Open Letter

Dear Mr President,

I listened to your energy speech and I was amazed that we still cannot have an adult conversation about our energy problems here in the United States.

I mean, you all but said we should "drill baby drill". Your administration is giving out deepwater permits like they're candy, before the oil corps have even cleaned up the last mess they made. They still have not shown that they know what they're doing or how they can prevent another disaster in the Gulf. We have leaking wells there that aren't being attended to and we still have tarballs and plumes almost a year later. Your own commission charged with analyzing the accident recommended a complete re-engineering of the "blowout preventer" BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED.

We need a CLEAN GREEN JOBS INITIATIVE the size and the urgency of The Marshall Plan, and we need it NOW NOW NOW!

Imagine if we took the 3.5 billion that we give as a gift to GE(one of the most profitable corps in the history of the world) and instead fund a solar panel plant in every county in the US - JOBS!

Take the billions we give away to Big Oil, and build a windmill plant in every big city in the US - JOBS!

Take the obscene subsidy we give every year to Monsanto, and use it to buy the solar panels to line our freeway right of ways to provide free power to the streetlights and municipal buildings adjacent. This will LOWER THE COST OF THE PANELS SO THAT HOMEOWNERS CAN AFFORD THEM.

Use the bully pulpit to make these transnational corporations pay their taxes,(or just take some chump change out of the "defense" budget) and use that money to help homeowners buy the panels and windmills that will build the distributed power network that will bring us into the 21st century stronger than ever.

Now, THAT would be an energy policy that I could get behind.

Open Letter

I took this chart, printed it out on a piece of paper, and added my prescription for our economy:


Tax Wall Street, break up "too big to fail".

Tax Big Oil, fund clean energy.

Tax the rich, fund Medicare for all.

Stop the WARS, Tax the War Profiteers!


...then I signed it and sent it snail mail (i'm beginning to doubt whether anyone ever does look at the emails submitted to the white house website)

from Science News:

LOVE HORMONE HAS A DARK SIDE

By Bruce BowerFebruary 26th, 2011; Vol.179 #5 (p. 15)

Oxytocin may accentuate social tendencies for good or ill

SAN ANTONIO — Oxytocin, a hormone with a rosy reputation for getting people to love, trust and generally make nice with one another, can get down and dirty, according to evidence presented on January 28 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
This brain-altering substance apparently amplifies whatever social proclivities a person already possesses, whether positive or negative, says psychologist Jennifer Bartz of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Previous work has shown that a nasal blast of the hormone encourages a usually trusting person to become more trusting (SN Online: 5/21/08), but now Bartz and her colleagues find that it also makes a highly suspicious person more uncooperative and hostile than ever.
“Oxytocin does not simply make everyone feel more secure, trusting and prosocial,” Bartz says.
These new results raise concerns about plans by some researchers to administer oxytocin to people with autism and other psychiatric conditions that include social difficulties, she adds.
Her team studied 14 people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 13 volunteers with no psychiatric conditions. Symptoms of borderline personality disorder include severe insecurity about relationships, fears of abandonment and constant, needy reassurance-seeking from partners.
Borderline personality disorder usually occurs in women, but Bartz’s sample included four men. Her group of healthy participants included seven men.
Members of each group played a computer game with an experimenter posing as a research volunteer. In each of three rounds, volunteers had to predict whether their partner would cooperate with them so that each player could make $6 or if the partner would leave the game in order to claim $4 alone.
Volunteers who suspected the partner of bad intent could leave the game early and claim $4 for themselves.
Borderline personality players of both sexes left the game early far more often after receiving an oxytocin nasal spray than after whiffing a placebo spray. Inhaling the hormone prodded their already high levels of hostile suspicion and depleted minimal reserves of trust, Bartz suggests.
Psychiatrically healthy players became more cooperative in the money game after getting oxytocin, relative to their placebo responses.
Nasally inhaling oxytocin also magnifies men’s memories of their mothers as being either supportive or not, Bartz says. Her team had 31 men fill out surveys on the quality of their relationships with their mothers up to age 16.
Those who described good maternal relationships remembered mom as substantially more caring and supportive after receiving oxytocin, compared with after inhaling a placebo spray.

Those whose early home life had been troubled remembered mom as much less caring and supportive after oxytocin, versus placebo. (my ems)

Bartz’s team initially described oxytocin’s two-sided influence on men’s maternal memories in the Dec. 14 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These findings underscore that “oxytocin is not a love hormone; its effects vary in different people,” remarks psychologist Greg Norman of Ohio State University in Columbus.
Norman and his colleagues have found that oxytocin stimulates the heart to beat more in sync with the breathing cycle in people with healthy social lives, but not in people who report constant loneliness.
Other researchers have recently reported that oxytocin stimulates greater trust of members of one’s own ethnic group and greater suspicion of other ethnicities.

When they first came out with the "Oxytocin is the 'love chemical' meme, there were those who either suggested or feared that politicians would use it for some kind of crowd- or mind-control (to make us love them against our will and better judgement).

This makes me wonder if the tea partys haven't been using this already at their rallys.

Open Letter

Dear Mr President,

Ain't nobody gonna look out for us except us. No hope, no change, business as usual.*

Please for the love of our country, stop with the deficit madness.

Tax Wall Street, break up "too big to fail".

Tax Big Oil, fund clean energy.

Tax the rich, fund Medicare for all.

Stop the WARS, Tax the War Profiteers!

respectfully...

Then I went to the end of the page to fill out the Captcha phrase, and got this:

same siblt

Which at first glance read: "same shit"

Figures.

*from The Alternate Brain