Monsanto has applied for a patent on pigs! So, it’s not enough to put crop farmers out of work, they have their GMO-reddened eyes on pigs. Monsanto just may end up owning your genetic material in the not too distance future.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/pigs.cfm
Category: Uncategorized
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this was posted in reply to barbaraQ’s blog entry about the not quite equal status of iraqi women under the not yet new constitution…i thought i’d record it here too.
women have power over life…we are the creators of life. women have power over death…we nurse those dancing with death; we soothe those kissed by death; we bathe, swaddle and let go of those taken by death.
men, fearful of our power to create and let go of life have usurped death. they starve, slash, soil and condemn to death all those they fear. and they fear us. they use death as a tool to shave our heads; cover our faces; bind our hands; burn our bodies.
so, what do we do? we do as the witches did. hide our staffs by our brooms; till our soil with our swords; fill our cups with our teas and cast our stones to the wind.
but there’s more to think about here than what i wrote to barbara. there’s more we must do privately and communally. the above is a start. we live our lives privately, honestly, fully and as nobody’s slave or fool. communally, we protect ourselves and other women, raise our children to recognize the power and worth of women and men from womb to grave. we shout. we write. we protest. we get in their faces and we don’t let up until they recognize their mistake and atone for their sin in the face of mother, daughter, lover, goddess, gaia.
and we don’t accept a lesser status…ever.
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spelling is one of those things i have managed to get compulsive about…spelling, grammar, punctuation. i kid myself that my obsession comes from the fact that i work in the field of higher education but the real reason is that i’m insecure, have an alarming lack of self-esteem and i am incredibly adept in the art of worry.
you wouldn’t think this with the lack of capitalization and the overuse of ellipses wouldja? well, i do this on purpose. it has, in a way, become my convention (one that i’m slowly abandoning, but i’ll leave that for another time). years ago, when i first got online, i found the politics list on a “board” at work. after posting awhile, i decided to dispense with caps. i have trouble with shyness and for some reason, typing in lower case made me feel less conspicuous. sure, i could pretend to be doing it out of some strange cosmic connection with ee cummings, but that would be a lie. i quickly realized there were others who did the same thing, but their reasons were different. one man did it because he was a programmer and he wanted everyone to know that. another woman did it because it was for her a sort of artistic expression of defiance. and brni typed in lower case also. after all these years, i admit i don’t know why he typed this way, but it was our first discernible link to each other. maybe he’ll tell me why after he reads this.
i also decided to type as i speak because i was (and still am) very self-conscious of my writing ability. i don’t feel i have a natural talent for it. i agonize over words, sentence structure, spelling mistakes, commas, semi-colons, parenthesis, nested parenthesis, and just exactly when the question mark falls inside or outside the quotation mark. typing as you speak is a great excuse to misspell on purpose…didja, owell, ack, argh, ya’all, whodathunkit, etc. it’s better than artistic license and it makes people think you are savvy in the ways of the internet….one of the “ins” of the internet.
but…
i still have trouble. it’s ok when i misspell on purpose, but only when it’s OBVIOUS that it’s on purpose. when it just happens…when it’s a mistake, i feel like crawling into a hole and not even peeking out to see who noticed. it’s not so bad when there’s an editing function as with livejournal, but omygod, if i send off an email and there’s a spelling mistake, or godforbid a mistake in grammar, i feel that i should send off an apology… an errata…and in fact, i’m sorry to say, i have done so.
so…
i am actively trying to remove this anal aspect from my personality, and not just about spelling. years ago it was all about time. i was always worried about being on-time and with the advent of digital clocks, things got totally out of hand. i was making myself and my family insane with worries of being late, not just by mere hours or minutes, but by seconds!
well…
this couldn’t go on. i had to find a way to stop this. so, i devised a way to ween myself off of time. i began by removing my wristwatch on the weekends. no time-checking while not at work. this was MY time and it was important to just let time flow naturally without the artificial segmentation of it into hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds. and when the battery went dead i didn’t replace it. instead, i dug out my old wind-up watch and wore that at work. the watch was old-fashioned with roman numerals instead of arabic numbers and there was no second hand. i liked hearing the tick tock and knowing that when it was first wound up, it would count time faster, slowing down throughout the day until it stopped counting time altogether. for some reason, that was comforting. soon, i began saying things like, o, it’s about half past 8 instead of it’s 8:28 pm.
later, i started forgetting to wind the watch on mondays. then i started actively forgetting it on other days until i stopped wearing the watch altogether. ahhh…this was nice. time was free to move on it’s own without help from me.
but…
even though i’m not wearing a watch on my body anymore, i still obsess about being late. i plan and plot out all sorts of things when i’m getting ready to take a trip…what time to get up, how much stuff to have packed and ready the night before, the day before, the week before. it goes on until i have to mentally bitch-slap myself out of it. to overcome this problem, i have instituted a method of inaction. i do not physically pack anything until the last minute (granted, my last minute is probably 12 hours before anyone else’s last minute, but hey, this is a process!). so, all the planning is going on behind the cranium, but the actual physical manifestation of getting ready just sort of floats out there in front of my third eye, palpable but untouched until compulsion loosens its death-grip around my throat. oyeah, this is all really really visceral for me. we are not talking philosophy here.
and then there is the problem of getting lost. planning must always factor in getting lost time. multiple maps and directions from various sources (mapquest, yahoo, AAA, better world club) are imperative to minimize getting lost time. still, a system must be in place to compute lost minutes-to-distance ratio. this usually results in showing up early which can be just as problematic, but much easier to deal with than being late. if you’re early you can simply pull over and sit for however many minutes it takes until you are on time.
but it really is getting better and i really am beginning to relax about time and being prepared for every little thing that could possibly happen on the way to wherever.
(and btw, i’m not at all convinced that time is linear, so obsessing over the minute by minute management of it might well be a a colossal waste of time, which makes this whole thing rather silly, no?)
so, back to spelling…
new rule: unless it’s for publication, i refuse to use spell checkers and i’m trying extremely hard to stay away from online dictionaries. it’s hard, but…spelling is not the measure of the quality of a thought, idea or opinion. a misplaced, dropped or transposed letter does not change the meaning of the thing. typos do not define the worth of a human being.
o, but even this is a problem. i hate rules and here i am making them so that i can live without them. heh. i’m sick of rules ruling my life, my actions, my very thoughts. why do we have so many rules? what are we afraid of? spontaneity? creativity? originality? mistakes? oyeah, baby! mistakes! not fitting in! BEING OUT THERE FOR ALL TO SEE AND DOING IT WRONG!
ack…
turns out, this is the easiest of all my obsessions to get rid of. i hate rules so much that i find a sweet, subversive delight in ignoring them. not breaking them so much, just paying them no-nevermind.
it might just be the fact that i’m getting older. i just don’t see the point in all the structure anymore. as gravity is breaking down my physical structure…bringing me literally (at least parts of me) closer to the earth, the source…grounding me…i find i have little time to indulge in these pointless obsessions. they are becoming mere annoyances and i’m becoming a bit more casual about many things. my interests are turning to broader things in nature, fluid things, invisible things, things with no straight edges or right angles. i’m hoping that one day all the lines will bend, angles will soften and i will become so careless about the everyday stuff in my everyday life that time will stretch forever and the meaning of life will reveal itself freely, without boundaries or rules to inhibit the joy of it all.
or maybe not.
who needs meaning anyway?
just let it be… -
this is from Organic Consumers Organization. aside from the coverups and our lousy testing standards, it now appears that mad cow disease can be contracted through blood products.
there are real reasons not to eat red meat, but if you do, please…eat only meat produced by organic producers who do not feed their animals contaminated feed. of course, this means never eating at fast food joints, most restaurants and school cafeterias.
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GLOBAL MAD COW BYTESJAPAN: Japanese food safety regulators were shocked by a new Ministry of Agriculture study revealing that nearly half of Japanese confirmed mad cow cases would not have been discovered if the nation had been using U.S. testing techniques. Although the U.S. already has a shaky reputation internationally for its lax testing procedures for mad cow disease, consumers in Japan, formerly the largest overseas market for U.S. beef, were shocked to learn, that in 9 out of 20 cases, U.S. testing would have mistakenly allowed animals with the fatal brain-wasting disease to go to market.
U.S.: New evidence, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, reveals yet another mad cow cover-up by the USDA. In this case, back in 2003, a cow with all of the symptoms of the fatal and contagious disease had brain samples tested, which mysteriously turned up negative. Newly uncovered USDA documents reveal that the agency knowingly tested the wrong part of the brain and made no efforts to do further testing.
UK: A select group of blood donors in the UK are being advised to get checked for vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Roughly one hundred donors gave blood to three people in 1993 and 1994. Those three people have since died of vCJD, and UK doctors say the chance the disease was transmitted via donated blood is quite high.
More Mad Cow Info: http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm
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another nightmare on monday…one of those with a sub-theme that occurs over and over.
i was in this house that was not our house, but we were living there it was all very high tech and white…everything was white…walls, shag (ugh) carpeting, furniture…everything. there was a little baby there that i was taking care of and he was very important to the world. anyway…there were 3 doors to this house. front, side and back doors. the front and back doors were locked tight, but the side door didn’t lock well…it was very old and didn’t latch onto the door frame well at all. you could throw the lock but still push the door open.
some horrible people were trying to break into the house…some men led by a very nasty woman. they were trying to kill me and get the baby. i was struggling to secure the house…checking the locks as these people were surrounding the house, trying to get it. no matter what i did, i couldn’t seem to get the back door to lock. i threw the bold, but it wouldn’t catch…i tried holding the door at different angles, pushing it tight, pulling it, trying to line the bold up but it just wouldn’t latch. there was a really old hook and eye lock that i managed to set, but it wouldn’t take much to just bust through that one. so i tried putting furniture up against the door to buy time. brni was out but were supposed to come back soon. i was trying to call him on the cell but just couldn’t seem to get through. i was trapped and defenseless.
difficulty locking doors and not being able to use telephones are old dream-scape themes for me. very frustrating and very scary. i hate recurring dreams like these. and they usually come in clusters, so i expect not to be getting much in the way of restful sleep for awhile.
Croneswood Art 