An email is circulating advising people to be careful when buying gifts cards because many stores are closing.
“Stores that are planning to close after
Christmas are still selling the (gift) cards through the holidays even though
the cards will be worthless January 1. There is no law preventing them
from doing this. On the contrary, it is referred to as ‘Bankrupcy
Planning)”
I always check announcements of this type out through a little web investigation. Here’s today’s crop of research.
Defining what success means to YOU: success will mean different things to different people. In these modern times, traditional ideas of success involving impressive job titles and high salaries are being challenged by such ideas as “time affluence”. Decide what is important to you, and don’t waste time chasing someone else’s idea of success.
An open mind: some of our beliefs and actions are so ingrained that we automatically disregard any evidence that we should think or act otherwise. Keep an open mind, and you may just come across a better way of seeing or doing things.
Here’s a resource food lovers will enjoy. This spiffy web interface allows you to choose several foods and see how they compare with each other in dozens of nutritional categories including vitamin content, carbohydrate, protein and cholesterol. Comparisons appear one after the other in each category so it’s easy to see how values stack up.
Apart from reaching outside the box for staff members, Obama plans to make a couple of important changes to White House relations with the people.
The transition team is exploring new approaches to communications that could undercut West Wing traditions such as the daily briefings to reporters, including making more announcements over the Internet to ensure that information reaches not only journalists but the millions of individuals who enlisted in Obama’s campaign and consider themselves invested in his presidency.
What’s different between Obama and the McCain-Palin ticket? This video explains it and will make you laugh too.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/1/12647/0809/711/616610
We need to balance respect for the environment, and individual privacy, against company’s needs to promote their products and services. Allowing the expensive waste of natural resources (trees and oil) used to produce and deliver useless mail which gets tossed in the trash without anyone ever looking at it, also encourages large-scale pollution of our environment. Moving unwanted junk mail makes a huge impact on erosion of the ozone layer and the quality of the air we breathe.
There are several services you can now use to opt-out of junk catalogue mail.
A colleague alerts me that illegal wiretapping began before 911, and I located a well-written article on this very subject at Truthout. Truthout is a great resource for well-documented articles on matter which doesn’t get looked at in depth in the major news media outlets.
The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.
Congress last week reversed its March decision to not allow immunity to telecomunications providers who have allowed phone wiretapping without court orders and voted to approve S2248, the FISA Amendment Act 2008. The senate vote is expected as soon as today. Yesterday a test vote showed strong support in the senate to approve the FISA bill with the amendment granting immunity to telecom providers for 6 years of wiretapping without the knowledge or approval of a secret court which was set up expressly for the purpose of reviewing and approving applications for surveillance.
In the majority ruling on the right of Guantamo prisoners to have their day in court to challenge the legality of their arrest, Kennedy writes:
The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom.
I love that statement. To be free, a person cannot be subject to unrightful restraint.
Glen Greenwald expands on the supreme court decision at Salon.
I came across this informed article on the dangers of aspartame. Stop imbibing this poison!
BRAIN CELL DAMAGE FROM
AMINO ACID ISOLATES:
A PRIMARY CONCERN FROM ASPARTAME-BASED
PRODUCTS AND ARTIFICIAL SWEETENING AGENTS
NutraSweet ~ Equal ~ “Sugar Free” ~ Neotame
By James Bowen, M.D.
And
Arthur M. Evangelista, former FDA Investigator
(c) 06 May 2002
FORWARD
This article is an accumulation of long-standing intensive research into the brain chemistry-altering effects of a toxic, artificial sweetener consumed daily by hundreds of millions of unsuspecting individuals.
Dave Winer writes
Her political career is over”
Strike 4. Suggesting she should stay in the race because Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in 1968.Too much benefit of the doubt. Bringing assassination into political discourse as an “issue” is too much . . . Screwing around with life and death is over the top.
So true, Dave. I found a video clip of Hillary’s comment here. I think she realized as soon as she said it, that she’d gone where no candidate ought to go, but it was done.
. . . scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can’t really fathom it, so low it can’t be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, “like dozens of lazy hurricanes,” as one writer put it.
The link Raymmmondo posted this morning on a local give-away list [like freecycle, but not] brings me to his websitepackratmom.com where he starts off telling his mother’s eBay saga with the phrase, “My mother is insane.” Raymmmondo proves that statement with pictures showing every room in the house where he lives with his mom overflowing – just filled to bursting point – with boxes, paperweights, dead plants, empty bird cages and a few years of saved junk mail. Everything, bought from eBay.
On Twitter Dave Winer mentioned that Obama was calling Pennsylvanians’ – and the nation’s – attention to the fact that it’s true that rural American people are angry and bitter as a result of patiently waiting 25 years for politicians they elect to stop selling them out and help them get their lives and their jobs back. I guess Obama became one of my heroes twice this weekend, because he told a really uncomfortable truth about American politics and refused to back off it. Then he admitted he was wrong for having made a poor choice of words when he originally made the statement.
