Category Archives: The World We Live In

The Airing of the Video by the Virginia Tech Murderer is Morally Reprehensible – Shame on NBC

The continued airing of the video by the mass murderer Seung-hui Cho is morally reprehensible and shows a lack of judgement by NBC news. It was also aired repeatedly by CBSs The Morning Show which unfortunately was on in my home this morning and it highly disturbed my children. Yes, we have the need to know what happened but why do we have to give the murderer the very soap box he wanted. This will only encourage future monsters to do the same, if not worse.

Here is an article written by a psychiatrist that mirrors my feelings. Also, please send e-mails to NBC telling them to not only stop showing the videos, but to make a public apology to the families and friends of the victims. Here are the addresses of the head of NBC Steve Capus and anchorman Brian Williams. steve.capus@nbc.com brian.williams@nbc.com

Tell them you will boycott NBC until they make a public apology for showing the videos.  Maybe they will realize how wrong they were. They need to know.

Tragedy in Virginia.

As you go through your day, please say a prayer for the people who lost their lives today at Virginia Tech University when a gunman went on a rampage and murdered over 20 people, many of them young students. It is events like this that make you realize how fragile life is. I’m going to give my two kids and wife a big and long hug today. Do the same to the people you love.

Economics Over Your Child’s Life – The Conservative View of the World

In a book I reviewed earlier this week, How Everyday Products Make People Sick, by Dr. Paul D. Blanc, there is one part that both angered and sickened me. It had to do with a review of the effects of lead by the conservative think tank – the American Enterprise Institute – Brookings Joint Center AEI/BJC on Regulatory Studies. The comment shows the kind of denial and obfuscation that the conservative right uses to protect industry’s ability to dump toxins on us despite overwhelming research.

Lead is a well known neurotoxin that was used in both gasoline and paint prior to the 1970s. According to numerous studies, lead causes IQ levels to drop, especially in children. What amazed me is that the AEI/BJC did not dispute the fact that lead was neurotoxic but that economically parents gain only $1,100 per IQ point while their children gain $1,900 through lead abatement. Are they kidding me??? Do we measure life benefits in terms of parents versus children? What kind of moral system do these people hold dear? One of their comments was “This analysis suggests lead standards will redistribute resources from parents to their children, because the benefits to parents are less than the costs of the standards. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development should reconsider their lead standards.”

Appalling?  You bet. Morally corrupt?  Closer to the truth. My parents came to this country back in 1953 to make their kids lives better, not at our expense but at theirs. The AEI/BJC is one of the many groups that our present administration looks to for advice. What does that say for us when the argument used to reconsider reintroducing lead into our environment is that parents should make more money at the expense of their children?

But lest this be a Bush-Bashing party, let me make it clear that this kind of disgusting government behavior has been going on for centuries and by just about every government in this world. In 1868, the British Fisheries Preservation Authority wrote a pamphlet entitled On Pollution of the Rivers of the Kingdom. they saw the problems back than.

Dr. Blanc even points out that in 1549 writers talk about things like sick building syndrome (not that term exactly) in a paper called Aerarium Sanitatis. We know that pollution and the dumping of toxins are killing us and causing incalcuable damage to our children and generations to come. As long as it is business as usual, we will continue to be dumped on and lied to about the dangers that surround us.

Please get this book. I don’t care if you get it through clicking on the link below or through any portal you chose, get it. It is one of the finest books on the effects of environmental toxins on human health I have ever read and believe me, I have read a lot of them.

 

How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace

Intolerance and Hatred – There is no place for it in a enlightened world.

Earlier today news that former NBA player Tim Hardaway made the following statement about John Ameche another former player who admitted being gay, “Well, you know, I hate gay people. I let it be known I don’t like gay people. I don’t like to be around gay people. I’m homophobic.” — Tim Hardaway, on Dan Le Batard’s radio show made all the sports and news talk shows. What strikes me is not the idea that someone is opposed to the gay lifestyle but the use of the word hate. I am not one to judge people like John Ameche for his lifestyle or Tim Hardaway for his comments, that is for a greater being than I am, what I do have a problem with is the lack of respect for a fellow human being and the hypocracy that is Tim Hardaway, his comments and others who have the same deep seated anger.

While listening to the Colin Cowherd talk show on ESPN radio this morning, I was astonished at the number of angry callers who agreed in principle with Mr. Hardaway. One caller claimed that since he was molested as a child he had a good reason for hating gays. Thankfully, Mr. Cowherd admonished him and reminded him that fully 80% of child molesters are heterosexual not homosexual. It is through ignorance that we generate hate, not intelligence. Hate is a base emotion that is borne of frustration and lack of knowledge for the most part.

Gene Wojciechowski wrote what I think is a brilliant response to this situation where his major astonishment is how a man like Hardaway can show such bigotry since he “…played at the same university and for the same coach who, years earlier, helped destroy racial stereotypes by starting five African-American players against all-white Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA Final Four championship game.” So I guess Mr. Hardaway feels it is all right to be a bigot against gays but not blacks.

What I hope for is that news of another gay person coming out of the closet is relegated to the back page of the newspaper, buried with other unimportant issues. The same for the announcement that this Super Bowl is the first with two black head coaches or other news like that. My ideal world would be one where people who are unique don’t have to hide from the spotlight but also that they don’t need to have a spotlight shown on them because they are different.

There are far more pressing issues in this world than the fact that an athlete is gay or that an ignorant ex-player hates him. Let’s move on to more important things like saving our environment or making the world a better place for our children to live in. Oh, and if you have some hate mail for me because of my point of view, just leave it in the draft box because I won’t pay any attention to it.

Want to Make an Ecological Difference? Stop Buying Bottled Water

When I came upon this bit of information I was astonished and dismayed. Bottled water is not only environmentally bad, it is harmful to third world countries and its people as well.

This coming Monday, February 12th I will be doing a presentation entitled “10 Things You Can Do To Save The Environment And Protect Your Health” at the Rotary Club of Incline Village. My tenth item was about not buying bottled water anymore. Here are the major points. After reading it I bet you will never look at bottled water the same ever again.

  • Let’s take the example of Fiji Water.
  • It is transported 8,700 killometers from Fiji to San Francisco. Imagine the fuel used to transport the water and the bottles (it is bottled in Fiji).
  • The bottles themselves use petrochemicals to manufacture and the plastic for the bottle is transported from China about 7,000 kilometers away requiring more fuel to transport.
  • A bottle that holds 1 liter requires 25 liters of water in its manufacturing process (this includes power plant cooling water).
  • Every bottle takes 1,000 years to biodegrade. More than 50% of the bottled water brands out there simply purchase U.S. municipal reserve water (your tap water) and filter it before bottling it. Then they resell it to you for an average of $5/gallon.
  • Buy a water filter. You’ll save lots of money.
  • One thing that should outrage every Rotarian especially.
    Companies like Coke (Dasani), and Pepsi (Aquafina) have discovered that buying up the drinkable water from some third-world country, bottling their water source and shipping it to you to sell to the U.S., is less expensive than paying for water from the municipal reserve. And they’re buying up the ONLY drinkable water sources in some countries.
  • So every bottle you drink is not just at the expense of the environment, but also at the expense of another somewhere else, who doesn’t have any other water. And you do.
  • Do you wonder why third world countries don’t like us?

Buying bottled water, unless you really need it should embarass you. It is unnecessary and bad for the environment and does nothing to make you any healthier than if you bought a water filter for your kitchen tap and filled a reusable bottle everyday. Come on America, stop being lazy and uncaring and change your habits. You will save money and make the world a better place.

It Makes You Think

The late Carl Sagan was known for his observational skills and the way he put our world into perspective. When commenting about a picture taken by the spacecraft Voyager I back in 1990 which showed earth from billions of miles away he said the following which I found very profound. Think about it this weekend.

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

To see that “dot” go to http://www.bigskyastroclub.org/pale_blue_dot.htm. Makes one humble doesn’t it?

The Reason We Celebrate Independence Day (It isn’t for the fireworks)

Declaration of Independence
(Adopted in Congress 4 July 1776)

——————————————————————————–
INTRODUCTION

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

PREAMBLE

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

INDICTMENT

–Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totaly unworth the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

DENUNCIATION

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

CONCLUSION

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levey war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Walking on coals? Scam or mind over matter?

I always love to dispell myths and scams.  Here is one I wanted to post in today’s blog.

  • People like Tony Robbins, the self-help guru, has his people do the fire walk across hot coals.  He has them say cool moss, like it was supposed to show that the mind can stop the coals from burning their feet.  Now I don’t dispell the power of the mind, it does work (see the placebo effect). The reason why we can walk on hot coals is three fold – First, our calloused feet protect us to some degree, second, people walk across the coals like their in the midst of a track race and third, coal is a poor conductor of heat.  It’s like touching a cake in a 400 degree oven.  You can do it without burning your fingers but touch the metal pan and ouch!!!

I’d like to thank the journal Scientific American (May 2006) for the info on coal walking. 

Be Safe While Driving

I just got into my office and felt an overwhelming need to write this blog as I just seen the aftermath of a horrific car accident between an SUV and a Ford Mustang Convertible.  It was icy this morning here in Reno and I was taking it easy, keeping well below the speed limit even though I drive an all-wheel drive Saturn Vue. Drivers were zooming past me, running red lights, acting kind of stupid if you ask me.  When I came up the hill, not 1/2 mile from my office I saw that a big white Suburban had just crossed the median and slammed into a blue Mustang.  It couldn’t have happened more than 2-3 minutes before I got there. When I looked over, I saw the ashen looking face of a young man, no more than 30 years old, folded in half, not moving. The sight is something I shall never forget. Next to the car was the driver of the SUV looking panicked and horrified, not knowing what to do, almost begging for help.

The police had just gotten there and I can still see the face of the officer; shocked, yet controlled, trying to see if there was anything he could do. It didn’t look like there was anything to do barring a miracle.

I’d just like to say, please take it easy out there.  Slow it down a little, watch what your doing, pull over if you need to use your cell phone and take care.  This morning, two young men woke up like any other day. Now, sadly, one will never wake up again and the other will awaken every morning knowing what happened today. I can’t help but wonder what life would have been like for those two men had they taken it a little slower.

Be careful out there.  Life is a truly precious thing.