Don’t Fear the Truth

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Putting this information into text books is likely to offend some idiot that thinks we should only be patriotic cheerleaders, even if it means omitting important information. As you can see the Wikipedia entry, unlike high school textbooks, contains this information.

As long as Wiki articles cite sources, why would schools its use?

What is really interesting is that Wikipedia, to me, shows how companies and the government fight for information, for people’s minds. How? Try Wikiscanner.virgil.gr. This is a site that scans Wikipedia entries, logs their IP addresses, and then finds out where those edits came from. After setting up this site, people found that corporations and governments were editing Wiki entries to hide information, or change how things were worded to make them less damaging. Some examples:

• Diebold, the company that makes electronic voting machines, removed all criticism and controversy about their company.
• “Somebody from the Turkish Treasury removed the part on the Armenian genocide.”
• Someone at the NRA added that Iraq was involved in 9/11 to a 9/11 entry.
• “Dow purges an entire section labeled ‘Environmental and human rights controversies’ that included information about the Bhopal disaster, Agent Orange, and silicone breast implants.”
• Someone at Fox News edited Al Franken’s entry, with respect to his problems with Fox News
• Someone in the Republican party changed the word ‘occupying” to “liberating” in an entry about Iraq. “Over two years after the invasion of Iraq, someone from the Republican party edited the entry on the Baath Party from “In June 2003, the US-led 2003 occupation of Iraq occupying forces in Iraq banned the Ba’th party” to “In June 2003, the US-led 2003 occupation of Iraq liberating forces in Iraq banned the Ba’th party.”"

In “Lies My Teacher Told Me” the author talks about political pressure can change what appears in high school text books. Would Texas allow text books that openly criticized religion, or presented studies that promoted gun control? Would any of the heavily Republican states allow a negative (honest?) presentation of the US “occupation” of Iraq? I doubt it.

But Republicans are not only to blame, and not just politicians either. America is very patriotic, almost Nationalist, and unfortunately a lot of people would take issue with children learning the truth. Like say… how Christopher Columbus was so brutal to American Indians, that women often killed their newborn babies, so that they would not grow up under Columbus’ rule. If an American Indian failed in his gold quota, he cut off fingers or hands.

I would say that Wikipedia is a better tool for children to use. Do any history books talk about the US overthrow of Guatemala in 1954? I posted about this event here, and had thousands of visitors read it. (It was voted up to the front page of Reddit.com) If it was common knowledge that the US had overthrown a *democratically* elected leader of a country, and installed a brutal dictator, why did so many people read my article?

They did because it is NOT common knowledge, except to people who seek out this type of knowledge, or happen to take a college history course that discusses it. (Is there a connection that *government run schools* seem to censor information, but private universities are more open? Possibly because politicians cannot, or at least have a harder time, swaying what books and information a University teaches?) Why is this not taught in high schools? Would our country be so full of blind patriots Nationalists if more of us were taught how the US government REALLY treats poor countries?

If you look at the Wikiscanner page tracing edits on the page about the History of Guatemala you can see where people disagree and change information about Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA operation that overthrew the Guatemalan government.

You can see people ‘arguing’ over the causes of the coup. Was the United Fruit company’s political pressure to blame, or McCarthyism and the fear of Communism (Arbenz, the president that was overthrown, had allowed all political parties into the country, including the Communist party).

As the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me states: “History is not facts, history is furious debate.”

And most importantly, here on wikipedia, people are debating what forces were mostly to blame for the US overthrowing a democratic government and installing a brutal dictator. In high school text books, the fact that the US did such a thing is not even mentioned. If they DID, possibly more people would have questioned attacking Iraq, and the world would be a much different place. Possibly a nicer place…

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Top 10 Health Foods we never eat. Cabbage? I knew cabbage was low calorie, but didn’t think it was high on the healthy list…

Holy FOOKING SHIT BATMAN! McCain drops the bomb, and admits the Iraq war is for oil. Of course this will get spun and covered, but we all know what he meant.

This is a very good article talking about the possible causes of the Great Depression. Awhile back I was convinced that the Depression was all part of a vast conspiracy… but I think becoming paranoid and looking for a huge conspiracy behind everything is part of a natural reaction to finding out most of the shit you have heard all of your life is false. That being said - I would still bet that Bush was behind 9/11. And there is truth behind the theories. Pearl Harbor was not planned… but Japan was provoked in multiple ways, ultimately by US economic sanctions that even government officials admitted would likely push Japan to attack us. The Gulf Of Tonkin never happened. The Federal Reserve is a sham, but not like many think, in my opinion. Public Education is not intended to really make free thinking citizens in America. Hmm, what else. Christopher Columbus was an evil, evil man. Americans slaughtered American Indians for 100 years, yet we don’t take responsibility for it like Germany does with Hitler… Most of the Founding Fathers were racist, rich, and didn’t really care about the average citizen. Did you know in the original Constitution, only those who owned land could vote? Interesting that servants, women, slaves, and the poor (if they did not own land) couldn’t vote to help decide their destiny in the Great US of A…

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Basically, stories about rice being rationed at Cosco are a joke, after you read that people in Haiti are eating MUD PIES. This is not a joke, they use a type of clay, add fat to it, and then eat it.

Here is where I get mad.

The US Defense budget is about $500 Billion a year. 2008 is estimated at over $600 Billion. These numbers are just planned budgets, not actual spending. We spend more than this.

The second highest defense budge in the world is China, at about $60 billion per year. Meanwhile “The United Nations estimates that the cost to end world hunger completely, along with diseases related to hunger and poverty, is about $195 billion a year.”

$195 billion a year would end world hunger completely?

So the US could cut its military spending by enough to wipe out world hunger, and still spend 6-7 times more than the number two military country in the world.

Actually, I am not a fan of just sending countries aid. Welfare only keeps people poor, and I don’t think the citizens of these countries just want hand outs - they want the tools and education to make it on their own. Contrary to popular belief not everyone in Africa welcomes the food we send them. To quote the article:

We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.

Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.

Some Africans have even asked that the UN stop sending food to Africa.

Lets recap:

• Sending free food to poor nations only encourages corruption and laziness, and ensures the cycle of poverty and hunger continue.
• The US and other industrialized nations continue to send food to poor nations. These nations are still hungry though, people are still dying every day.
• The US alone could cut its military budget by 33% - think about this, just a 33% decrease - apply that money to distributing free food to poor nations, and end world hunger. Yet they do not, they send some food and aid, but continue to spend three times the money on its military than it would take to end world hunger. The US would still, after this decrease, be spending 6-7 times what China, the number two militarized nation in the world, spends on its military.
• “The World Bank wants developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture.”

It would appear then, that if people in power really believed that free food would solve world hunger, that the US on its own could do so pretty easily. Yet we do not.

If the people in power know that sending $195 billion in free food per year would not really fix the problem, why do we continue to send smaller amounts of free food?

A case could be made that the industrialized world does not want too many of the poor countries to industrialize. Especially Africa. As noted above, the World Bank pushes reforms that cause huge problems for poor nations. This article in the NYTimes even shows how Malawi, a country in Africa started feeding its own people and even selling surplus food to other countries - they ignored the advice given to them by the World Bank, and US Economics ‘experts’. This article really proves that the US is purposely trying keep these nations poor, and starving. How? It states:

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.

The US is planning on spending $288 billion on farm subsidies - yet we tell African nations not to subsidize their own farming. Malawi decides to go on its own and subsidize farming… and now they have so much food, they are exporting it.

Possibly this is not all planned. I would like to think so, actually. But the evidence is pretty strong. Sending free food is not helping, rich nations are counseling poor nations to use economic policies that they themselves do not use. The US could easily wipe out hunger if it truly felt that sending free food would help these countries.

In a time when oil is getting harder to find, maybe people in power understand that natural resources are limited, and the more countries become industrialized, the more we will have to share with the rest of the world. The US could not sustain its lifestyle if we did not import natural resources, and by keeping poor nations from industrializing, we can buy their natural resources and even claim that it helps their country - which it would, if many of the nations in Africa were not controlled by dictators, and overrun with corruption… which is coincidentally, promoted by the policy of sending them free food…

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Earlier this week, after reading the article stating Canada was going to stop the import of these bottles, I started looking online for glass versions of the bottles we have, called Dr Browns Bottles. These are unique bottles, and reduce baby gas immensely. I found out that you could now get glass versions of Dr Brown’s bottles, so I started checking online stores. Amazon had one seller - sold out. eBay had no one selling any of these bottles.

I spent an hour and a half looking at probably fifty online stores - none of them had these bottles. They were all sold out. It appeared that Dr Brown just released these bottles about a month ago, and with this article hitting yahoo.com, people had bought out every store on the net. Amazing.

I kept checking, started looking for other bottles that might be similar to ours. No local stores even carried glass bottles at all. Very frustrating. If you have kids, trying feeding them with a bottle and wondering if your baby is drinking something harmful to them.

This morning I went online to check again - and found some! Sellers on eBay had them! Hey wait a minute… what the hell is up with these prices?

eBay sellers, and one person on Amazon, are price gouging these bottles. Not just a little either. These bottles sell for $12.99 for a set of two. We use about 10 bottles total, including what we send to our daycare. So I expected to pay about $60 plus shipping for 10 bottles.

Here is the list of eBay sellers that have these bottles.

Six bottles = $109. Four bottles = $59. Two bottles = $34!

I am so, so tired of capitalism. Anything for a buck. Now, if someone gouges a Playstation when they are new, and someone wants to pay $1000 for one, fine. In my opinion, this is different. People are scared, and worried that their *babies* are in danger and these freaks decide not to just make a few dollars on the short supply… they triple the price? A few dollars more I could see, but this is no different, in my opinion, than the company that charged $8 for bottled water at the second Woodstock concert. Disgusting.

We got lucky. The Babies-R-Us store an HOUR away had 11 packages, so we now have the glass bottles. I had thought I would buy the remaining bottles and put them on eBay for the price I paid, just to piss off those scum bags making money off of fear, but then realized I was just taking bottles away from someone locally that might need them.

Is this the end of the world? No. But can we have a little humanity please? Nothing is more precious than a baby. At the right, take a look at my 9 month old daughter. Yes, there is nothing any better about my daughter than anyone else’s daughter, but sometimes I think people need to relate to things visually. There are a lot of people out there just like me, who have bundles of joy just like this little rascal here. We deserve to be safe, and that safety comes before profit. I don’t give a shit if your portfolio drops a little because some plastics company’s stock lost value now that they can’t produce cancer causing plastic. We all deserve to be safe, from the newborn baby up to the retired great-grandmother. Is it too much to ask that safety comes before profit?

And the question of the day is: do you think the corporations knew about dangers of BPA when they started using it? Because in case you didn’t know, the chemical companies do not have to prove something is safe to be put on the market - someone else has to prove that they cause problems in humans. Since you can’t test on humans, that is pretty hard to do until the chemical has been around for quite a few years, and you can start to look for trends, etc. Is it coincidental that after 30 years of use, there is growing evidence that Aspartame is dangerous… and lookie here, Splenda is on the market, ready to take over.

This is not the way it should be. Fuck profit, fuck corporatism, and fuck anyone involved in this shit. We can’t even make cigarettes illegal though when we know that they cause cancer, what are our chances of changing how chemicals are allowed into the market so that we can know our kids are safe with the stuff they come into contact every day?

About Zero. The European Union, Canada, and California are all making these chemicals illegal because they will put a ban on something without conclusive evidence. Is it not better to remove something that seems questionable, until it can be proven safe, than it is to say “well until you can prove that it causes cancer in humans, we will continue to make money.”

I’m moving to Canada. Screw this shit.

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