Author: kimi

In California the air pollution control agency AQMD is offering a program to replace traditional 2-cycle leaf blowers with models that are much cleaner. This is why:

“These machines are a significant source of smog-forming emissions. In one year, the average two-stroke backpack leaf blower emits as much pollution as 80 new cars.” The blowers in the exchange program, manufactured by STIHL Inc., are nearly five times cleaner than the California Air Resources Board’s most stringent standard for new blowers. By scrapping 1,500 old blowers and replacing them with low-emission STIHL blowers, the program will reduce at least 14 tons per year of smog-forming emissions. read more

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. read more

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.

Nutritional values

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

. . . 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. read more