I wanted to thank and congratulate everyone involved in putting out the very spiffy looking and intellectually stimulating first issue of the West Word. Obviously, we have some talented people in the hood who deserve recognition. All I did was write an article and zip it off to cyberspace. I'm glad there are people who know what to do with this stuff because I sure don't. The paper is a step above the typical local fare (in my opinion anyway) and I hope to see it continue. I was fascinated by the story about residual medical/pharmaceutical waste in the water supply.
Other sources of information that I have indicate that a lot of solid waste from sewage treatment plants is also being passed off as "safe fertilizer" for agricultural use. Big corporations would rather foist this material on the farming community than deal with it's inadequate treatment. The state tests for about a dozen dangerous substances and calls this gunk safe but there are about 1000 compounds they don't test for. I guess we're supposed to take the word of the treatment industry that everything is OK. I'd say that anything that gets put on fields where the food we eat is grown deserves a little more scrutiny but this is how the corporate state treats us these days.
Speaking of the corporate state; my article on Home Rule Charter and Citizen's Bills of Rights was a bit long - all papers have to edit for length in order to get everything in - so I posted the original unedited version on the blog. If anyone is interested in a more detailed look at the issues as they affect Easton you can check it out. There are links there to many of my resources as well. It is located along the right green sidebar under the heading "Downloadable Documents".
In the next week and a half I will be making three posts on rail: the first will be responses to your previous questions and comments, then a primer on the Lehigh Valley draft rail study and finally a primer on how American passenger rail functions today (mostly via Amtrak).
Happy reading"
DRL
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4 comments:
See you at the launch party tonight at Ashley's--I'll get there around 8pm...
Dennis - thought your article was very important and thank you for putting it out there. I hope perhaps sometime in the future we can have some kind of discussion group on the issues raised - it is so much to do with all that is going on now but not everybody sees the connection. This loss "of our country" didnt just recently happen happen. It goes back to that legislation. People do need to connect the dots, I agree with Glen Beck on that.
Cathy,
All the policy battles we fight are less stand-alone issues than symptoms of the bigger unseen problem.
The hardest thing to get environmentalists (or citizen activists of any kind) to do today is abandon the old model. Standard operating procedure for them has been the same for decades: raise money, put up posters and mail out info, rally support to attend meetings and rail against the status quo - all the while, fighting within the very regulatory framework (zoning, subdivision and land use, NEPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, OSHA standards) that their opponents helped institute.
You are right; the vast majority has been hypnotized by TV, books and mags, public schools and college classes and our own government press releases to believe things about what the constitution is, what it was originally designed to do and why it was written that way. I do not blame the vast public. They have few tools to get to the truth and many distractions to prevent the effort from beginning.
None the less, we will have to educate ourselves or have no excuse for the failure of our national self-governing experiment.
I have info on classes we could hold in Easton if enough people were willing to pay for the opportunity and give up one weekend of their life to do something life-changing.
I'm also glad Glen Beck has mastered dot connecting. Coloring books may be the next challenge.
I hammer on all talking heads equally...not just the right wing. They all add to din and fog.
DRL
I, for one, would be very interested in attending classes like these. I think other independent thinkers on this blog would be as well...
Please let us know what it would entail.
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