technology become as efficient and affordable as fossil fuels. Is any of that going to happen in my lifetime??? In the meantime, we CAN get affordable, politically cheap oil- (meaning NOT located in some foreign country where they all hate us). I say go for it.

As to the environmentalists and other critics of fracking, I want to know just what exactly are THEIR solutions to the issue of our need for energy? I’ve already heard about their ideas that we all go back to living off the land. Yeah, well, I agree with that but don’t think that’s at all possible unless and until we’re ready to eliminate at least a few billion of us humans off the face of the earth. Birth control would be my preferred method, space colonization would work for me just fine, our so-called leaders would prefer we kill each other off in expensive wars, and mother earth will probably do it with some sort of plague sooner or later.

OK, so what OTHER solutions are there???