Category Archives: Rock on-Peace Out

Death toll rises as wildfire wipes out Chilean town of Santa Olga | News | DW.COM | 27.01.2017

Chile requests international aid

Forest fires are common in Chile’s parched, wooded areas during the hot summer months. However, serious drought has made the fires this year particularly difficult to contain. Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, has called the fires “the greatest forest disaster” in the Chile’s history. The country has turned to the international community, requesting aid to tackle the wildfires. Heraldo Munoz, Chile’s foreign minister, said the United States, Canada and various other countries have offered help. Meanwhile, Bachelet tweeted on Thursday that the country had accepted additional super tanker planes and helicopters from Russia.

Source: Death toll rises as wildfire wipes out Chilean town of Santa Olga | News | DW.COM | 27.01.2017

Death Valley National Park Joins Resistance And Starts Tweeting About Japanese Internment Camps: LAist

surrogate for President Donald Trump actually said that World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps could be seen as a “precedent” for the potential creation of a Muslim immigrant registry. This is despite the, um, slightly awkward fact that the U.S.’s Japanese internment camps are pretty much universally considered a black mark on our country’s history. In fact, it was no less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan who signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which issued a formal apology to the more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated, and paid out $20,000 in compensation to all surviving victims.

Source: Death Valley National Park Joins Resistance And Starts Tweeting About Japanese Internment Camps: LAist

Government pushes back against US halt to abortion aid – Radio Sweden | Sveriges Radio

Sweden’s government has called for action to defend work on abortion and contraceptive rights, as the new US President orders a halt to international aid and development in those areas.” The world is looking to Sweden as a leader in these issues,” says Development Minister Isabella Lövin. She wants to meet the Swedish opposition parties and establish a broad political consensus for action to limit the effect of the new US government’s withdrawal from reproductive rights work internationally.

Source: Government pushes back against US halt to abortion aid – Radio Sweden | Sveriges Radio

Is the GOP Trying to Kill Americans? | Dame Magazine

I’m cussing a lot because I’m furious. Like millions of Americans (despite my Welsh birth, I’m about to become an American citizen) I have never had an employer who paid for my health care. (Actually, I had one employer, who was mandated to provide me with health care for a year through the Writers Guild.) But now this kind of bullshit is back. Donald Trump and the Republicans’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a way to curb a bureaucratic mess, but an out and out war on the American people. Because repealing the ACA would mean everyone with a preexisting condition will no longer be able to get health-care coverage. It means those of you middle-income people without health care provided by an employer, but unable to qualify for Medicare, will have to dig deep and find $200 to $300 a month to give to an insurance company who will squabble over each and every doctor’s visit, every dime you spend, every minor symptom you have.After the birth of my son and a horrible divorce, I was crippled with depression and anxiety and PTSD. I credit mental-health-care services—weekly visits to a therapist at $40 a pop even with insurance, monthly visits to a psychiatrist at $50, monthly prescriptions at $20—with saving my life. I am a healthy person. I do yoga, I dance, I eat healthy, I’m active. Being felled by MRSA, a retained placenta, mental-health issues could and would have killed me without insurance.Living in America is prohibitively expensive, and in a big city, even more so. Rent, traffic tickets, tickets for having you dog off leash, tickets for overtaking in the fast lane—it never fucking ends. I often feel like white men are masticating me as they try to suck the sinews off my bones to make stock for their fucking stew. This country is a devastating and unfriendly place to be, and yet here we all are, trying to make the best of it, faced with little choice but to wake up, day after day, work in jobs we hate for pennies our employers argue over, paying rent for homes owned by people who see us as cash cows. I knew this was happening, but the reality of it has devastated me more than I can say. In my ten years of American living, moving here during the Bush era, I began to see real change, and now I am bearing witness to a perilous plunge into a new, worse horror.We need to do everything we can to stop it. Start by picking up the phone: Call. Your. Senator.

Source: Is the GOP Trying to Kill Americans? | Dame Magazine

Pope admits to ‘darkness’ in his faith – The Local

“If I say I’m Catholic and every Sunday I go to mass but then I don’t talk to my parents, I don’t help my grandparents, the poor, I don’t visit the sick, then there’s no point,” said Francis.”In that way, we’re nothing but a Christian parrot: words, words, words.”

Source: Pope admits to ‘darkness’ in his faith – The Local

News | Embassy of the Earth

A breakthrough in science, knowledge and consciousness is beginning to unfold for all human beings. As we pay attention, we begin to experience life through new perceptions of a delicately woven interdependence, cluing us in to larger patterns and expanding our knowledge and awareness of continuous flow and change. As an ABC community these larger patterns are helping us to better grow nutritious and delicious food for the world. Simultaneously this awareness directs us to allow the natural world, our eco systems to do what they do best: protect and regulate the biosphere.The case I’m making here is that there is a profound essence in the world’s smallholder farmers, fisher folk, pastoralists, forest dwellers. They are not just food producers, they are frontline custodians of biodiverse landscapes, with them lies the true regenerative power of our societies.

Source: News | Embassy of the Earth

Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet – Amanda Hess

My harasser finally acquiesced to the protection order when my lawyer showed him that we knew the blog comments were coming from his computer — he had made a valiant attempt to obscure his comments, but he’d slipped up in a couple of instances, and we could prove the rape threats were his. When the judge approved the order, she instructed my harasser that he was not allowed to contact me in any way — not by email, Twitter, phone, blog comment, or by hiring a hot air balloon to float over my house with a message, she said. And he had to stay at least 100 feet away from me at all times. The restraining order would last one year.Soon after the order expired, he sent an email to my new workplace.

Source: Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet

Men and women who threaten and/or incite criminal abuse against others on the internet and other digital and analog devices should not be allowed to do so. All organizations participating in facilitating the transmission of such abuse should be held financially accountable for the harm caused by such communications. Each transmission of such a message should constitute an individual criminal act.

New York Artist Molly Crabapple Sketches Her Way From Guantanamo Bay to Bangalore – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

Gaza was bombed and wrecked during the 2014 war, Molly remembers seeing construction workers taking the rebar from a building that has been bombed. “If you’ve ever seen rebar from a building that has been bombed, it is an evil-looking material. It’s like coiled snakes; like nettles.” She saw two men taking the rebar and straightening it with rocks and tools. And in it she saw an image of resilience, taking the rebar and turning it into construction material, but “goddammit, you’re going to rebuild anyway!”

Source: New York Artist Molly Crabapple Sketches Her Way From Guantanamo Bay to Bangalore – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

Modern Benefits from Ancient Seeds: The Hunt for Wild Fava | Civil Eats

After considerable study, it turns out the seeds are wild ancestors of Vicia faba, commonly known as the fava bean. Fava is considered by the conservation organization Crop Trust to be one of the most important crops in some parts of the world. Fava’s health is a critical matter even in places where people don’t consume it very much: it’s the most effective natural nitrogen fixer known to agriculture.Nitrogen is essential to building nutrient-rich soil, but it’s quickly used up by cereal crops like wheat, which, when eaten in conjunction with fava and other legumes, provide an inexpensive, balanced diet to the world’s estimated 375 million vegetarians. Any crop’s wild ancestors hold important information about how to make modern domesticated varieties more resistant to disease, drought, and other devastating effects of climate change. But traces of a wild ancestor of Vicia faba, long presumed extinct, proved utterly elusive—until el-Wad.The six seeds, each measuring about 5 millimeters in length, were discovered by paleobotanist Valentina Caracuta; she published her findings in Scientific Reports this past November. Caracuta dug the seeds up from the earliest levels of an ongoing excavation of a Natufian habitation. The Natufians were a hunter-gatherer culture that inhabited the Levant (or eastern Mediterranean) from about 13,000 to 9,700 BCE.

Source: Modern Benefits from Ancient Seeds: The Hunt for Wild Fava | Civil Eats