Alison Gardner

Your fridge is ground zero, Part 2 of 2

“Hunger, in your neighborhood or anywhere in the world,
is a violation of human rights, and caused by inhumane politics.
Corporations have a responsibility to get the excess food to those who need it,
and we all have a responsibility to demand that they do.”

(Your fridge is ground zero, Part 1 of 2, 4/24/15)

Yesterday, we brought an important documentary to your attention, “Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story” (trailer here, how to screen). It revealed some sobering statistics summarized here, below which you can find some of the things you can do to fight this scourge that on our environment, making all the effects of climate change much worse.

by David McLean Flickr/creative commons

by David McLean
Flickr/creative commons

  • The US and Europe have 150-200% of the food they actually need, wasting the land by over planting to supply peak demand periods.
  • Although fruits and vegetables are the most wasted foods, their environmental impact pales in comparison to how much is wasted in the beef.
  • The amount of US-grown and -produced food that is wasted in the United States is a whopping 40%, costing $165 billion a year. The world as a whole wastes 30%.
  • While most of us might jump to the conclusion that it is restaurants, grocery stores, and farms that are doing all the wasting, it is actually consumers, you and me, who are responsible for the waste of more than half. We demand perfection, not one blemish on any fruit or vegetable, and just toss away 20% of the food we do buy.
  • The role that food waste plays in climate change cannot be understated. A full 4% of all the energy used in the US goes to the production of the food that we toss. Moreover, much of the wasted food goes to landfills increasing harmful methane emissions. And, the water we waste to produce discarded food in this country each year could instead supply a year of water to 500 million people.

You and I waste we waste about 20% of the food we buy, so what can we do to help . . .

  • Use your freezer more because practically any food can be frozen for use at a later date.
  • When you are cooking a meal, use what’s in your fridge rather than what you are “in the mood for.”
  • At the grocery store, understand expiration dates which mislead consumers. Sell By is a communication meant only for the retailer, and Use By or Best by a certain date is far short, in some case weeks or months, of the actual time you can consume the food before it is inedible.
  • Save and eat all your leftovers, yours and from restaurants. This is one of the biggest sources of wasted foods.
  • Mark a bin in your fridge that says, “Eat First.”
  • Frequent farmers market, of course, but offer to buy stuff they won’t sell because it isn’t necessarily attractive, like having one tiny defect.
  • Talk to people stocking produce and ask for expired or discarded items which you can buy at a huge discount or have for free
  • Volunteer at food banks, and work with your community to obtain and distribute more food to neighbors.
  • Encourage enterprises that turn food waste into fertilizer.
  • Become a gleaning volunteer to pick up all the food that will otherwise be left to rot in farm fields.
  • Most of all, educate yourself about food waste. It will change your life (and your fridge) forever. Start with the National Resources Defense Council.

 

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Your fridge is ground zero, Part 1 of 2

by bigbutpretty Flickr/creative commons

by bigbutpretty
Flickr/creative commons

In case you missed it, try to screen “Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story,” a documentary which premiered on MSNBC this week (trailer here). The film follows one couple’s quest to live on discarded or expired food, and showcases world food waste experts such as Dana Gunders (National Resources Defense Council), Johanthan Bloom (author of American Wasteland), and Tristam Stuart (feedbackglobal.org, Feeding the 5K campaign, and author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal). The couple succeeded in their task, by the way, and ate heartily (and gave some food away). For the entire 6-month period, they spent less than $200 for food worth $20,000.

The US and Europe have 150-200% of the food they actually need, wasting the land by over planting to supply peak demand periods. Although fruits and vegetables are the most wasted foods, their environmental impact pales in comparison to how much is wasted in the beef.

The amount of US-grown and -produced food that is wasted in the United States is a whopping 40%, costing $165 billion a year. The world as a whole wastes 30%. While most of us might jump to the conclusion that it is restaurants, grocery stores, and farms that are doing all the wasting, it is actually consumers, you and me, that are responsible for the waste of more than half. We demand perfection, not one blemish on any fruit or vegetable, and just toss away 20% of the food we do buy.

The role that food waste plays in climate change cannot be understated. A full 4% of all the energy used in the US goes to the production of the food that we toss. Moreover, the wasted food goes to landfills increasing harmful methane emissions. The water we waste to produce discarded food in this country each year could instead supply a year of water to 500 million people.

Watching this documentary should be required viewing so each us can start today to take an active role, at home and in our communities. It’s already motivated me to do more. Most of all, we are reminded that hunger, in your neighborhood or anywhere in the world, is a violation of human rights, and caused by inhumane politics. Corporations have a responsibility to get the excess food to those who need it, and we all have a responsibility to demand that they do.

Tomorrow, Part 2, will focus more on what you can do to make a difference, and the impact you can make in your own home and being volunteer and activist in this or any other movement trying to rescue our planet from the jaws of defeat.

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The Salvation of Climate Change Deniers

Climate change deniers have painted themselves into a corner. They are victims of their own rhetoric based on illogical conclusions drawn from a fairly limited world view. Many do not seem to have paid attention in grade school, let alone have the skill set for a statesman entrusted with the life and death decision-making so necessary to preserve our planet. We should be helping them find a pathway away from this dead end, even though for some it may be too late.

Woodleywonderworks Flickr/creative commons

Woodleywonderworks
Flickr/creative commons

The theocratic GOP is a font of bad ideas and cowardly inaction, but both sides of the debate, and the media, have framed the question completely wrong in the first place, and it has nothing to do with science.

The environmental movement long ago won the science debate, and the climate change deniers will always cling to those few studies that counter the overwhelming evidence of the environmental carnage that’s here with us already with more to come.

You can produce dozens of charts that show the spiking environmental impact of man and machines since the Industrial Revolution, and it will still not be enough for a climate denier intent on allowing the rape of the earth’s natural resources for the profit of corporate elites, and those in government who benefit financially and politically by protecting them.

That fact, these seemingly irreconcilable and immovable differences — literally strangling the air we breath and the water and food we consume — proves that we have reached the end of this debate.

We need not strive in this arena anymore because there is a better, and more logical and more useful replacement for the climate change debate.

The issue of the causes of environmental changes is moot because we are already in the early decades of quite a long and fragile period that promises to be devastating to the world economies and security. We just have to look around and pay attention, real attention.

Even setting aside for a moment all the groundwater pollution (and earthquakes) caused by such enterprises as fracking, consider that entire ancient island populations have been forced already to migrate because rising sea levels have ruined all their groundwater. Entire populations, men, women, children, everything, leaving blighted land that once was a natural paradise.

More appropriate questions will replace debate, such as, “How many white people must be displaced by rising sea levels or other environmental catastrophes before we can end this grade-school debate and join in global action?”

As I wrote yesterday, this is one of VenusPlusX’s key issues because if we ruin our planet, our search for social and economic justice means little.

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As I wrote yesterday, this is one of VenusPlusX’s key issues because if we ruin our planet, our search for social and economic justice means little.

For more . . .
What do Sex and Gender have to do with Climate Change and Net Neutrality
Silencing Climate Change Deniers
Response to Climate Change Impossible Without a Revolution in Thinking

 

Love Your Earth

Earth Peace
Listen to the sound of the earth turning
(Yoko Ono, Earth Day, April 22, 2015)

We’ve been promoting the hashtag, #EarthDayIsEveryDay because the impact on climate change is still grossly underestimated. It is one of our key issues because if we ruin our planet, our search for social and economic justice means little.

Pascal B. for technovore Flickr/creative commons

Pascal B. for technovore
Flickr/creative commons

Mass migrations caused by loss of groundwater due to rising seas, extreme weather and earthquake frequency, and loss of bio-diversity are just a few of the results. We can’t rely on mainstream media to inform us about the risks of climate change, and climate deniers cannot claim they are “skeptics” because that is a word connoting an open mind.

Here are some of the stories we are investigating today that we thought you should know about . . .

For more . . .
What do Sex and Gender have to do with Climate Change and Net Neutrality
Silencing Climate Change Deniers
Response to Climate Change Impossible Without a Revolution in Thinking

 

 

 

April 21 Update

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

I’m returning here after another hiatus but if you have been following me on Facebook and Twitter you can see what we’ve been up to: fighting to end poverty, racism, and war, while promoting the advancement of sexual freedom, a state of being someday where each person is autonomous and mutually respected, having shed our backwards, primitive attitudes.

The book is finally ready for e-book publishing this summer. Long ago, Dan Massey and I uncovered the cosmic connection to love energy, something we have researched and benefited from ever since. This energy is so closely quartered within individuals that they often have trouble understanding its source and how to yield it creatively. This world-changing power has been and always will be at hand but it has been almost entirely masked by religious hierarchies and cults and the fundamentalists who fear it.

by Alice Popkorn Flickr/creative commons

by Alice Popkorn
Flickr/creative commons

The goal of the journey of discovery we embarked on became explaining this immense human power, this love energy, in a more accessible way by demonstrating scientifically the mechanics of how we are connected to the vast array cosmic technologies, personalities, and administrators; what that knowledge means to change ourselves and our world; and, why it has so much to do with human love, affection, sexuality, and gender.

Love energy is something so large in all of creation that we submit it is singularly worthy of worship. It is real. It is not ideological or necessarily religious. We are not starting yet a new religion, but outlining a format for a non-religion, what we call a trans-religion, something that comes after religion once it’s no longer a valuable or viable building block of civilization.

Enjoy our archive of ideas, and check this space almost every day for something new on all fronts of social, economic, and ecological justice and the tools we need to build our better future.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome: columbia@venusplusx.org.

 

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Op-Ed: The Inherent Corruption of US-Israel Relations

A complete political perversion of diplomacy is upon us that further illustrates the underlying illogic that cements US-Israel relations.

Photo by Michael Loadenthal Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Michael Loadenthal
Flickr/creative commons

Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, conspired to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address both houses of Congress on March 3, just two weeks before the Israeli leader stands for re-election.

An invitation of this magnitude never goes, shouldn’t go, to a foreign leader hoping to make his bona fides for an upcoming election at home by addressing our Congress, in this case, allowing Netanyahu to undermine US leadership in nuclear disarmament talks with Iran, something Israel has objected to. Rightwing Israelis don’t want any talks about any subject between America and Iran which they view as threats to Israel’s security. And, Netanyahu at least doesn’t see the perversity of taking America’s chief podium to criticize a country where he is a guest.

House Speaker Boehner is knowingly usurping important presidential prerogatives and weakening the presidency (whomever that may be, now and the future) because foreign relations decisions (and invitations) are the exclusive purview of the executive branch, not the legislative branch, of our government. This makes Boehner (who you will remember is third in line for the presidency should anything happen to the current president and vice-president) particularly unsuited to serve our country. Boehner gives us so many self-repudiating examples of his sheer stupidity it’s hard to keep up, I know.

Jewish organizations and politicians and activists in this country have weighed in on Netanyahu’s planned address to Congress, some lobbying for a postponement to March 17, after Israeli elections, others mounting petitions to cancel it. Both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have refused to meet with Netanyahu during his US visit. Netanyahu’s opposing candidates back home in Israel have questioned even the legality of Netanyahu’s American address this close to the election, which is not guaranteed to go his way. A boycott by some or all members of Congress is being planned. No doubt plans are underway for March 3 street protests and other campaigns objecting to this ugly expression of the congenital dysfunction of US-Israel relations.

We have to understand history to fully comprehend how we’ve arrived at this awful point.

Once Israel and the US (and England) were able to finesse this blatant land grab based on questionable ancient principles of imminent domain and general guilt-tripping after World War II, the only hope, the only hope, for success in this region would have been the emergence of a western state that was totally dedicated to fostering regional and world peace, including the integration and uplifting of the existing population in Palestine. We all know that never happened. Instead, the superiority complex of early and current zionists has done nothing but challenge, irritate, and disappear anyone in the way of their complete domination of the region. With America and Britain’s blessing, Israel conquered Palestine, and the massacres and ethnic cleansing persist to this day.

We can’t fail to mention here that christian fundamentalists in and out of political power blindly call for the supremacy of Israel at all costs to preserve the landing strip for Jesus’s return to earth. This zealotry, on a par with zionist zealotry, undergirds America’s unquestioned love of Israel and support for its actions, no matter how heinous. The reality of the here and now and what’s best for the future are superseded by the politicization and prioritizing of these highly personal religious beliefs on the part of our elected leaders.

As we have written before, the jewish people worldwide, including Israel, and the American people, must take a step back and consider the roots of the Israel disaster and the hatred of Americans throughout Middle East it has engendered.

Yesterday, L. Michael Hager at Truthout, offered a thoughtful review of Alison Weir‘s new book, Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the US was used to create Israel (CreateSpace Publishing), shedding more light on just how deep this US-Israeli conspiracy to defraud the world goes. The full review and the book are both worth a full read, as is Ms. Weir’s website, If America Knew.

Zionist organizations established in the 1930s and ’40s lobbied President Harry Truman to recognize the state of Israel despite strong objections by Middle East experts. Loy Henderson of the State Department warned that the UN partition plan would “guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA echoed that view. (Hager on Weir, Truthout)

Did you know that Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, two US Supreme Court Justices at the time of the formation of modern Israel after World War II, were secret zionist supporters who led the manipulation of American and British lawmakers to support their efforts? As activists and members of the public there can be no end to our excavation of US-Israel relations because they have upended and are upending half the world, presenting one of the greatest obstacles to world peace.

Today, the US funds the Israeli military with over $3 billion aimed at oppressing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is your tax dollars that support this aggression and the deaths of thousands. That’s on you. What are you going to do about it?

As citizens of our war-torn world we must reckon with how and why the world has been hurt by Israel’s actions and the continued culpability of America in destabilizing the region through its unwavering, and chronically unquestioning, support of Israel’s 60-year reign of terror.

When will we break this insane and self-destructive love affair with Israel, and stand up for the rights of Palestinians? Seek out websites and read books like Weir’s to educate yourself. Talk to your friends and families about this pressing issue. Join or otherwise support organizations who are working each day to accomplish this goal. Get the blood off your hands.

Related:
Israel’s Messy Package, Part 1 and Part 2
Professor Walt Helps Explain America’s Bankrupt Israeli Policy

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

 

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: You Need To Explore

Scheyla knows about healthy sexual relationships. No rules. America differs from the rest of the world when it comes to views on sexual freedom. Too judgmental.

Are you burdened by too many rules when it comes to sex? Are Americans more uptight and behind the times?

Send us opinions, comment or send us your own video, essay, poem, a favorite visual image or even to put your original artwork on our platform. You’ll get a free VenusPlusX t-shirt as a thank you.

More videos.

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What Do Sex and Gender have to do with Net Neutrality and Climate Change?

Garry Knight Climate March in London September 21, 2014 Flickr/creative commons

Garry Knight
Climate March in London
September 21, 2014
Flickr/creative commons

I have often been asked why VenusPlusX, and its mission to help bring about to the coming New Age of Sexual Freedom, has been so concerned in the last couple of years with the two issues of Climate Change and Net Neutrality. Some of my friends asked me to explain what these issues have to do sex, after all.

Dan and I set out to help change the world. Maybe you did or will, also. Each of us can envision a better future world, free from racism, poverty, and militarism and the constant interference by the overreach of governments and religious hierarchies and the greedy exploitation by corporate elitists. We chose the New Age of Sexual Freedom to connote that lofty goal, the day when respect for personal autonomy and bodily integrity will at last realized. That future we are co-envisioning is real: what is old and useless will be gone; what was old but useful will persist because it has value; and, new and humane ways of doing things emerge to replace all of the inhumane and coercive systems that enslave all of us but a few.

The work of rescuing civilization from those who would corrupt it proceeds by setting priorities. A long time ago, I appealed to my fellow social and economic justice activists to reserve at lease some of their time to advocate for a strong worldwide response to climate change. But will that be enough?

Climate change deniers like to call themselves climate change skeptics to make you think they are capable of absorbing new information when they have made themselves mentally unable to do that. These annoying deniers are trying to get in the way of taking immediate and historic action. The number of deniers in power to interfere may be high or low but that doesn’t change the fact that the effects of climate change are already upon us, and the urgency is increasing expodentially.

The ravages of climate change and our ability through a free and open Internet to respond to this crisis, are inexorably linked. Climate change is not just threatening our very existence, the very ground on which you now stand, it is rising quickly with some dramatic outcomes (mass migrations, violent weather, rising sea levels and salinization destroying water sources, etc.). When will these outcomes get the attention of those  going through each day blissfully unaware of this world emergency? When will these outcomes directly affect you and your family? Or have they already?

Improvement in all other areas of social and economic justice will depend on our success in responding to climate change, starting with fostering new ways of getting energy without using fossil fuels. In short, we need the Internet to accomplish everything.

You can see more about Net Neutrality and Climate Change, here and here. Also, here is a good summary of the issues, just out today.

BREAKING: According to tonight’s Wall Street Journal, the Federal Trade Commission that protects and regulates utilities like the Internet seem poised to do the right thing. We may be able to celebrate a huge victory after fighting so hard for Net Neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission is about to fundamentally change the way it oversees high-speed Internet service, proposing to regulate it as a public utility.

Chairman Tom Wheeler is reaching for a significant expansion of the agency’s authority to regulate broadband providers, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The move would fully embrace the principle known as net neutrality, and if enacted, would bring a new definition to the economics of the Internet industry: Rather than regulating broadband firms lightly, as has been its practice so far, the FCC would treat them like telecommunications companies and subject them to more intrusive regulation, especially in areas relating to how they manage traffic on their networks.

A central element would be a ban on broadband providers blocking, slowing down or speeding up specific websites in exchange for payment, these people say. Supporters of the FCC’s position say allowing some websites to pay for faster access to consumers would put startups and smaller companies at a disadvantage.

The proposal, expected to be unveiled by the FCC on Thursday, is a victory for a host of Silicon Valley firms and liberal activists who have championed it. Many of these companies lobbied the White House seeking such an outcome, and were rewarded in November when President Barack Obama announced his support for “the strongest possible” rules for net neutrality, the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

If we have the Internet and the ability to communicate rapidly across all sectors in the world, we will have a fighting chance in meeting the tremendous security challenges presented by climate change, and change the world in the process.

 

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One Word To Legalize Prostitution

The desire for love, for touch, for compassion, and for companionship and the improvement of physical health doesn’t have and shouldn’t have any boundaries or interference by governments or religions because our erotic senses are foundational to our connection with others and the cosmic technology around us.

The above is an excerpt of a post I wrote in June, entitled, “Voluntary sex work is destined to evolve into a legitimate Sexual Healing Industry.”

flickr/creative commons

flickr/creative commons

As organizations make way for this discussion, some having worked on legalizing prostitution for more than a decade, I offer the words, “sexual healing” to substitute for the words, “prostitution” and “sex work.” It’s a business like any other business. As long as it’s entirely voluntary, it can provide revenue to people who choose it as one would choose any other job, and healing for so many people in need.

Sexual healing more aptly describes what these exchanges are about, paying for something we might have wished we got for free but otherwise need as much as the next person. By focusing on the value inherent in the exchange in recognition of the fact that this is a matter of healing as much as anything else, we change the dynamics of the discussion, and bring this activity out of the shadows, and help focus more on the unnecessary criminalization of it.

“Hey, I’ll be home late tonight because I am going to my sexual healing therapist after yoga” should be the norm. The sexual healing industry shall become just as benign as any other therapy or activity. As previously asserted, “Crime, sex trafficking, and financial exploitation accompany sex work only because it has always been criminalized.

A realignment of this entire discussion is long overdue. What do you think?

 

Net Neutrality: Stop Congress


Dan Massey
and I were there at the birth of the Internet, Dan directly involved in the research and development that brought it about. Based on the work of Alan Turing and others, the Internet was an expensive, tax-payer-funded, labor intensive product for the military. By the late 70s, it became a utility available to the public.

The great joy of its arrival in our home was supercharged by sharing the recognition throughout the world that for the first time in history everybody could be an author.

It changed everything.

That long ago, you paid for the creation of, and the permanent public access to, a neutral Internet. For sometime now it has been unfortunately embroiled in a cultural war with a small group of corporatist elites attempting to exploit this public resource out of greed, and, as always, at the expense of the 98%.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Think about it. There would be no Internet now if American taxpayers, your parents and grandparents, hadn’t paid for its development, decades ago. For all the activists who are working everyday to Save the Internet, along with anyone else who stops to think about it for 3 minutes, there can be no other premise:  This is a utility that should be treated NO differently that any other public utility such as water and electricity.

As you are probably aware, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has at last been indicating that its 5 commissioners are close to announcing their new rules, another attempt to split the baby, a hybrid that includes giveaways to those who would exploit it rather than organize it for the public good, so they can make money from something we now all share in paying for.

The FCC has been talking about these new rules ever since a Big Cable lawsuit against the FCC was successful in dislodging the previous set of rules which Big Cable found too restrictive. For the last two years, the FCC commissioners have been pressured, you can say assaulted by Big Cable lobbyists and their cronies in Congress, to allow these few huge companies to become the de facto self-regulators of the Internet. This will allow Big Cable to create fast lanes for a selection of their commercial clients/customers while shutting out the rest of us, making us pay more for diminished service in the slow lanes they will let trickle down. Small companies, schools and universities, whistleblowers and activists, non-profits, innovators, and on and on — all shut out.

On Tuesday, President Obama, in his State of the Union speech, made clear that net neutrality is important to everyone throughout the world, saying, “I intend to protect a free and open internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks, so that the next generation of digital innovators and entrepreneurs have the platform to keep reshaping our world.” And, yesterday, we urged you to call Senate and House committee members and their chairmen (who received massive donations from BC) to stop any legislation that would usurp the FCC in order to give the corporatists and the politicians what they want. Tens of thousands of calls and emails were received by Congress, yesterday, and we have to keep calling. Also today, BattlefortheNet.com launched 535 new websites to track all congressmen’s stand on the issue.

Keep the pressure up, and continue to educate yourself about this crucial, life-changing issue. Without a free and open Internet, we are surrendering to the thought police. Your voice and the voices of countless others will be silenced if you don’t act now.

Friday Postscript: The struggle to assure the Internet remains open and available is foundational to efforts to solve some other pressing problems, such as responding to climate change and stemming corporate attempts to capitalize the world’s resources. Soon your enslavement will include demanding you pay  for each quart of water you consume. Climate change is bringing the scarcity of goods, mass migrations, and droughts these profiteers will use to make billions, but only if we let them. 

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