Thursday, December 29, 2011

It's Just a Ride

Bill Hicks - what an amazing soul.

Criminal Charges Are Prepared in BP Spill

U.S. pr

Prosecutors are focused on several Houston-based engineers and at least one of their supervisors at the British oil company, though the breadth of the investigation isn't known. The prosecutors assert the employees may have provided false information to regulators about the risks associated with the Gulf of Mexico well while its drilling was in progress, these people said.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Why We Must Stop SOPA

Right now, there are two pieces of legislation in Congress that would change the Internet forever if they are enacted. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) would give the federal government the ability to potentially shut down millions of websites. SOPA (the version being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives) is the more dangerous of the two. It would essentially be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the Internet. It would give government officials unlimited power to very rapidly shut down any website that is found to "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. That language is very broad and very vague. Many fear that it will be used to shut down any websites that even inadvertently link to "infringing material". Can you imagine a world where there is no more Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? Sites like those would be forced to hire thousands of Internet censors to make sure that no "infringing material" is posted, and many prominent websites may simply decide that allowing users to post content is no longer profitable and is just not worth the hassle. Are you starting to get the picture? That is why we must stop SOPA. If SOPA is enacted, it could be the death of the free Internet.

Source: End of the American Dream

Dow's Deadly Harvest: The Return of Agent Orange

Whether you are aware of it or not, your food, air and water are the battle ground upon which a titanic struggle between the multinational biotech corporations Monsanto and Dow AgroScience is now playing out. As a result, your health and environment (and that of all future generations) are at profound risk of irreparable harm.

Dow AgroSciences (a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals) recently announced their development of genetically-engineered corn, soybean, and cotton plants metabolically resistant to the herbicide 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), a major ingredient in Agent Orange. What this means for our future is that, if approved for use, vast regions of our country will soon be sprayed with a chemical that has been linked to over 400,000 birth defects in Vietnam.

How did we end up here?

Source: Activist Post