The insidious cancer-like growth that systemically mutates before everyones downward-cast eyes has a price that far too many shoppers fail to evaluate. The transformation before us, is all too reminiscent of Hollywood monster blockbusters -- more precisely, this multi-dimensional monopolistic growth is more like science fiction madness -- a cross between Darth Vader (evil empire), The Borg (assimilation) and the romanticism of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (third reich nazi stuff).
The hyper-leap to walmart as an evil beast in transition, is often not a matter of objective discussion, or observation, as if there is a will by many to be polite about the obvious manifestations of a crippling and disfiguring disease. Perhaps there is a generational change of guard and a shift in the ways in which society views its relationships and interactions with an increasingly complex struggle to survive.
People in denial about economic decay across the globe look to politics and the symbolic corruption on wall street, and then, they go about their lives looking for ways to save nickels, dimes and dollars. It's therefore no small coincidence that a corporation that uses global scale and politics to crush competition would be the hero to so may people that are being oppressed. Rich and poor alike collectively unite in synonymous and utopian thinking found in Benjamin Franklin's misquoted folk wisdom, that "A penny saved is a penny earned". As pennies are saved, few ponder the cost of freedom and few look to the future with hope.
Franklin and The American Revolution serve as a useful starting point for this blog, and the modern-day struggle of mis-representation, economic abuses and unfolding stories that define society. Americans have a proud history in being united to represent what is right and then standing up for just causes. I'm an American Blogger and I have a story to tell about injustice.
News stories today, along with all hypermedia are moving targets that provide both distorted noise, and clarity. As such, I find myself wondering where to start this blog, or how to connect chaotic parts of scattered stories into a jigsaw puzzle that connects content into a meaningful framework.
My focus is to point a finger at walmart, hollywood, the United States Chamber of Commerce and various political organizations and gain a better understanding of what's going on in America -- things seem really screwed up and there is a lot of confusion as we head into the political nightmare of 2012.
A current topic to immediately jump into is the hotbed topic of legislation related to SOPA, PIPA & Hollywood media content, which for all practical purposes may as well be called political porn. This is a rough way to start a blog, but this story has to unfold in parts in order to make more sense. I hope you'll be patient as I develop media content, stories and links for this project:
Update: March 31st, 2012 @ 9:55 am:
I'll be re-arranging this blog puzzle and see what happens. I found some interesting weather posts the other day and wanted to share those, but that subject doesn't connect with much here -- and staying on topic for anything (lately) seems increasingly challenging.
As I look back, this blog starts out with general walmart, SOPA and injustice themes -- and now, currently drifting off into oil tax loopholes and stray political shit. I have made comments that I didn't want to get stuck in one area -- so I'm going to attempt to de-construct this entire thing and put it back together in a new way.
The main problem is to feel constrained by a blog that needs to have continuity in terms of single subjects or an on-going focus, e.g., a fixation on cupcakes or the broader generalized area of sweet treats, or a desire to communicate about ethics. I think these blog-world micro-focused topics end up burning out and going nowhere, and then blogs end up in blog purgatory, waiting to be deleted.
I think a better solution in terms of continuity is to break up blogging subjects into Wiki-like pages, where a subject can be continually explored and updated, and thus remain dynamic. Blogs are generally too static and that's why they die off. Blogs that have exciting cupcake recipes from just 1999 are pointless -- if someone wants a history of cupcakes, a more dynamic blog with greater information scale is obviously going to have more current and future value.
Hence, I'm hoping to group my topics into a new logical format -- but, Blogger may work against me on this, i.e., it may be easier to just have 5 different blogs, versus 5 dynamic pages.
I think this all comes down to simple structure and continuity, e.g., the first story in a page sequence will always be the latest most up-to-date information. That's actually the core of the problem here, i.e., I would post a story, rant and rave and then add in links and content as I went along -- and that's a bad thing, because as more info is added to the post, the continuity breaks down -- and thus as a post grows in length, the most up-to-date info is buried at the bottom; the continuity becomes totally chaotic.
The solution is to have pet topics that have the most current activity as the first thing you see. A blog should be more like an RSS-feed that expands into an archive. The weakness of Wiki, is that it sets up a topic and then buries the relationship between current thinking and the historical continuity of subject matter -- that's actually why so many news stories are a waste of time, i.e., because current information is distorted into simplicity and lacks depth.
In the perfect world of HyperMedianews, the best way to look at a topic, is to use a dynamic RSS feed and then tap into a dynamic archive of related consolidated content -- this way, a person can look at information scale and gain greater perspective.
In the perfect world of HyperMedianews, the best way to look at a topic, is to use a dynamic RSS feed and then tap into a dynamic archive of related consolidated content -- this way, a person can look at information scale and gain greater perspective.
I have 23 posts so far and 341 meta-key word/labels so consolidating this into a better structure will make this a better resource, which hopefully will be easier to deal with ....
The first thing I'll do is consolidate walmart posts and then take a look at what that looks like, then move to energy. The main problem with many of these topics is the overlapping and intertwined tentacles of politics, lobbying, corruption, tax evasion, ethics and stuff like that related to society; I'm still not sure how to break that out, other than to use bold red type or hilite connections. SOPA stands out as a very weird topic that touches walmart, justice, corruption, ethics, technology, media -- complex, yet simple, yet where does it fit?
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The first thing I'll do is consolidate walmart posts and then take a look at what that looks like, then move to energy. The main problem with many of these topics is the overlapping and intertwined tentacles of politics, lobbying, corruption, tax evasion, ethics and stuff like that related to society; I'm still not sure how to break that out, other than to use bold red type or hilite connections. SOPA stands out as a very weird topic that touches walmart, justice, corruption, ethics, technology, media -- complex, yet simple, yet where does it fit?
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I stumbled on a webpage today, and as with surfing, one thing jumps into another, and sometimes, along the paths of chaos and logic, there are connections that make sense. The title of this blog was a phrase I heard on a Youtube Video -- the ending of that speech links to this statement:
"And so I say to you today, that if you wish to align yourselves with the disposed and the marginalized, reject the language and ideology of colonialism, conquest and exploitation. As my colleague Waziyatawin told Occupy Oakland “distinguish yourselves from the builders and players of Wall Street”. Place decolonization at the centre of your movement and abandon the language of occupation. And if you want to be really brave and radical, place the concerns and the issues of Indigenous women at the centre of your de-occupation.
Miigwech, Mi’iw. Her video is here:
I liked the idea, "We all share the same bowl" because it triggers all sorts of ideas and reactions, which I hope to get to later. Sewatokwa’tshera’t, the Dish with One Spoon seems like the perfect way to look at the Keystone Pipeline and the madness of our world.
Intermission music break:
Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s has been amended by Young in concert over the decades, and currently is sung as "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century."
I never dreamed this morning that my blog-territory would use an example of Palinism -- but, WTF:
"With [environmentalists'] nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you're doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You're not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous."
By placing that new Palinism context into the ancient framework that we all share the same bowl -- then mix in ideas from the quote from Occupy Oakland, i.e., "place the concerns and the issues of Indigenous women at the centre of your de-occupation" -- then I think we get some new friction and sparks for a fire.
I just love how this stuff falls together. You have the haters like Palin, who hate people that want a clean environment and vilify them for being protective and proactive -- and then you have all the GOP haters -- the right-wing religious frothers -- whipping around at high speed, splattering bullshit about all the lost Keystone job. Then you have the Democrats sitting on their hands waiting for scrapes to fall off the table, and hoping for glimpses of change and whatever hand-out comes along.
Hence, the Kleptocracy infrastructure fuels itself like hamsters on a treadmill, spinning around in circles about how we need jobs, need energy, need new leadership, need social reforms -- but yet, as these rodents speak half-truths -- they always forget about accountability. When was the last time you heard a politician talk about accountability, audits and facts? When they refer to jobs, what are the facts, when they talk about energy, do they talk about the total story that includes reclamation and toxic waste -- and when they talk about leadership, what have they realistically done and how much of what they did do -- was part of a payoff or bribe that connects them to special interests?
- We all share the same bowl
- You're not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them, blah, blah
- Place the concerns and the issues of Indigenous women at the centre of your de-occupation
What if we looked at the specific context of how many jobs have been created for women in the oil industry in the last few years. Let's examine the viewpoint that Big Oil, like Big Pharma and Too Big To Fail Banks, are doing the vast majority of God's work -- and hence, let's see how many women are being placed into BIG jobs:
Example # 1 provides the backdrop of government:
The percentage of visible minorities in the public service increased to 11.3 per cent in 2011 from 10.7 per cent in 2010, according to the Treasury Board report. Aboriginals accounted for 4.7 per cent of the public service, while people with disabilities accounted for 5.6 per cent of the 202,631 public servants that fall under the Treasury Board umbrella.
The numbers did not impress senators on the human rights committee, which in 2010 released a report critical of federal government hiring practices.
"It remains to me distressing that we can have senior officials from the public service of Canada appearing before parliamentary committees and they don't represent the mosaic of Canada and today is no exception," said Senator Donald Oliver.
Example #2: Who cares about Canada? What about American Women? The following series is interesting, but who has time for this stuff?
It's interesting to see that in 2010, out of 88, 576 employees in the US oil industry, 23,973 were women, or about 73% of the labor force looked like Men. If one looks closer areas like Total Workforce involved in Office & Clerical Work, over 55% of all the employees are white women (5,247) and by contrast the next largest race represented for O&CW is Hispanic, with 974 jobs. Hispanic male counterparts scored lower in that area with 166 jobs.
The best way to look at that data is the Participation Rate, which sums things up faster:
Of All Employees, 79.69% are Men, 70.69% are White, sort of like Palin, Newt and myself. So, with that color on our paint brush, let's assume that the Keystone Pipeline will create a massive wave of employment for America's national security -- versus the reality that this tar shit is headed to China to help those guys live cheaper. As I recall, the GOP Frothers are suggesting the pipeline project will create about 100,000 jobs. Thus, of those illusionary mis-calculated and hyped numbers, we can assume that the majority of jobs will go to White people that most likely belong to the GOP. Actually, this whole mess has nothing to do with people or their color, it's about getting the cheap oil from Canada to China -- where "global corporations" can evade taxes, get cheap labor, and not be held accountable for destroying things in their paths. This isn't about anything but finding cheap grease to make the machines of greed turn a little faster -- while Newt and Palin pretend that God wants them to help China and all the yellow people. It's pathetic bullshit and if you want the GOP to talk about jobs, have them talk about remediation jobs and jobs to clean up all the tailing ponds in Canada. Maybe those are jobs that decrease profits ... who can say?
Realistically, is China going to pay more for their oil, in order to support the people and environments that they impact -- places where they don't live? Is China willing to pay a premium tax to gain a resource they need -- or more likely, is China going to continue to get what China wants, because of corruption and greed throughout government agencies? Does Red China need the support of Palin, Newt, Romney and Obama -- or do they just need one Canadian Prime Minister?
Here's a story recently found a few seconds ago; somewhat related:
"Just last week, Caterpillar Inc shut its Electro-Motive locomotive plant in London, Ontario, after failing to force through deep wage cuts. At least 450 people lost their jobs."
Let's all guess, those old jobs probably end up in China, like the tar oil -- but no one really cares, and maybe as a wild guess, what if the tar sands is the only thing that Canada can sell at this point, and what if their entire future depends on selling out to China -- because the entire Canadian population wants to save money on shit, and suck up to China and walk away from having any self respect. After all these are just Canadians, who for decades were as laid back as sloths -- until the price of oil was manipulated ...
Remember that oil spike that seems to be here again?
The recession caused demand for energy to shrink in late 2008, with oil prices falling from the July 2008 high of $147 to a December 2008 low of $32.[12] Oil prices stabilized by October 2009 and established a trading range between $60 and $80.....
I bet you a barrel of oil, oil prices will rocket as the election gets closer .... no, make that 10 barrels and let's say oil goes back to shocking, record breaking levels as a way to buy the election. Obama sucks, but the GOP will destroy America with its madness!
I don't know how many readers made the connection, but the concept that "We all eat from the same bowl" is complicated by greed, and those that do have more, often don't share. I watched a video with Cornell West and put him into one of my old Occupy Video edits, and in that piece, he says:
"He decried the “moral obscenity” of 1 percent of the population controlling 42 percent of the wealth. He criticized both a “mean-spirited, mendacious, mediocre set of Republican candidates” and “milquetoast” Democrats as contributing to the problem."
Here's my video:
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! ♥