Stop the Beef Madness for All Our Sake!

We need to begin to treat beef as a luxury food, for our health, for the environment and for the sake of providing more food for the rest of the world, healthy food derived from the resources previously used by an out of control cattle and beef industry. We need to eat our beef as often as a meal of a large lobster for the average coastal dwelling human. It needs to be expensive and rare in our diets for all our sakes.

A fantasy photo staged by an industry photographer for advertising.
There are very few spacious pastures like this one left in the United States.

 Beef needs to be rare and expensive because we are feedings millions of tons of food and water into the most over harvested animal on the planet. An animal that is a glutton of vegetation and feed, and a destroyer of land under it's hoofs, and is a polluter of our air, gives fatty deposits to arteries and hearts of those who eat it. Beef cattle raising and slaughter is the most wasteful and inefficient method of food harvesting the planet has ever known. 53% of all of the meat we eat is beef. We are keeping alive more than 80 million cattle on any given day in the Unites States. We are slaughtering at least 93 thousand cattle daily, 33 million annually in the U.S.. We sell $79 billion in beef annually, some of that internationally, which costs us $56 billion annually to produce, not a great return especially considering the great many unaccountable costs of detriment and loss to people and environment from it's consumption. Per capita (each of us as a division of the population) we will spend $261.90 on beef, which is 53% of all spending on meat. A cow will excrete up to 286 lbs of methane gas per year, or 9.6 fluid ounces of pure methane - a carbon emission contributing to global climate change. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that world-wide live cattle contribute to nearly 5% of all greenhouse gas climate changing pollutant. Millions of acres of oxygen creating forest (that ironically could process much of that pollutant) have been cut-down around the world to make room for grazing herds of cattle. A herd of cattle, 44 head on average, can destroy an acre of fertile vegetative land in one week, by trampling and destroying soil and vegetation under hoof (300-500 lb/sq. in. per hoof), and by poisoning top-soil with thousands of gallons of salty urine, making further growth for growing food or for grazing cattle impossible for many years on that acre. To raise between 3 and 5 head of cattle foraging/grazing on native vegetation, a rancher requires 5 fertile acres to be sacrificed for his return, for our return of thousands of cheeseburgers for instance. Two large rural African villages could eat heartily from the crops of five acres.

 

Thanks to hormone, steroid, and breeding sciences we have created larger cattle with our manipulations, but that has only made matters worse incrementally and efficiency gained for that effort is

Typical new large cow of modern manipulation.

negligible. A cow yielded on average 449 lbs of production meat in 1980. That cow now yields 632 lbs. in 2009. But in terms of output verses input and environmental destruction, that larger cow makes no difference, is not an efficiency, just a big steroid filled, genetically manipulated larger hunk of meat with more bone problems. It still must be grain fed (most cattle are grain fed manually), and it's water supplied at it's new 2009 size. What we do get is nine year old girls growing breasts, and many more 7 foot tall basketball players, and many other maladies and abnormalities including puberty and reproduction malformations, and cholesterol levels nation wide that if combined could fill a large lake with pure fat. Today's new cattle will consume over 2,000 gallons of water per year each on average. For comparison humans only need to consume 182 gallons of water annually. Cattle will consume up to 2.5% of their body weight in dry grain per day. In human comparison that would be like us eating almost 4 lbs of dry food per day or over 10 lbs. of wet food. We consider our selves efficient processors of food and water - why raise an animal to eat which is multiple times more grossly inefficient as compared to our needs?

The land occupied and destroyed by grazing, and occupied by corn, barely, oat, and soy to feed most of the grain eating cattle, can be far better utilized for grain, fruits and vegetables enough to feed the humans of rest of the world. If you must eat beef, eat it infrequently, as a luxury food.  Remember, as you chomp through that fatty delicious burger, that meat and the being it once belonged to, once had feeling and emotion no different from your own.

We need to consider the feelings of these animals. All mammals possess a cerebral cortex, the cow is no different. Our large cortex allows more cognition, and so more emotion as a result of that cognition. There in the thinner cortex of the cows each

As emotional as we are. Human cow love.

processes enough cortex so that cognitively what they see and experience through senses, results in emotion, causing them to act, if they can. Emotion often expressed as familial behavior, love for their calves not unlike our love for our children, loyalty to others in the herd, emotional breakdown when seeing loss and stress of others near them. We ignore that these are emotion filled animals. Ask any farm raised child if his cows, his goats, have ever had an emotional attachment to him or her, and the answer is always "yes definitely." Many a family has made "Clarabelle" the family cow, their pet and keep it alive and share in affection for it, and even receive return affections, wanting for human touch and company from the humans. These are the beings we are destroying the lives of every day. We bring them into the world to raise and eat. They experience the emotions of loss of their young, deaths of others, illness of other cattle, danger to the herd and so on. They are hugely emotion experiencing animals. Like our pet dogs and cats. Yet we'll slaughter more than 93,000 of them today, for cheeseburgers with lettuce and tomato.

News Flash: September 11, 2014. McDonalds has announced "across all regions in August, the fifth monthly drop since July 2012."  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/business/mcdonalds-sales-dip-globally-china-scandal-will-hurt-profit.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar

Assembed Twitts to proliferate this article:
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #USDA #CDC #Menshealth #starvation
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #WHO #unicef #hunger #food
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #health #healthcare #chd #heartattack
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #heartdisease #diet #meateaters #butcher
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #redmeat #ranching #cattle #usda #USHHS
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #cholesterol #hearthealthy #consumer #AMA #NEJM
#Beef it's what's not good for anyone. bit.ly/SdMzvG  pic.twitter.com/KfjDVVAt #fat #fattyfoods #sirloinsteak #hamburger #cheeseburger

Sources:

Acres of land occupied by cattle: 2 -5 full sized cows raised to harvest size on 5 acres seems to be the consensus on forums. https://www.localharvest.org/forum/thread.jsp?forum=6&thread=461

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_methane_does_a_cow_produce "Methane emissions per animal from this assessment are comparable to figures
obtained by Schils et al. (2007b), Cederberg et al. (2009) in OECD countries (ranging from 110 to 130 kg methane per cow per year) and by Herrero et al. (2008) in Africa (ranging between 21 and 40 kg methane per livestock unit per year)."

 

Beef Cattleman's Assoc. http://www.beefusa.org/CMDocs/BeefUSA/Resources/Statistics/annualcattlenumbersandbeefproduction774.pdf

From Beefusa.org Cattlemen's assoc

http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx

 80 million alive today in the USA alone.  some 27 million are feeder calves.

Average $500 grain per year each.

53% of all meat eaten is beef each year.

33.5 million head harvested, 26 billion pounds of beef harvested under usda inspection. Would mean that we are slaughtering 93 thousand head per day.

Total cost per year $55 billion of livestock.

$79 Billion processed in USA annually

 http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/faq7811

• Cows will consume between 1.8% and 2% of their body weight on a dry basis of a low quality feed.
• Cows will consume between 2.0% and 2.2% of their body weight on a dry basis of an average quality feed.
• Cows will consume between 2.2% and 2.5% (during lactation it may be as high as 2.7%) of their body weight on a dry basis of a high quality feed. (University of Nebraska, Beef Cattle Production website)

The Decremental Cigarette Inspires Nicotine Step-Down - Saves Lives

Tiny red lines could save lives and actually prevent allot of suffering related to cigarette smoking. But it just has to be done! Perhaps courageously by cigarette makers acting like humans, or by regulation of government upon the cigarette makers to force this moral and simple solution to reduce nicotine addiction. Reductions in daily nicotine, or stepping-down, is a known successful way to quit for long periods and in many cases permanently, and the Decremented Cigarette will help everyone participate mindfully with each new cigarette in taking those downward steps. With the thin red lines of the Decremented Cigarette the amount the user is smoking is very visible every time they bring the cigarette toward their mouth, in this manner the alternative to chose to snuff-out early is made a forefront thought for the candidate quitter.

Every smoker thinks about quitting almost every time they light-up. For some the thought passes quickly as something not likely for themselves personally. Self discipline against the addiction, or willful resistance, is very difficult in the case of nicotine in tobacco. Quitting cold-turkey abruptly is painful and too challenging. But decremented and so using less of your cigarette each time one use's it is reasonable.

We must spread the idea to our friends and neighbors, we must petition our government and petition the cigarette makers to make this bold step. It would be easy for the manufacturers to do. But it would definitely cost them money across all ages and types of smokers as consumption decreases, and so they must be willing to make that negative corporate choice. Chronic snuffers / liners / "replenishers" are a market that will exist even with the Decrement Cigarette in existence and popular, this group will hold-out the longest, purchasing additional cigarettes while discarding many longer butts during the day.

The proposal is so reasonable that if they (big tobacco) refuse to do this, the public should then see the cigarette companies as dastardly and villainous in refusing to introduce the simple and health conscience decremented lines, an

The people should act using democracy.

Like it? Contact a cigarette maker and tell them!
Philip Morris USA contact form.

After all cigarettes are delineated with decrement lines, small decorative Cigarette Snuffers will be popular among "liners." Stores with products like theses would see more business! http://www.createdbymechel.com/html/cigarette_snuffers.html

Casino theme Cigarette Snuffers

Below are assembled Twitts to conduct your own campaign using social media to effect this simple and beneficial idea to becoming a reality.

Decrement #Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM bit.ly/TJxosM

Decrement #Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM bit.ly/TJxosM #RJReynoldsTobbaco

Decrement #Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM bit.ly/TJxosM #quitsmoking

@USFDA Decrement Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM #FDA #ACS #cancer

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@Bat #bat @bats #bats Decrement Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM
 

@AdrisGroupadd @AdrisGroup Decrement Smoking w Red Lines on #CIGARETTES can aide successful quit! pic.twitter.com/j7unMvay bit.ly/TJxosM
 

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There Has Never Been a Better Time for 100% Public Campaign Financing

 

 "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."

- President Teddy Roosevelt, 1905

We have proven beyond a doubt that our current electoral campaign finance system mostly does not work for anyone but the wealthy. This inequity is why United States representative democracy has never truly been in place. If you think that historically what works well for the wealthy, works well for you in the long run, then you may not agree with this solution.

The route to Public Campaign Financing has to be a new Constitutional Amendment, because obviously Constitutional amendments are not ruled unconstitutional except by another amendment. 

The anger and disappointment over our Supreme Courts' decision in Citizens United verses the United States, is swelling the ranks of democratic activists and unifying them toward a goal of a Constitutional Amendment to repeal Citizens' United.  I say whoa. Citizens United is horrible, but lets use this opportunity to both fix Citizens United and correct something long over due that will reap benefits for democracy well beyond just the repeal of Citizens United. Public Campaign Financing would remove the target for every corporation and superpac benefiting from Citizens United. Many democracies around the world are succeeding using their own form of Public Campaign Financing. There have been several periods of time in our recent political history where Public Campaign Financing was offered by many people as a solution to the corruption and misrepresentation and under representation that occurs constantly under our current system of campaign financing. The call for Public Campaign Financing is so old it is almost traditional American rhetoric.

I support overturning Citizens United - and it's underlying warped philosophy that corporations are people. But it is foolish to NOT make use of the huge energy and anger in all political parties currently to finally create Public Campaign Financing, which would cause Citizens United to become MOOT and introduce full representative democracy where over 100 million non voting eligible citizens finally become represented. The advantages of PCF are numerous and the arguments against these advantages are very hard to make. The whole proposal for PCF makes so much logical sense it makes the effort to introduce a constitutional amendment to defeat Citizens United look trivial in comparison.

"The greatest moral question which now confronts us is: Shall the trusts and corporations be prevented from contributing money to control or aid in controlling elections?" 

                                  - Defeated Presidential candidate Judge Alton Parker, 1904.

Candidate campaigning has been tainted by the dollars of the few wealthy over the interests of the poorer many since our inception. I don't need to mention examples of the corruption, the resulting absence of representation, the conflicts of our interest created by massive dollar amount campaigns. I won't mention the many examples of decades of fighting against large money donors to get our congress to do something, anything. I don't need to mention that after that fight, when we think we are about to get something with all of our interests in mind, that we get watered down half measures of legislation that are partially representative of us all.

Nearly 50% of our federal representatives, 261 members of Congress, are millionaires. Among us the numbers of millionaires are 3 - 4%. The first priority on their first day as elected representatives is to start raising money to get re-elected. A US Senator from a rural state will have to raise on average $20,000 per week once elected to prepare for re-election. That Senator will have to ration his time for meetings with those most able to re-elect him, not time finding solutions to our problems. Our two presidential candidates will spend nearly $1 billion on this election, up hundreds of millions of dollars from the last general election.

How much are we spending on elections? From Ryan Borek, Executive Director, Take A Stand PAC: "In 2010, researchers believe approximately $4 Billion was spent on the midterm election. 2008's Presidential Election cost over $1.7 Billion not including other elections, and likely topped over $5 Billion. The off years such as 2009 tend to lag significantly behind at around $2 Billion. The average US Senate race costs around $4-7 Million, with the average US House race costing $2-6 Million. State elections cost significantly less, usually around $500,000. Local elections can cost as little as $5,000 depending mostly on filing fees. It is difficult to ascertain exact costs as the system is not designed to keep track of state or local spending in any central location. You can find the exact spending for any single federal candidate at FEC.gov, however you would need to contact each individual state's election office to find the spending on a state or local candidate."

Per person based on current population and the above estimate of $5 bilion per year, a standard General Election would cost approximately $15.87 each. Who would not be willing to pay $16 per year to better ensure real representation for all of us, without conflicts of interest, without corruption of our elected officials?

In the ruling of the Supreme Court in the now famous "Citizens United," corporations were given the status of an individual in the practice of petitioning government their grievances and exercising free-speech. Essentially in the invisible center of every corporation lies a being, a being that pays taxes and wants legislation that favors them, as if they were individuals with unalienable rights like us.

This interpretation of free speech and who or what can participate monetarily in our elections was greatly damaging to representation in that it tipped the scales even more toward more robust representation of those of greatest means. It was not enough that the entire executive board of a corporation is entitled to use free speech and vote their minds as individuals, now an invisible new being in the middle of the conference table is able to pool its larger amount of resources and out-bark the general populace or any target population they may, thereby manipulating all of our futures unrepresentatively.

Enter the only best answer: the 100% public financing of every electoral campaign in the United States of America. Below is educated speculation of what happens after Constitutional Amendment number twenty-eight that mandates this change, has gone into effect:

1. With literally no more purse for the coinage of the lobbyists to be dropped into at our elected representatives offices, the lobbyists for corporations and unions and smaller governments get real jobs in the private industry and vanish in one day from Capital Hill never to be seen again, so long as the 28th Amendment is the law of the land. Citizens United and all other rules as they pertain to corporations or any lobby, will matter no more because all campaign material and money must come from the public fund only, and gifts to our representatives and candidates will remain illegal.

Some lobbyists find a job in a related field practicing an American tradition: marching  around all day outdoors in front of the capital building carrying protest signs advertising slogans about issues. No wooden handles allowed guys! Stay within the yellow tape please!

2. Do the corporations or the unions still have free speech, representation, the ability to give money toward campaigns? Yes of course! The public fund for electoral campaigns is also contributed to from corporations made of individuals who pay a flat rate toward the public campaign fund, just like the citizen who pays the same exact rate who may own a small house right-next-door to the multi-billion dollar corporation. If a corporation is a person and that person is entitled to the free speech act of giving to a political campaign, then under Public Campaign Financing that person/corporation has given, with taxes, toward the political campaign, just like every body else under the new 28th Amendment.

This is a new shared representation in free speech ability the nation has never known. The "individualist" corporations' argument will then have to be "we have more money so we want to be able to give more money because we are more important to the nation than the little people!" And perhaps "This is not unfair to the great majority of the population!" Opinions that will be hidden from us and that the public would find distasteful.

3. Equal campaign funding for equal candidates everywhere. Knowing that your competition has not one more dollar than you do to spend on the campaign, makes the issues and your position on them far more important than ever before in determining a winner. As a representative you won't know who to support more on any one issue unless you delve into your constituency for real information on the issues. Information you then use without influence in dollars, while keeping in mind that it's your stand on the issues that will get you re-elected.

4. Equal political air-time. The media will have to abide by the rules just like individuals. They can not use outside funding for any political propaganda unless it is from the Public Campaign Fund. And they can not get that money until campaign time. Like Great Britain we have restricted the number of calendar days before the election in which television and radio and newspaper advertising can be displayed by anyone in favor of in opposition to a campaign or an issue of political purpose. Perhaps 60 days prior to election. When the millionaires' public relations manager calls the television network to try to gain advantage in an election, the manager would tell him or her "Sorry but you can't advertise for a political issue or a candidate until September 4th of this year and then you'll have to prove your money comes from the Public Campaign Fund. My hands are tied by the 28th Amendment. If you like we can interview you at any time, but your opposition gets an interview also."

Is it not time for the frenzied race to the top of Capital Hill lead by the wealthiest to end?  How much more evidence needs to pile-up for us all to admit the system as we know it, as it's structured, does not work? The Founders did not imagine our present could become this bad, I'm sure. We are not the few land owner, white, businessmen voters and congressmen the framers did imagine, any longer. In attempting to fix our electoral system few if any better solutions exist. Any answer must eliminate the power of the big-money contributors and return our nation to the people.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But this seems unconstitutional! . . .


Keep in mind successful Constitutional amendments are not ruled unconstitutional except by another amendment.

The purpose of the First Amendment is not damaged by Public Campaign Financing. The goal of representative democracy is shared and more fairly distributed, rendering the political speech concept of our free speech more representative and so more powerful than before.

If public funding of election campaigns is somehow unconstitutional then since 1976 checking a box on your income tax return that gives $1-5 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, is also unconstitutional. Because that is nothing more than what Public Campaign Financing does, And the SCOTUS has denied a challenge to this practice on two occasions. I's our government managing and collecting a fund for election campaigns specifically.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The clarion call out of the windows of our homes should be "It's my money and I want my politician back!"

Thank you. Grace on the United States.

James G. Mason

Please post critical and constructive criticism in the comments section below. I will try to  answer every question.

Please sign the online petition! http://bit.ly/LCjp17 It's not an iron-clad endorsement of this solution to sign the petition. It's purpose is to get the public and our Congress interested and talking. Sign it to help if not only to allow us all to begin the discussion.

Copy this banner if you want to help graphically.

Related posts: Financial Plan Saves Families

Heroes Quasi and Real

Repost from 2002 Inspired by Chris Hayes of MSNBC Hero Controversy.
 

Update 6/2/12

Poor Chris Hayes of MSNBC got himself in trouble for suggesting he was "uncomfortable" calling soldiers heroes. I was making this complaint ten years ago generally about all of our uses of "hero."

Recently our nation had another hero similar to the hero mentioned in my article below. He is a roofer from New Jersey. That morning when he woke up to go to work he had no expectation of being in danger or especially of risking his life. It is that fact that makes him a real hero. 51-year-old Rob Nuckols a hero and his news story of heroics:

___________________________

February 2002:

A Hero is Discovered in Harlem:

" . . The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said. So he made one, and leapt. Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, his heart pounding, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time . . . . "
Read the entire story: 1/2/2007 New York Times

__________________________

2011:

Quasi Heroes and Real Heroes

We are getting carried away from important ideas and their English vocabulary definitions, for the sake of feel-good emotional docu-drama. We are calling the wrong people heroes and we are afraid to acknowledge truths to squelch our own collective emotions regarding the September 11^th massacres. Former mayor Gulliani of New York City is not a hero. The firefighters and police or New York City are not heroes. George W. Bush is certainly not a hero.

What is a hero? Is it someone who does his job, or someone who goes beyond his or job and into danger or humility when he doesn’t have to? I say it’s the later. Take for instance the firefighters at the scene of the world trade center massacre; are they heroes for attempting to save lives, forsaking their own lives and going into the scene, either into the buildings to get people out, or toward the catastrophe of rubble to evacuate pedestrians in the disorder of the collapse of the towers? Heroes are the pedestrians and otherwise civilian bystanders who risked their lives to do the same. They were not expected to, yet some did. If heroes are civil servants and rescue personnel who veritably carry on their persons their own resignation papers, for quick turnover to their immediate supervisors in case a situation gets scary, then yes the NYC firefighters and police were heroes for not resigning upon viewing the tragic circumstances of the moment.

A hero is the boy out for a walk who notices a man bobbing up and down in a large ice hole in the middle of a frozen lake. The boy takes off his shoes and coat and jumps in to hoist the man to safety. A hero is the man driving his car on the highway, he sees a burning wreck on the side of the road, he stops, he runs to the vehicle, reaches into the scorching hot car and pulls another driver to safety, saving a life. The boy walking and the man driving are not rescue trained civil servants performing obligations for pay and to meet performance expectations of their peers and supervisors, these hypothetical people are real heroes.

We cheapen the word hero by further exalting this title on people doing what they were expected to do. We make heroes out of every Tom, Dick and Harry in a uniform.

Enter into the melodrama of television cable (“we’re more patriotic than that other network”) news squawk shows. The faces of military personnel killed in the illegal action of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, face us from the dead, in memorial. The show-graphics announce them as American Heroes, and or “they died so we can be free.” Where is the logic is these statements? Nowhere. Emotion dilutes and clouds logic but it increases cable ratings! Your average Joe Military young man signed up with the understood knowledge that the great majority of his comrades will eventually come home alive, just like WWII or from any other war of our past, no matter how bloody history has recorded them to be. As a bonus, their recruiters promised shoe-boxes of money for college, health care delivery. Besides it was better than hanging around a dead-end town and becoming losers like so many of the young men they had known. Joining-up made their parents proud and gave them and their family hope for their futures. We all know the cliche dogmatic philosophy born out of the “good war,” that we tell young men who don’t know what to do with their lives: “It will make a man of you. You’ll gain confidence. You’ll learn leadership. You’ll come back and anyone will be glad to hire you!” Does a hero require these perks? Is it love of country and angelic selflessness that drives these eighteen and nineteen year olds into the services? Lets get real. These young men are given protection, given numbers of brothers to surround them for increased safety. They bond with their units, they feel the “got your back,” pact of their unit. They are not the lone highway traveler who with all choice to do nothing, chooses to rescue a trapped motorist from a burning vehicle. They are not the boy who disrobes to dive into a freezing lake to rescue a drowning person from a break in the ice.

It's wonderful to show appreciation for a dead or wounded serviceman. To show our gratitude for a task that held the possibility of great danger is a needed commission and in the case of those vulture-like cable news shows, its really the least they can do.

Time magazine had chosen to make Rudy Gulliani “person of the year,” like the firefighters he has been called a hero for doing his job. The cliché phrase “man of the year” is generally an honor of positivism bestowed on someone, or something for being the best at something in a year’s time. Time magazine’s honor traditionally is neither positive nor negative, it is supposed to be for an individual who has affected world events the most in that preceding year, for instance Adolph Hitler was given this dubious honor. Three weeks before the magazine announced it had placed terrorist Osama BinLaden on the “short list” for man of the year the criticism started rolling in. Americans couldn’t understand the acknowledgement. They said it gave him publicity he didn’t deserve. They suggested good people by our standards, they suggested Mayor of New York City Rudy Guliani, and they suggested the court select president George W. Bush.

What did mayor Gulliani do that any other mayor of any other city would not have done? Nothing. Is there precedent for a mayor to run and cower when his city is besieged with calamity? No there is not. His and any mayor’s job in a time of crisis is to keep the city running, to provide for emergency assistance the best that the office of the mayor can do. He did his job. Do we shower him with praise for not running to a motel room to take cyanide tablets? Is he a hero for not freaking out and going on a three-week alcohol and drug binge?

What did president select George W. Bush do that was hero like? It couldn’t have been his drunken AWOL service to our country in the Air National Guard. Might it have been the heroic manner he jumped around from military base to military base in Air Force One on September the 11^th? Must be all the speeches he gave and continues to give on network television? If his speeches had some substance I might grant him a small degree of hero worship in that department, but the hyperboloid rhetoric that is contained in every speech reminds me more of a salesmen’s convention than substantive information for the public.

Evidence of our national denial in a sea of emotional docu-drama is the ABC television v. Bill Maher incident: when one man dare to point out the inconsistencies of president select Bush’s child like speeches, he gets fired by his boss. Bill Maher’s well made point that the hijackers of the planes could not have been cowards, as the president select had told us a few nights before, was light hearted truth that was met with ignorant and emotional bitterness. He became blacklisted for his subversion to patriotic mushy mush.

Lets remember who heroes are before half the population is wearing a hero medal and suing for hero pay and television time. Let us reserve the meaning of hero for those who through no influence but their own primal ethical drive made the ultimate act of selflessness.  

Copyright Reserved: James G. Mason, 2011
This editorial was first published
in 2/02

Repost: Hard Drives in Space! 2006

I would never re-post it if I did not think it relevant. More so than it was in 2006. Its a possibility. Its definitely needed. The technology is here.

Hard Drives in Space (announced with a large ambient echo) might be the ultimate in long term reliable data storage for the people. Behemoth satellites can be built with principle of design for duration, for capacity, for durability, and for access from any Earth bound users.

As we see our planet reach closer towards an ends, either by war violently, by viral plague, or catastrophic geologic and or climate change, we must consider our data and what is to be the fate of all that we have done digitally. What is to become of those novels on Microsoft Word, you worked so hard on. What about those two hundred family photos you would like to keep. How about all that email you have saved for ten years? What about that 30,000 image collection of women’s naked butts you spent years downloading in your office with the lights out? There is no need for the capacity in hard drives in space to be restricted to a certain few for example the military, and government, and for that reason Hard Drives in Space must be a combined government and private citizen’s endeavor.

The satellites (as vessels for protection, maintenance of orbit, and routing upload and download streams) must be high enough in orbit not to degrade and burn up, ever. The protection from meteors and meteorites and micro-meteors must be primary in the design. A steel triple hull of the type some modern oil tankers are now using would be adequate. Sophisticated security programs must police the integrity of everyone’s data for centuries to come, assuring users that their own data will never be deleted to make room for someone else’s. Several (perhaps six) should be built and launched in the same time period. But only one uploaded to working capacity at a time. A satellite over an opposite hemisphere should function as a replicate data copy for the first. A full drive can be moved into an even higher orbit, or even sent to a lunar orbit for added safety.

Again; Hard Drives in Space, is not necessarily for our selfish use, but primarily to preserve and pass-along human history, human endeavor, and human pictures of Janet Jackson’s right nipple and record of other time consuming totally hedonistic and voyeuristic activities. In the far future there will be archeologists roaming about Earth or traveling through this solar system called “Sol.” Perhaps they will be humans who’s ancestors originated from Earth. But we can assure that they do not just find a planet of water and dust, of crumpled ruins resembling piles of rock, and all metals turned to reddish brown piles of rust. We can assure they have access to all that was us, every thought a human of our time may have had, every pleasure, every disappointment and so on.

We can do this! Its very important for our whole race!

Protect the Occupy Movement and the United States' Constitution

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

To: New Haven Register, Editor

From: James G. Mason

Deep River, CT, 06417

Letter to the Editor.

Dear Editor,

A truly free nation practicing democracy that has written law on parchment, essentially protecting public political speech with our lives, is in jeopardy of no longer existing.

Occupy Movement participants: You may not realize it, but through all of those newspaper and television images you are broadcasting hope to millions of your fellow citizens who also want a country that prioritizes the economic health of the 99% above the 1%. We watch and we think "maybe, finally, at last, they're doing something about Wall Street's control over our lives." These unseen supportive millions don't have the courage or the time in their lives to do their visible part for the Occupy Movement. But they will your victory from their couches and they wait for each new large demonstration, each showdown with the police, each launching of tear gas at Americans who are being very American. It is these events, we all know, that Americans will remember as precluding change.

When I see the New Haven Green used by young people in the Occupy Movement, I see angry colonists trying to peacefully "petition their government a redress of grievances," as was visualized and written in 1787 in our constitution's priority of the First Amendment. I see state and local governments acting like corrupt institutions by being bad Americans and anti-constitutionalists by chasing citizens off the public square when little harm is being done to anyone and political speech is in process.

When I see the police in their riot gear line-up in gauntlet fashion across from Occupiers, I am seeing betrayers of the Constitution to the United States of America. I see people in uniform acting exactly as Madison and Jefferson must have hoped they never would, with weapons pointed at the masses, at us, at citizens, while they conduct their First Amendment busting operations under the policy of their employers, under oath of employment, threat of firing if they don't comply. Working within law enforcement department policy alongside your peers to destroy a public gathering of peaceful political protestors on a public square is tantamount to treason and not worth an evening of tear gas launching and head cracking of unemployed young men and women to violate the very tenant of your country. If you are law enforcement and you have taken part in dispatching the Occupy Movement participants, then perhaps the United States is no longer your country, after having been violent with otherwise peaceful political protestors? After all you have violated it's first premise designed to protect a free society. New Haven police officers: unfortunately once a traitor to a nation you can't reverse that, and additionally it's a guilty feeling you'll have the rest of your life.

Scream Rooms Getting Educators in Hot Water

Update 10/28/2015: A girl tossed across the room like a rag-doll, nearly breaking her neck, by a school police officer in Richland County, SC, USA. Incidents like that are often the result of NO GOOD place to place a disobedient student in that circumstance;

CNN Story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/us/south-carolina-school-arrest-videos/index.html

~~~~~~

Take a read at some recent local coverage of this issue here.  Here. And here.

I am really surprised that someone might actually lose a job over the use of the "time-out" rooms at Farm Hill School in Middletown. I see these rooms as necessary and I'm surprised they are not in every school. Even high school kids could use a place to cool off and do their homework in solitary. 

When I was a boy I was wild and uncontrollable, and I have disturbed my share of teaching and learning classroom time for others, in my adventures in public schools. At ten years old I had knocked out a school teacher and had to be placed in a school for students with behavioral problems in another county. It was called the Mark Twain School, in Montgomery County, Maryland, (closed in 2008) and it incorporated all that was known about teaching to bad behaviors. "Quiet" rooms were at the entrance areas to each school, the middle school where I was, and the grade and high schools in that one building. The Quiet Rooms were two rooms near the secretary's desk, off a main hallway paced by a teacher or an assistant principal. Like the Middletown room portrayed on television news, they were barren concrete block plain painted walls, with room enough to pace, with a school desk to sit and do school work. Back in the 1970s I deserved to be yanked out of class and asked to spend some hours in the Quiet Rooms, and the kids in my class especially deserved for me to be yanked out. Separating me from the classroom was about what's' fair to them, not about what was fair to me. The rules were simple in the rooms "chill out." Doors were never locked. Punishment for coming out is more time in.

It is way overboard to chastise an educator for the innovation of the safe and timely use of these rooms. I would trust most well intentioned educators, in choosing what is best for the entire classroom, in so choosing to utilize these necessary rooms for Hellions like me to sit and chill. These rooms actually save taxpayer money and time! When the disruptive influence is away from classroom, normalcy convenes and that's what we pay for and expect to see!