Saving Sea Turtles

We Need to Save more than just the Turtles - Long winded and Opinionated

I often cringe when I see posts that say things like - boycott Nestles they are clearing rainforests to plant palm oil or boycott a hundred other company's that use monsanto grown corn.

I would love to do both those things religiously but to get to the root of the problem with the palm oil problem we need to work with the native people who use the pittance paid to them for tearing down the rain forests and planting the palm oil trees to survive on.  We need to find them something that pays better so they can turn their backs on these greedy companies.  We need to show them how important their heritage is and how they need to protect it. We need to compete with the big boys.  That may give us a chance against producers like Nestles.

With massive sized corporations like Monsanto who have their fingers in pies and cakes around the world, things are more scary. I am not quite sure what would be the best approach or if there is anything to be done anymore.  Like everything it is Greed motivated.  Convincing Betty Crocker that we will pay more for their product if they buy a more expensive nonMonsanto grown and produced flour or other products isn't that straight forward.  Besides how many of us would pay more.  It is not just Betty Crocker as many generic brands are produced and packaged by the name brand companies so you might as well just learn to make that chocolate cake from scratch and buy your flour from your local flour mill which only usues organically grown flour ... I think you understand what I am trying to say about how hard it has already become to fight this battle.

So please don't just ask me to boycott give me an alternative.  Spend an equal amount of time investigating alternatives to using these companies as you do discovering which companies are using the product you want me to boycott.  We don't necessarily have the time between family, work, home and life in general to look for alternatives even if we want to join the boycott.  Most of us are far from having enough money to be excessive with the food we buy.  Give us alternatives. Give us options!

I know we should in all world market countries OUTLAW the any government official - Senator, House of Representatives, Members of Parliament from owning or profiting from any company that is related in anyway to laws and bills being passed. Tough idea but imagine them not being ruled by GREED in profits of companies they have investment in or direct family has investment in when making decisions that have as far reaching effects as genetically modified foods which are modified ONLY so that the pesticides made by certain companies must be used to make them grow.

I have nothing against modified crops but lets do it the old way, the earth friendly way. Lets do it with respect.  It has been happening naturally for millions of years. We can help it along with digging into their genes.  All that scare mongering they are doing about when the bees disappear is no joke.  It is going to hurt us in ways we have not yet imagined. 

Would it surprise you to find out that there are a lot more people starting to hoard and stash food and some of these people are the rich and powerful. Some of these companies that are producing expensive dried foods for long term storage are making a profit even with the high prices. Have to ask yourself why are they selling that much long storage food. Do their customers see something we don't?   

For all our good intentions, it feels as though we are on a sinking ship in our desires to turn the tide of darkness we have allowed to flourish in the name of Profit, allowed to flourish beyond our ability to change.  With any profit there is an expense but the profit has reach a level beyond comprehension today and it looks as though the expense paid will be the same, beyond comprehension. Profits in the billions means little or nothing these days.

I know of an owner of a company - he drives expensive cars, owns multiple properties, buys regular new large equipment to increase yeild but has no money to pay his just above minimum wage earing employees a raise in over four years.  The only raise they get is when the national minimum wage increases.  He inherited this company and from what I understand his father was worse.  He took hold of the economic crises and used it as an excuse to claim profits are not high enough to give raises.  SO where does the money come for his personal european racing care, new machinery and vacations all over the world.  He is one of many companies that is profiting from the economic crises - rich picking in employees mean that they can get away with this and keep those profits up.

Monsanto seems to be so concerned with bigger and bigger profit and greater and greater control, they have lost sight of the bigger picture (that is unless the picture they are seeing is holding the world hostage for food, then they are on course).

When I was a little girl in the California Central Valley we used to catch fireflies, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises.  We had good bugs and bad bugs, lady bugs and bees.  Not much of any of those left with the amount of pesticides they have been declining drastically for the last thirty years and pretty soon the only place we see them will be in zoos.  Insects, we need them but we ignore the signs of their disappearance and what it means for us.

It hurts to think of the lack of care, the purposeful desctruction of balance and the raping and torture of our living planet.  Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and ask myself why bother caring?  Why worry about what legacy we leave our future generations, my children's children's children who will remember our time our era as the era that destroyed for profit, self absorbed and so selfish that many of us not all of us but more than not left them with one @#$%^&*
world to clean up.  Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing a major catastrophe happening in my life time and I still may.  I hope I live long enough to see the forced change that will be required to survive. After that if I am a casualty of this catastrophe, then so be it. 

As long as I can, I pledge to do the best I can and a little more to be a respectful human being to my planet and to those who inhabit it in innocence. I shall be sparing with my waste, recycle every way I imaginable, conserve my use of fossil fuels (ie., ride my bike to go shopping, shop more often so I waste less, etc), Take the time to recycle more water so I give less money to the water wasting water companies. I pledge to do the biggest amount I can for my little part in loving my earth.    

Saving Sea Turtles

This website is by one of the biggest earth loving companies I know National Georgraphic, it is a travel website with pictures and blogs from around the world.  I may never get to see any of these but it is nice to know they are still there to enjoy. All these places make my world, your world, our world the best little spaceship in the universe.

Thank you National Georgraphic for sharing with me the wonders of my world.

 

     

Dream On and Dream Big!

I keep hearing about this ‘one world-one people.’  We are all perhaps the same species but we are not like bees or ants and even they split off and create new colony.

I want to see people treated with respect and common kindness but I am no supporter of the one world one people.  I get flashes of Matrix crossed with the primordial ooze, bland and undefined.  To lose our ethnic identities feels heinous and the need to strive to find ourselves would be lost. Who we are and where we came from would no longer be a source of pride. Where would we focus our pride? We need not suffer arrogance to have pride – personal, family, community and country. 

 

My husband is English and I am American and I would never expect him to give up his nationality to become an American and neither would he expect the same thing from me.  Our countries of birth are both sources of pride even when they are acting like ninnies.  

Who would I be able to compare notes with if we all lived the same, worked the same, laughed the same. I know I am being a bit dramatic but … Where would we throw our competitive drive? What would replace that competitive spirit? What would happen to all those unique foods we eat – how could France make its claim to have the best food in the world if everyone has it?  What would happen to the Olympics?

I see nothing wrong with working together but we are unable to work together in most large corporate or government office settings, so how are we going to find the desire to work together as billions of people (I bet if you have ever experienced a large office setting you would see how unrealistic this idea is). 

It is a fantasy to think we can achieve a united earth of one people, a naive and idealistic dream but then to those who think it can happen, I say, believe because dreams can be unreasonable and dreaming is something humans do. Dreaming is good. I will dream of opening our minds and our heart to accepting those that are different as valuable, worthy of respect and kindness. I will dream of winning the lottery, I will dream of owning a small holding with at least one big ole billy goat, I will dream possible and impossible dreams because I amd human and I can. 

I will dream a dream or two or three as unrealistic as the ‘one world-one people’ idea but then dreams are for dreaming.  It they come true, we find new dreams and dream some more.  Dreams are what move us forward, spur us on. So dream on and dream big, or maybe even small but never, ever dream nothing at all. 

~My dreams rock!

 

    

Fixing What Ain't Broken

I don’t understand this need to fix what isn’t broken.

Three, maybe four years ago, it may have been longer, I noticed when I went for blood tests that the doctors now instead of taking it from the middle of the inside elbow they were tackling it from closer to the top edge (of the inside elbow).  It hurts taking it from there. 

Come to find out that some people have problems with it being taken from the good old veins in the middle soft fleshy center area of the bend in the elbow.  That’s all fine and good but NOT everybody has that problem.  So why is it when it affects some, EVERYBODY has to have it changed. 

I asked the nurse one day (and without going into detail she is crap at it) why she is taking blood on that outside edge instead of the fleshy middle like they used to do.  She said it was because of having to hold down or push down or something to hold the veins.  Well really! The things aren’t set in cement, they are round like pipes and well if you don’t hold the tube (vein) still when you try to pierce it, it is gonna try to move out of the way.

Now this last blood test (referenced above) by a nurse was pretty disturbing. She couldn’t find a blood filled vein in my right arm (on the outside edge of course).  After the third jab with the needle, when my flesh refused to give up any of the red stuff, she left the needle in and started fishing for a vein that way. I mean, thirty second ( and I am talking a good thirty seconds – ok maybe twenty but it might have been an hour for how it felt) I waited watching and trying to make light of a rather embarrassing for her, situation.

She had a training nurse in there and perhaps that made her nervous – I felt I was going to be sick. But give me a break, there must be blood somewhere in my body because my heart is beating.  Watching a needle fishing around inside my flesh was creepy, let alone how it felt. I finally had to ask her. “Can you quit moving the needle around in my arm that hurts. She stopped and paused and I then had to ask her. “Can you take it out it does not seem to be working.”

If someone on the street had attempted that I would have returned the pleasure in some defensive way, a reaction which was only natural.  Instead, I had to let her have a go at the other arm. She must have hit a nerve or something in the left arm. Probably just brushed it because nerves don’t take much to upset them. For two hours –no exaggeration this time – it strung like alcohol on an open cut, where she stuck me. Finally proved I was alive by retrieving an adequate amount of red stuff so I could get out of there. 

I was livid. I get upset as most normal people would, when stupidity makes me suffer unnecessarily. I get livid at myself or others, makes no difference, except when it is I being stupid I can do something about it.  Why did they change their style of blood drawing for everyone when the old way worked fine for many?  Why not give people a choice. It is an annoying thing to have done at the very least let us have a say in it. 

What is the real need to make changes to what everyone recieves, when the problem lies with only a few.  My Guess - Somebody had too much time on their hands and needed to show how important their overpaid position was in the medical community so, they did a study and found a few people that had problems with the old method of drawing blood.  Wallah! We will just change it for everybody!!! This will make me feel important.

 

Any way why is all this seemingly important to me at the moment?

I am scheduled for a blood test in a few hours.  I forgot to stress to the front office lady, I wanted my doctor to do it (doctors don’t do it, so I have been told but my doctor does, so I usually see him and he is pretty good at vampiring my blood out of me). So if they have me scheduled to see the nurse I am going to cancel it (even if it means I have to starve another morning for this no food consumed blood test).  Rather starve again than have to brave the Neanderthal for a second round.