Diane Wilson, author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas appeared on KPFA radio’s The Visionary Activist to talk about her past experiences with oil and chemical companies. This isn’t her first experience with polluters, and, depressingly, all the lies and obfuscation from BP are nothing she hasn’t heard before.

From KPFA.org:

Caroline welcomes 2 extraordinary voices for the sea: Diane Wilson, 4th generation Gulf Coast fisher-woman, from once beautiful Sea Drift, Texas, triumphant against all odds taker on of polluting corporations, Formosa, Dow Chemical, BP, author of “An Unreasonable Woman,” and “Holy Roller.” AND Martin Prechtel, master of eloquence, story guide to dynamic reverence, native of New Mexico, a leader in the Mayan village of Santiago Atitlan, author of innumerable books including “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time.” www.floweringmountain.com
Both have experienced the death of much close to their hearts beauty and cooked their grief into effective words and actions for all that we love at this time of Dire Beauty.

Listen Now

Visit KPFA.org.

 
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Author James McCommons spent a year riding the rails, talking to railroad officials and fellow passengers and experiencing the highs and lows of passenger rail travel in the US. He wrote about his experiences and insights in Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service. Now you can download the first chapter of his book for free, exclusively from the Saturday Evening Post.

You can also read James McCommon’s cover story in the current issue of the Post, on newsstands now.

From the Saturday Evening Post:

In 2007, a business trip took travel writer James McCommons from his home in Michigan to the West Coast. McCommons, who hails from a railroad family, took a train west and flew back to the Midwest. His trip on “The California Zephyr” had transcendent moments of crossing the moonlit Great Plains and running through the Red Rock Country of the Rockies’ western slope, but also was marred by equipment breakdowns in Nevada’s deserts and repeated delays due to backed-up freight trains. He reached Sacramento 12 hours behind schedule.

Read the whole article here.

 
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Though society’s attitudes have changed in a big, big way over the last 20 years, with more people than ever saying we should legalize marijuana, law enforcement doesn’t seem to have received that particular memo. New York City alone has seen an increase in possession arrests skyrocket from 1,000 in 1990 to 46,000 in 2009—and NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) wants everyone to know it.

From The Huffington Post:

Just in time for 4/20, the official/unofficial marijuana holiday, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws will debut their new digital ad highlighting the sharp, sharp increase in New York City’s rate of marijuana possession arrests over the last two decades.

Read the whole article here.

 
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The full video interview, on The Big Think, features Tyler Volk covering topics like ‘Why We Die,’ ‘Fear of Death Is Immature,’ ‘Why Life Needs Death,’ and more.

Tyler Volk is a Science Director of Environmental Studies and Professor of Biology at New York University. He is the author of “Death & Sex” (with co-author Dorion Sagan), “CO2 Rising: The World’ Greatest Environmental Challenge,” “Gaia’s Body: Toward a Physiology of the Earth,” and “Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind.” Professor Volk is also lead guitarist for The Amygdaloids, a “heavy mental” band comprised of NYU scientists. He lives in New York.

By David E. Gumpert

From his blog, The Complete Patient

I think it’s a good thing that there’s so much back-and-forth about the specifics of the Wisconsin raw milk legislation currently under consideration in the state senate. The prospect of legalizing raw milk in the nation’s second-largest dairy state would probably not have gotten anywhere near this much consideration a couple years ago, so much has changed in a brief amount of time.

Yesterday saw the politicians engaged in all kinds of horse trading—pulling out the liability exemption, making the legislation temporary, requiring farmers to keep the names of their customers. Steve Bemis of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund went back-and-forth with Bill Marler, the food poisoning lawyer who has a big following among regulators, to possibly eliminate some troubling language limiting milk consumption to those who purchase the milk.

But something else was going on yesterday in connection with the raw milk legislation: retribution.

Two inspectors from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, Consumer Protection visited the dairy owned by Scott Trautman. You may remember him.  He became an activist in the movement to legalize raw dairy sales after he came under attack by DATCP for selling raw milk, helping organize the protest on behalf of Max Kane in Viroqua in December, and then briefly chaining himself to the fence around the governor’s mansion on Christmas Eve.

DATCP inspectors had given Trautman’s dairy passing grades four times before last fall, as a Grade A dairy. (He lost his license last fall after he was dropped by a dairy processor. Under Wisconsin dairy rules, you lose your Grade A license if you fail to sell milk for 60 days.) Now Trautman wants to be part of the proposed new law (as well as sell cheese) that was the focus of all the horse trading yesterday, which could well be enacted and would allow Grade A dairies to sell raw milk. But yesterday, there were suddenly a number of things the inspectors didn’t like about his dairy.

The big problem was that they didn’t approve of his wooden milking parlor, and want him to build a new one. “Anybody sitting on ten thousand dollars to waste on closing in our beautiful parlor and making it ’safe’ and ‘unpleasant’?” he asks.

“Isn’t it interesting,” he observed to me. “I have perfect inspections in a facility signed off on by DATCP. Then I am sounding off about raw milk and suddenly I don’t pass. Amazing.”

DATCP is highly conflicted about the proposed legislation. I spoke with DATCP’s spokesperson, Donna Gilson, Thursday morning to inquire about the agency’s position on the pending raw milk legislation. “We still don’t believe there’s a way to produce raw milk safely,” she began. Hmmm, not real positive. What about the pending legislation? “This makes it slightly less risky,” she said. DATCP likes the elimination of the liability exemption, and the  requirements for testing and signage. It also approves of the collection of names of purchasers. “When there is an outbreak—you notice I don’t say if there is an outbreak—this is the most efficient means for notification of people.” I guess you could say DATCP will be a reluctant supporter at best of the new legislation.

But one thing DATCP has no hesitation about is payback. Once the legislation passes, it’s going to be payback time for those farmers who pushed things to this point where the agency has to regulate raw milk rather than just stamp it out. DATCP just seems to have gotten going a little early with Scott Trautman.

As long as there’s all this horse trading going on, here’s my suggestion for an addition to the legislation: an amnesty clause. This is what typically happens when wars between countries end—everyone releases their prisoners and starts over again.

But sometimes, following a war, when the original rulers remain in place over an alienated population, there is a blood letting. The rulers tell the ruled via force: yes, you may have won the latest round in the war, but we’re still in charge. And we want you to remember who is in charge.

DATCP has shown itself to be nearly obsessive when it comes to making life difficult for certain raw milk activists. Witness Max Kane. According to one media report, he appeared briefly at a Viroqua courthouse today for what was supposed to be another effort by DATCP attorneys to question him about the names of his buying group participants. He left a copy of a motion to cancel the session because he has appealed a previous order that he testify, and quickly left the courthouse. 

I’d suggest that the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund make sure that, as part of any legislation to legalize raw milk, that those farmers brave enough to challenge DATCP aren’t setupon by the agency in retaliation. Even prisoners of war get protection under the Geneva Convention.

***

In New York, raw milk protesters Barb and Steve Smith of Meadowbrook Dairy are awaiting the wrath of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, in the wake of the agency’s court victory invalidating Meadowsweet’s limited liability company to distribute raw milk. In the meantime, the couple has some words of warning for Wisconsin dairy farmers:

“As we have gone through the last 3 years of trouble with Ag and Markets we have seen very clearly that their compulsive desire to control all the milk in the state means they will never allow the raw milk farmers to survive if they can help it. Their real agenda is to eliminate the existence of raw milk farming completely. We were told this years ago by our inspector at the time but didn’t really believe him. Now we know he was right. As long as you have a permit you are voluntarily placing the noose around your own neck. You are agreeing that the department has the authority to come on your farm anytime, to control your farm and farm operations, to find violations, to fine you, and even to shut you down if they want. Raw milk farmers around New York who do have permits are in an almost constant struggle with the state as they are threatened with being shut down for test result violations that later prove to be in compliance afterall. And most importantly, if you do have a problem with the way they treat you, there is absolutely NO recourse! Their word is law, period. If you do not have a permit you are technically NOT under their jurisdiction, though they will try to say otherwise. And finally, if you have a permit you can ONLY sell milk on your farm and ONLY milk, no butter, yogurt or kefir.”

Something to think about.

There’s a new breed of housewife and househusband: those who reject modern society’s ideas of consumerism and mindless consumption. They are the radical homemakers.

The radical homemakers grow and prepare their own food, mend their own clothes, and try to live as self-sufficiently as possible while acknowledging and embracing interconnectedness and living modest but fulfilling lives.

From Yes! magazine:

Homemakers today could have a similar influence. The Radical Homemakers I interviewed had chosen to make family, community, social justice, and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They rejected any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that did not honor these tenets. For about 5,000 years, our culture has been hostage to a form of organization by domination that fails to honor our living systems, under which “he who holds the gold makes the rules.” By contrast, the Radical Homemakers are using life skills and relationships as replacements for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need the gold can change the rules. The greater one’s domestic skills, be they to plant a garden, grow tomatoes on an apartment balcony, mend a shirt, repair an appliance, provide one’s own entertainment, cook and preserve a local harvest, or care for children and loved ones, the less dependent one is on the gold.

By virtue of these skills, the Radical Homemakers I interviewed were building a great bridge from our existing extractive economy—where corporate wealth has been regarded as the foundation of economic health, where mining our Earth’s resources and exploiting our international neighbors have been acceptable costs of doing business—to a life serving economy, where the goal is, in the words of David Korten, to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few; where our resources are sustained, our waters are kept clean, our air pure, and families and can lead meaningful lives.  In situations where one person was still required to work out of the home in the conventional extractive economy, homemakers were able to redirect the family’s financial, social and temporal resources toward building the life-serving economy. In most cases, however, the homemakers’ skills were so considerable that, while members of the household might hold jobs (more often than not they ran their own businesses), the financial needs of the family were so small that no one in the family was forced to accept any employment that did not honor the four tenets of family, community, social justice and ecological sustainability.

Read the whole article here.

 
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The following is an excerpt from Whole Foods Companion: A Guide for Adventurous Cooks, Curious Shoppers, and Lovers of Natural Foods by Dianne Onstad. It has been adapted for the Web.

Grapefruit

(Citrus x paradisi)

General Information

The grapefruit is a relative newcomer to the citrus clan, an accidental hybrid between the pummelo and the orange. It was first described in 1750 by Griffith Hughes, who called it the “forbidden fruit” of Barbados. Seeds were brought to Florida by the French Count Odette Phillippe in 1823, but at first the trees were grown only as a novelty and the fruit little utilized. Florida started sending small shipments of the fruit to New York and Philadelphia between 1880 and 1885, thus setting in motion the colossal

Florida citrus industry. For many years the grapefruit was not extremely popular because of its slightly bitter taste, but sweeter varieties were eventually bred. Red grapefruit were first spotted in the Rio Grande valley of Texas during the 1920s and have since been transplanted to other parts of the world; the red grapefruit is now designated the state fruit of Texas. The thin-skinned, shiny, heavy Florida grapefruit is considered by many to be the juiciest, sweetest, most nutritious variety available.

Buying Tips

Grapefruit of good quality should be heavy, well shaped, and even-colored, with a smooth, thin, shiny skin that is firm but springy to the touch. The heavier fruits are usually thinner-skinned and contain more juice than those with coarse, puffy, or spongy skins. Grapefruit will keep for up to eight weeks in the refrigerator.

Culinary Uses

There are several varieties, each good for different uses: white is best for juicing, pink is sweet enough to be eaten like an orange, and red is sweeter still. Generally considered a breakfast fruit, grapefruit is also used to make juice and marmalades, is added to fruit salads, ices, cakes, and other desserts, and can be baked or grilled. It is best to eat grapefruit alone or with other acid fruits, and not in combination with sweet fruits or starches. The habit of sweetening them (with sugar or another sweetener) causes a fermentation of the sweetener in the system, which then produces an acidic reaction in the body. Served before the main meal, grapefruit will stimulate the appetite and aid digestion. Once the grapefruit or its juice has been canned or in any way preserved, the value of the organic elements is lost.

Health Benefits

pH 3.00–3.75. Digestive. Fresh grapefruit, because of its salicylic acid content, has proved to be one of the most valuable fruits as an aid in the removal or dissolving of inorganic calcium that may have formed deposits in the joints (as in arthritis) as a result of excessive consumption of devitalized white flour and pasteurized milk products. Naringin, a flavonoid isolated from grapefruit, has been shown to promote the elimination of old red blood cells from the body and to normalize hematocrit levels (percentage of red blood cells per volume of blood). A compound called galacturonic acid, found only in grapefruit, adds a unique therapeutic benefit: it breaks up and dislodges the fatty plaque buildup in arteries and whisks it away. Used externally, the juice is a natural antiseptic for wounds and is valuable as a drug or poison eliminator.

One word of caution, though: avoid the extensive overuse of all citric acid fruits, as they are powerful dissolvers of the catarrhal accumulations in the body, and the elimination of too much toxic material all at once may cause boils, irritated nerves, diarrhea, and other problems. Citrus seed extract, usually derived primarily from grapefruit seeds, is available as a major ingredient in liquid extracts, capsules, and ointments. Grapefruit seed extract is extremely effective at killing dozens of bacteria, fungi, yeast, and other harmful organisms. When diluted, it can help knock out a sore throat, stop a bout of food poisoning, curb acne, clear up traveler’s diarrhea, and kill off a candida infection. Used full strength, it even makes warts vanish.

***Update: Jonathan has posted a translation of this excerpt from the speech in the Comments section. ***

At the international climate talks in Copenhagen this week, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez railed against capitalism, saying that in order to change the climate we must change the system itself. It is the growth-centric capitalist system that squeezes out true democracy and allows for an iron-fisted global hegemony by a few powerful nations.

He then held up a copy of How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth (Spanish language edition), which was given to him personally by author Hervé Kempf in Copenhagen, and read from the author preface:

To the ecological principle that was so useful at the time we first became aware— “Think globally; act locally”—we must add the principle that the present situation imposes: “Consume less; share better.”

Chávez talks about the book and its conclusions for a full two minutes, beginning at around 5:20. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an English translation of the speech.)

Visit DailyMotion here.

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Smoke if you got ‘em! (“’em” in this case being a valid license to smoke medical cannabis, a membership in NORML, and a $5 daily fee.)

Café Rumpspankers will soon be changing its name to the Cannabis Café. That’s to reflect its changing status: the café will be the first in the nation to cater exclusively to certified medical cannabis users. (Personally, I like the name Café Rumpspankers, but I guess they want to be taken more seriously. Oh, well.)

From CBS 4 Denver:

A coffee shop in Portland, Oregon is the nation’s first marijuana cafe where certified medical cannabis users can come to get the drug and smoke it, as long as they stick to state law and smoke out of public view.

Cafe Rumpspankers, which will soon carry the name Cannabis Cafe, is testing a new relaxed policy by President Barack Obama regarding medical marijuana users. The policy, handed down by the administration in October, restricts federal attorneys from prosecuting patients who use the drug for medical reasons and dispensaries in states that have legalized them.

Other states, such as California and Colorado, have legalized medicinal marijuana, but their laws only allow for dispensaries.

Read the whole article here.

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Traditionally, psychology has served to fit the status quo and protect the power structure. A philosophy that places individual pleasure above social structures is fundamentally flawed in that it alienates us from each other.

So says Dr. Bruce E. Levine, author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy. The remedy, says Levine, is a massive dose of “Liberation Psychology.”

From Z Magazine:

The term “liberation psychology” was popularized by Ignacio Martin-Baró (1942-1989), the psychologist, priest, and activist who was assassinated in El Salvador by government troops. Martin-Baró focused on the oppression of his fellow Salvadorans, Central Americans, and Latin Americans. It is increasingly apparent that U.S. citizens need Martin-Baró’s insights along with their own special kind of liberation psychology.

Why, in the United States, when the majority of people oppose the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry and the military occupation in Iraq, are the streets not regularly occupied with large numbers of protesters? Given 47 million people in the U.S. without health insurance and many millions more who are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage, and given the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, why are there not millions, rather than thousands in Washington, DC protesting this betrayal?

In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who risked their lives to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, few in the United States took to the streets to protest their own disputed 2000 presidential election. The U.S. corporate media, which often fails to report many injustices, did not hide the non-democratic nature of the 2000 presidential election. It reported that Al Gore received, undisputedly, 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. It reported that the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths about injustice or about how they have been victimized by the government-corporate partnership that can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more psychological way we become even more broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. The more we don’t act, the weaker we get. Ultimately, to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape with strategies such as depression, substance abuse, television, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Liberation psychology is quite different than the prevailing psychology that most U.S. mental health professionals practice—which is to modify, manipulate, and medicate “malcontents” so that they are not monkey wrenches for the industrial order. In addition to Martin-Baró’s insights, the U.S. needs its own version of liberation psychology in which we start by recognizing that the U.S. population has been broken, then understand how this has happened, and then find paths to regain morale, healing, wholeness, and strength.

Read the whole article here.

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