Friday, April 15, 2011
#links
#links I am living the life of a gyspy right now. I live in an RV and travel where ever in the USA. When people ask me where I am from I ask how far back do they want me to go. Yesterday I was in Junction City. Today and tomorrow I will be in Marysville KS. Trying to get the pictures I have saved in my mind into fabric is a big challenge for me. It gets easier as I learn more about how to do it. Jackie
Insecticide Dangers
Have you read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson? It is an old book, copyright 1962, but I am just now reading it. Now I am aware of the fact that I added to the human made poisons around and in the earth. DDT was suppose to be the god-sent savior for the world, eliminating the bugs that pestered us, sickened us and ate ‘our’ food. Actually it did but at a greater price than we should be willing to pay. Now there are traces of DDT in the livers and other organs of most animals in the world.
The story most of us know is the bald eagle story. They were nearly gone from the world because the eggs they laid in the spring were not fertile, or the shells were so thin they broke before the eaglet was ready for life. This was caused by the DDT in the adult birds. So we got smart and quit using DDT. Now the birds are coming back to numbers that we can enjoy watching them again.
But how many of us quit using the other poisons that were sold to kill anything we didn’t want around? I know I didn’t. I still used systemic fertilizers on my roses so the bugs wouldn’t eat them. Of course the bugs died but so did the critters that ate the bugs.
And that is where the real tragedy comes into play. Every dead bug on the earth even if it is not eaten is leaving the poison in the dirt. Then it rains the residue is washed away, eventually to the streams and rivers and the ocean. On the way other animals and people drink the water and get DDT in their livers and other organs in the body. When we eat the beast of the field or the fish from the waters we take the compound into our bodies too. So no living creature is safe.
Could this be the cause of some of the diseases that are plaguing us now? There is a steady increase the numbers of Alzheimer patients that is being blamed on just getting old, but maybe, just maybe, it is caused by the poisons that have been put in or near our food. The residue may be building up in our brains.
Attention deficits disorders are increasing. More poisons in the brain? It is a very real possibility. Some parents get results when they remove food additives from the children’s diet. That may be just the over load that the brain can’t tolerate and function.
John Muir said everything in the world is connected to everything else. And the bible says “As ye sows so shall ye reap”.
Can we fix what is broken? Sure hope so.
The story most of us know is the bald eagle story. They were nearly gone from the world because the eggs they laid in the spring were not fertile, or the shells were so thin they broke before the eaglet was ready for life. This was caused by the DDT in the adult birds. So we got smart and quit using DDT. Now the birds are coming back to numbers that we can enjoy watching them again.
But how many of us quit using the other poisons that were sold to kill anything we didn’t want around? I know I didn’t. I still used systemic fertilizers on my roses so the bugs wouldn’t eat them. Of course the bugs died but so did the critters that ate the bugs.
And that is where the real tragedy comes into play. Every dead bug on the earth even if it is not eaten is leaving the poison in the dirt. Then it rains the residue is washed away, eventually to the streams and rivers and the ocean. On the way other animals and people drink the water and get DDT in their livers and other organs in the body. When we eat the beast of the field or the fish from the waters we take the compound into our bodies too. So no living creature is safe.
Could this be the cause of some of the diseases that are plaguing us now? There is a steady increase the numbers of Alzheimer patients that is being blamed on just getting old, but maybe, just maybe, it is caused by the poisons that have been put in or near our food. The residue may be building up in our brains.
Attention deficits disorders are increasing. More poisons in the brain? It is a very real possibility. Some parents get results when they remove food additives from the children’s diet. That may be just the over load that the brain can’t tolerate and function.
John Muir said everything in the world is connected to everything else. And the bible says “As ye sows so shall ye reap”.
Can we fix what is broken? Sure hope so.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Why we need unions.
I was just reading a magazine named “UNTE”. It is a collection of articles from other publications. The theme this month is ‘putting America back to “work”. Very interesting. What piqued my interest was how much better other countries are doing with strong unions. The average worker in Germany, an example given, is far better off financially than American workers are now.
The peak time for the middle class in America was the 1950’s when our unions were the strongest. There was a true middle class worker then. A class of people who could work a 40 hour week and buy a house, support a family and save money for retirement.
I know for a fact that in 1968 my hubby and I bought a house. His hourly wage was $6.25 an hour. The house was a mid priced house at $20,000. Nowadays people are expected to work for $10 an hour and the houses cost $200,000 or more for a regular house. In fact the last time I checked, about 30 years ago, the price on the same house we had bought at $20,000 it was $125,000.
Taking car production away from the Detroit union production workers has not helped the car companies. There are fewer people who can afford a new car now. And the government has to bail out the car companies. The money the government uses to do that comes partially from US tax payers and partially from the increasing government debt.
When people earn less money they have less to spend on goods that could be manufactured in this country. Goods made cheaply and poorly in other countries are sold here at high prices and the retail companies, like Wal-Mart, are making a bigger profit. And to put the finishing touch on the lopsided cake, retail clerks are some of the worst treated workers in this country. They are expected to work short hours so they don’t get any kind of health insurance and do it for poor pay.
What can we do to fix this? Right now I don’t have any idea. If anyone has an idea leave a comment. In the mean time I will use any resources I can think of to try and find something that we of the former middle class can do to fix things.
The peak time for the middle class in America was the 1950’s when our unions were the strongest. There was a true middle class worker then. A class of people who could work a 40 hour week and buy a house, support a family and save money for retirement.
I know for a fact that in 1968 my hubby and I bought a house. His hourly wage was $6.25 an hour. The house was a mid priced house at $20,000. Nowadays people are expected to work for $10 an hour and the houses cost $200,000 or more for a regular house. In fact the last time I checked, about 30 years ago, the price on the same house we had bought at $20,000 it was $125,000.
Taking car production away from the Detroit union production workers has not helped the car companies. There are fewer people who can afford a new car now. And the government has to bail out the car companies. The money the government uses to do that comes partially from US tax payers and partially from the increasing government debt.
When people earn less money they have less to spend on goods that could be manufactured in this country. Goods made cheaply and poorly in other countries are sold here at high prices and the retail companies, like Wal-Mart, are making a bigger profit. And to put the finishing touch on the lopsided cake, retail clerks are some of the worst treated workers in this country. They are expected to work short hours so they don’t get any kind of health insurance and do it for poor pay.
What can we do to fix this? Right now I don’t have any idea. If anyone has an idea leave a comment. In the mean time I will use any resources I can think of to try and find something that we of the former middle class can do to fix things.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Too Many People
The other day I read a bit of news that is scary to me. Every second there are 12 babies born and every second there are 8 deaths.That means we are continuing to fill the earth. The earth is a finite thing. It will only support a certain number of creatures.
So today I looked it up on the web and learned that as of noon on February 14 there are 6,899,943,795 people on the earth. That is a lot of mouths to feed. If we all ate nothing but fish from the oceans we could be starving to death. Many kinds of fish are in danger of becoming extinct. But since we eat other things the strain is spread out to other things as well.
And even if you are a vegetarian you need space to grow your food. Therefore there would be less land available for toad and snail and bears and hawks. Don't forget they need to eat too. The disappearance of habitat is the reason many of the wild creatures are having a hard time staying alive.
The reason the spotted owl was having a hard time was not because it was hunted and killed but the fact that the area of forest it inhabited was being cut down to make houses for mankind. A simple fact. And the more children we have the more houses we will need to build, not to mention the farm land to raise the food on.
I think the rulers in China were right when they decided that each family should have only one child. It lessened the strain on the countryside a great deal. Just think if there were two or three times as many people trying to live on the produce from the farms there now. It would be hard to do.
In order to bring back the herds of animals and huge flocks of birds and the richness of an ocean full of fish we need to slow our people growth. I actually wonder when we are going to have another "Black Plague" to depopulate the earth. About one third of the people in Europe died at that time.
Just imagine how quickly the rivers would recover and run clean if one third of the waste we put in the water was not there. And one third of the pollution we pump in the air everyday was not happening the skies would be blue again all over the world.
Can we fix it without a Plague?
So today I looked it up on the web and learned that as of noon on February 14 there are 6,899,943,795 people on the earth. That is a lot of mouths to feed. If we all ate nothing but fish from the oceans we could be starving to death. Many kinds of fish are in danger of becoming extinct. But since we eat other things the strain is spread out to other things as well.
And even if you are a vegetarian you need space to grow your food. Therefore there would be less land available for toad and snail and bears and hawks. Don't forget they need to eat too. The disappearance of habitat is the reason many of the wild creatures are having a hard time staying alive.
The reason the spotted owl was having a hard time was not because it was hunted and killed but the fact that the area of forest it inhabited was being cut down to make houses for mankind. A simple fact. And the more children we have the more houses we will need to build, not to mention the farm land to raise the food on.
I think the rulers in China were right when they decided that each family should have only one child. It lessened the strain on the countryside a great deal. Just think if there were two or three times as many people trying to live on the produce from the farms there now. It would be hard to do.
In order to bring back the herds of animals and huge flocks of birds and the richness of an ocean full of fish we need to slow our people growth. I actually wonder when we are going to have another "Black Plague" to depopulate the earth. About one third of the people in Europe died at that time.
Just imagine how quickly the rivers would recover and run clean if one third of the waste we put in the water was not there. And one third of the pollution we pump in the air everyday was not happening the skies would be blue again all over the world.
Can we fix it without a Plague?
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Adding another layer to my life. I am always thinking of something and some times it is different than the guy next door. But here I can say what I want and you can use it as a place to start your own thoughts. We all have the right to think what we want.
Right now I am thinking about how much life has changed since I got out of high school over 50 years ago. Computers? Cell Phone? The World Wide Web? Digital Cameras? And that is just the tip of the iceburg.
Add to that Interstate Hiways, Jet Planes and speed limits on the roads of as much as 70 miles an hour. Do you realize that now you can travel futher in an hour than the pioneers could travel in a week? The road to Oregon was a long hard road. I imagne what I will add to the world will not be as drastic. But still as humans keep changing our perceptions of the world I will undoubtable change mine and possibly yours.
So this is my change. Sharing my thoughts with the world. Hope you enjoy my travels in my mind and my moving home.
Right now I am thinking about how much life has changed since I got out of high school over 50 years ago. Computers? Cell Phone? The World Wide Web? Digital Cameras? And that is just the tip of the iceburg.
Add to that Interstate Hiways, Jet Planes and speed limits on the roads of as much as 70 miles an hour. Do you realize that now you can travel futher in an hour than the pioneers could travel in a week? The road to Oregon was a long hard road. I imagne what I will add to the world will not be as drastic. But still as humans keep changing our perceptions of the world I will undoubtable change mine and possibly yours.
So this is my change. Sharing my thoughts with the world. Hope you enjoy my travels in my mind and my moving home.
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