Peak oil explained graphically — Transition Voice

Image by D.L. via Flickr
Great job putting a difficult concept into pictures.

One Fair World -- a Salem gem

Attention Nativity Lovers

 

We are starting a Nativity Club at One Fair World.  In mid-October we will hold a special showing of our nativities after regular store hours.  If you would like an invitation to this event, please e-mail, call, or sign up in the store.  You will also receive a free nativity ornament with the purchase of two nativity sets. 

We will keep a record at the store, so you can purchase these sets at different times.  Our handmade nativities from around the world feature unusual materials (olive wood, recycled paper, ceramics, cloth, capiz shell, wheat straw) and interesting figures. 

As we watch the reactions to the Occupy Wall Street movement

Image by alykat via Flickr
Judges defending Constitution must sometimes share their foxhole with scoundrels of every sort, but to abandon post because of poor company is to sell freedom cheaply; it is fair summary of history to say that safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
 
Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009)

Best bet tonight: Confluence Chorus "Classical Melodies"

Confluence: Willamette Valley LGBT Chorus will present...
“Classical Melodies,” on Saturday October 15, 7:30 pm, at the

First Congregational Church, 700 Marion St., Salem

Dear Friend,

Artistic Director Ray Elliott has crafted a special concert of classical music with choral works, madrigals, arias, cello and piano, including composers Rossini, Handel, Donato, Orff, and Benjamin Britten, among others.  The concert is designed to lift your spirits and soothe your soul.

Tickets in advance, online or from chorus members, are $15 General Admission, $12 Students & Seniors.  Tickets at the door are $18 and $15. For tickets online, or to make a donation, go to confluencechorus.org

You Are Invited

…to a special preconcert wine and cheese reception at 6:30 as well a silent auction which includes three separate coast getaways—

one at Lincoln City with a gift certificate to Kyllos Restaurant	another just south of Salishan, within 250 ft. of Lincoln Beach	and a third near Waldport (on the beach and pet friendly).
All three can accommodate from two to six people. A great opportunity for families or groups of friends to pool their  resources and win a chance to spend some time together.

   

A fourth auction item is a  14,000 BTU Sportable Gas Grill, great for tailgating and camping. 

All four auction items will make awesome holiday gifts for friends or family.

---

Your Support is Needed

Confluence recently purchased a cargo trailer that was stolen two weeks after purchase.  Although it was insured, the expenses of the deductible and ongoing secure storage are challenging the nonprofit chorus’s minimal operating budget.  Donations for the trailer are welcome as well as attendance at this concert, which is additional to the regular concert season starting in December. 

Donations may be made any time at confluencechorus.org or on the night of the concert.

---

Questions? Contact publicity@confluencechorus.org

Confluence: Willamette Valley LGBT Chorus
Building Bridges Through Song

How “Overpaid” Government Professionals Reduce Public Expenditures « The Reality-Based Community

Worth repeating in a town like Salem.

Amen -- Libraries strengthen communities in uncertain times. Join the Friends!

More than books: Libraries strengthen communities in uncertain times

. . . “What we’ve learned about libraries is that they fill a really important role in the community by providing an inviting space for people of all backgrounds,” says Molly Raphael, president of the American Library Association (ALA). “They’re important for creating understanding across different cultures and pulling elements of the community into the space.”






. . . Libraries are also dedicated to keeping teens involved in library programs and activities and provide a safe, third place to go with targeted activities and areas set aside for them.  “Teens really want to be separate from kids and adults,” says May. “It doesn’t have to be elaborate or costly, just something apart.”

A free remedy for social and creative isolation, libraries are good places to go to get work done, offering a way to tap into the group productivity dynamic that has made co-working so popular.
“Libraries are important spaces for communities to gather,” says May. “There’s an intellectual energy that comes from hundreds of people working.”


\

. . . With some library branches increasing their focus on e-materials, others prioritizing their community offerings, and many trying to strike a balance of the two, libraries have some big budget and information-delivery questions to work out. Far from going away, they are as relevant to communities as they have ever been; perhaps more so.

“The question of relevance is out of sync with reality,” says May. “We’ll always be consuming new kinds of media, and libraries will always try to keep up with that. Libraries are changing to keep up with the times.”

Another SPFS don't-miss: Unnatural Causes

Unnatural Causes

Thursday, October 13, 2011
7 PM

This documentary crisscrosses the nation uncovering startling new findings that suggest there is much more to our health than bad habits, health care, or unlucky genes. The social circumstances in which we are born, live, and work can actually get under our skin and disrupt our physiology as much as germs and viruses. Research has revealed a gradient to health. At each step down the class pyramid, people tend to be sicker and die sooner. Poor Americans die on average almost six years sooner than the rich. Through what channels might inequities in housing, wealth, jobs, and education, along with a lack of power and control over one's life, translate into bad health.

Treasure Trove: Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Image via Wikipedia

Great stuff.

OCCUPY SALEM TODAY: You say you want a revolution, well, you know ...

Image by Goldiefexify via Flickr

This crap keeps up and you might see some heads on poles soon.

Then there's this summary of our woes.

Combine those two pieces with the other recent reports showing banks and mortgage servicers have changed NOTHING and continue to fabricate documentation and commit frauds on courts when foreclosing people out of their homes and you wonder just how clueless these people are.

I am certain that the elites of Bourbon France sniffed that the message from the masses nearing the Bastille was incoherent.  Given Americans' propensity for violence and extremely well stocked gun racks, I pray that the elites here understand something about history, such as what happens to a society when the middle class is destroyed and impoverished.

High tech information processing and the globalization of trade, with the concomitant insecurity for all but the elites creates conditions conducive to tremendous and self- reinforcing inequality, like the positive feedback cycle that drives a microphone into a painful squawk of noise. The destruction of communities by the banksters and the corporate chieftains who insist that Henry Ford was misguided to care whether the people who built his cars could afford them is at the point where even relatively or apparently well-off folks are without any resiliency and cannot withstand any reversals, such as a serious illness or job loss.

Given that most people of a certain age played Monopoly as children (a game created during the Great Depression before this one), it's a wonder that more people don't remember that the game is a lot more fun when all the players have enough money to make deals and exchanges interesting and beneficial to both sides. Once someone establishes enough dominance to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, the fun stops and the grinding down starts, often right before people quit, often by turning over the table and scattering the game pieces to hell and gone.  It's not fun when it's a board game, much less when it happens in real life.

TUESDAY, PDX: Margaret Kripke Speaks on Environmentally Caused Cancers

Image by The Mayor of Worldwide Breast Cancer via FlickrThe Lund Report is a rare gem -- someone with a lot of knowledge about the medical-industrial complex doing the deep, hard work in the trenches to report on the whole gamut of issues that coalesce under the heading of health.

The editor, who funds this shoestring operation mainly out of her own pocket, consistently runs rings around the captive media outfits who dare not annoy advertisers, which include both the big hospitals and many polluters who would be happiest if we kept thinking that cancer is the fault of genetics or personal bad choices.  These people prefer it if we don't recognize that cancer is primarily an environmental illness.


Hat tip to Lund Report for bringing news of this:

Margaret Kripke, PhD, a co-author of that report, speaks in Portland next Tuesday, October 11 at an event sponsored by Rachel's Friends Breast Cancer Coalition in collaboration with the Oregon Environmental Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility. This free lecture takes place at 7 p.m. at Kaiser Town Hall located at 3704 N. Interstate.

According to the report, 'The incidence of some cancers, including those most common among children, is increasing for unexplained reasons,” while environmental cancers disproportionately affect women and members of disadvantaged social groups, who are more likely to be exposed to carcinogenic materials at work or who live in polluted environments.

Not only is more research needed into environmentally caused cancer, but environmental contaminants should be better regulated, and the methods of measuring such exposures improved, the report states. Currently such research is a low priority and receives inadequate funding, resulting in an inadequate number of environmental oncologists. Instead, most research emphasizes the genetic and molecular mechanisms in cancer.
The report is also critical of existing environmental cancer research, noting that most of that research investigates the effect of specific chemicals on adolescent laboratory animals – which doesn't really mirror real-world exposures to environmental contaminants. In addition, animals in these studies are exposed to doses substantially higher than those likely to be encountered by humans.

“These data – and the exposure limits extrapolated from them – fail to take into account harmful effects that may occur only at very low doses,” according to the report. “Further, chemicals typically are administered when laboratory animals are in their adolescence, a methodology that fails to assess the impact of in utero, childhood, and lifelong exposures. In addition, agents are tested singly, rather than in combination.”

Since Americans are exposed to tens of thousands of foreign chemicals throughout their lifetimes, studies should be designed to look at the effects of specific groups on contaminants in the communities most likely to be affected.

The report also calls for stronger regulation of environmental contaminants, saying that U.S. regulation is rendered ineffective by inadequate funding, fragmented and overlapping authorities and uneven enforcement, excessive regulatory complexity, weak laws and regulations and undue industry influence: “Too often, these factors, either singly or in combination, result in agency dysfunction, and a lack of will to identify and remove hazards.”

The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation's productivity and devastate American lives.”
Kripke is currently serving her second three-year term on the President's Cancer Panel – comprised of three people including Lance Armstrong, and LaSalle D. Lefall, Jr., the report's co-author. The panel,  created by former President George W. Bush, advises the President on the status and needs of the cancer problem in America.

Kripke is a professor of immunology and executive vice president and chief academic officer to the University of Texas MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston. Her research focuses on the immunology of the skin and skin cancer, skin cancer's relationship to ultraviolet light, and how the immune system influences the development of skin cancers. She holds a PhD in immunology from the University of California at Berkeley.

When I am sad about the people I've known and lost to cancer, I give to only those groups that recognize that blaming the victims for their cancers lets the polluters off the hook.  The group that has been sounding the warning about the environmental roots of the cancer pandemic the longest:  Breast Cancer Action.

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