CivicActions

The Archimedes Movement, a project of the Foundation for Medical Excellence, initiated by former Oregon state Governor John Kitzhaber, will launch a new website on December 5th that will support their goal of changing the way that people think about and work toward universal health care. The site, designed to maximize the effectiveness of online and in-person activism taking place all over the state, includes features such as document forums where members can discuss and suggest changes to proposed legislation, and a Chapter section, where members in a defined geographic area can call and publicize meetings, post and generate dialog about meeting notes, and post stories, blog posts, photos and other content that is specific to a given area.

Terence McKenna described a fractally eschatonic view of history called the "TimeWave" that posited that history was repeating itself in ever faster cycles, culminating in The Big Event in 2012. That's a separate discussion, but a really cool modern example is the profound symmetry between the Nixon Right's war on John Lennon and his peace advocacy at the height of the Vietnam War.

The US vs. John Lennon Movie is coming to theaters in September, and its timing and message could not be more poignant at this moment in time, where the lessons of history have been so predictably forgotten by warmongers and peaceniks alike. It is frightening and yet strangely empowering to hear Lennon speaking out against the Vietnam War amidst the attacks by the Nixon right waged on John Lennon, all set to this classic soundtrack.

Article from Rense.com - "This study confirmed the previous study by Dr. Trocho and co-workers (1998), which also found the formaldehyde breakdown product of aspartame to be damaging to cellular DNA and that this damage was cumulative," said Dr. Blaylock. "The type of damage was a duplicate of that associated with cancers. These two studies strongly indicate that drinking a single diet cola sweetened with aspartame every day could significantly increase one's risk of developing a lymphoma or leukemia.

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Overriding Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s veto, lawmakers yesterday made Maryland the first state in the nation to require a private company to provide a minimum level of health benefits for its employees.

Supporters hailed the vote as a victory for working people who can't afford health insurance.

"Fair share health care is going to sweep the nation!" said Vinnie DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens' Health Initiative, a group that has been lobbying for universal health care. Scores of states across the nation are considering similar bills.

The Problem: We live in a world which is literally awash in data and information that has swamped our systems of representing and understanding it, precisely at a moment in Human history when we most need to understand this information. The World Wide Web is a vast and remarkable resource, but viewing web pages a page at a time through a web browser fails to satisfy our need to get the “big picture” and takes waaaaaay too long to grok the fullness.

Similarly, we can gain access to enormous relational databases full of information – such as the databases of nonprofits who seek funding, and their financial characteristics and missions – but most of our views of this data take the form of incremental pages, spreadsheets or limited graphs which do not reveal the complexity of those rich relationships.

This is a nice story about the benevolant World Bank - now being led by our former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

The story goes "...the World Bank will reveal its proposed $1 billion package, half of which it aims to provide through its grants or interest-free loans and half through a trust fund financed by donors."

How nice of the World Bank to take care of the "developing countries" by providing them loans to pay big pharma. As summarized in Wikipedia, the World Bank "...has been accused of being a US or western tool for imposing economic policies that support western interests." No...Really?