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Opinion
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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
I often wonder why the media, meaning primarily network television and most radio, doesn’t carry the important news. I mean stuff that really affects either our lives as we now live them, or us an individuals based on the lives we have thus had.
Here’s a great example of this hypothesis (which is a science term you’ll understand in a moment):
If you’re under 45, stop reading this now. It won’t make any sense to you. But if you’re like me, mid-50's something or perhaps older, and grew up anywhere that television reception was possible, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
On June 12, 2007, another icon of our youth was lost to eternity. His passing by itself doesn’t mean much, other than the end of a long and probably meaningful life. In the past 40 or more years, his name hasn’t appeared anywhere, but as a footnote to some other story about the golden age of television, or the current state of educational television and the decline of science education in America.
But if you’re of the right age, with memory intact, and understand basic principles like the displacement of a body in water, or what static electricity is and how it works, or why the filament in a light bulb glows to light our hours of darkness, you may want to thank one man: Mr. Wizard.
“Watch Mr. Wizard” was a television program in the infancy of the medium, originally broadcast from Chicago, then later from New York. It featured a very pleasant man in white shirt and tie, sleeves usually rolled up to show he was serious about his science. He did something rare in those early days, starting in 1951. He didn’t talk down to children, or adults. Oh and they watched too.
Before the thought gets lost in the nostalgia, here’s the main question: What was his name? We all knew he was Mr. Wizard, but to the world at large, he was Don Herbert. Mr. Wizard hit the airwaves and stood his ground for 14 years, on network television, and his show was even revived for a new generation much later. But he was personally responsible for the love of science by many young people, including me.
When he left network television, Mr. Wizard would appear on other shows from time to time, including “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman” among others. He won a Peabody Award for his television show, and later was seen on the cable channel Nickelodeon for a brief time.
What most people don’t know is that Mr. Wizard was an accomplished actor, and in private life, had been a bomber pilot , flying missions over Germany and Italy, and received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Mr. Wizard knew that science and magic were the same things, but science could be explained. It was still magic by another name. He let his young audience share his awe of the majesty of its principles, and respect for its unbending rules. He explained the forces of the universe without resulting to a heavy hammer, but instead did so with an appreciation of the simplicity of its rules.
As I wrote once before, upon the passing of Bob Keeshan (“Captain Kangaroo”), we will miss Mr. Wizard. Not for who he was, but for what he left to us, and what he let us become.
Doug Rhoades is an attorney. He lives in Lakeport.
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- Written by: Jima Kuzu
The oil that we use as an additive in our food chain is just as carcinogenic as the oil which comes from the bowels of our planet Earth. That which has taken eons to transform vegetation into oil within the earth, Mankind has duplicated in an instant with its blenders and presses, though the outcome is basically the same. Once the molecular structure is destroyed , the oil extracted becomes a carcinogenic carrier.
Oil is the cause of every illness and disease that has plagued the human race. Since mankind first start using oil in our food chain, so began the running nose, and mankind’s susceptibility to illness and disease.
No other species on this planet suffers as the human race does from illness and disease. Yet, they eat the same foods we eat except one substance, which is oil, that we have refined from vegetation and added to just about every packaged food, our salads, and worst of all in our cooking of foods.
This process begins as we consume the oil and it begins to coat every cell, tissue and organ. As we consume more oil enriched foods, the very cells began to accumulate more oil thus suffocating the cell and prohibiting the cells from communicating with each other. This oil , becomes an insulator; thus preventing the cells from interacting with each other . Over time, t he organs become so saturated with oil, that the oil has now become rancid and cancerous and is beginning to deteriorate every cell and organ it attaches to. The body is unable to heal itself for all surrounding cells are just as isolated from the brain and unable to produce the very remedies to heal itself.
The very drugs that are being used to treat the illness are hampered by the very cells and tissues they are supposed to be helping because they become insoluble in the oil itself; thus preventing them from being effective. Stop your use of all oils and discover the "Fountain of Youth".
Jima Kuzu is a lifelong vegetarian who has read extensively on health and healing, and attended the World Vegetarian Congress annual meetings several times. Through a vegan diet, using lots of raw foods, he has been able to find good health. He lives in Kelseyville.
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- Written by: Daniel J. Davi
The observance of Memorial Day day was born of compassion and empathy in 1863.
As the Civil War raged, grieving mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and other loved ones were cleaning Confederate soldiers' graves in Columbus, Miss., and placing flowers on them. The nearby Union soldiers' graves were dusty and overgrown with weeds.
Grieving for their own fallen soldiers, the Confederate women understood that the dead Union soldiers buried nearby were the cherished loved ones of families and communities far away. They cleared the tangled brush and mud from the Union graves as well as their own soldiers' graves and laid flowers on them also.
Soon the tradition of a “Decoration Day” for the graves of fallen soldiers spread. On May 5, 1866, when the Civil War was over, Henry Welles of Waterloo, New York, closed his drug store and suggested that all other shops in town also close up for a day to honor all soldiers killed in the Civil War, Union and Confederate alike. It was a gesture of healing and reconciliation in a land ripped apart by conflict.
Sixteen years later, in 1882, the nation observed its first official Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember and honor the sacrifice of those who died in all our nation's wars.
For decades now, Memorial Day has been a day in our nation when stores closed and communities gathered together for a day of parades and other celebrations with a patriotic theme. Memorial Day means ceremonies at cemeteries around the country, speeches honoring those who gave their lives and service, the laying of wreaths, the playing of Taps.
These ceremonies continue to this day.
Today, we honor our fallen comrades and those who served our country in a time of conflict. On this day we honor the ideals and values all soldiers have given for their country and thank them from the bottom of our hearts for defending this country in its time of need.
Daniel J. Davi, BM2 Boatswain Mate, is a member of the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 951, which has taken part in this weekend's Memorial Day activities. The group visited veterans at care facilities this weekend, where Davi delivered a version of this history of Memorial Day, along with thanks to the veterans for their service.
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It is rather ironic for the government to ask Americans to be united, when what it actually fears the most, as do all governments everywhere, is a united population ...
Of course this government has asked us to unite under, that is to say to submit to, its own agenda, not to unite among ourselves under a common sense, grassroots, well-informed approach to demand accountability and true representation, as would a free people.
In a climate of fear and institutionalized corruption and deception, when the public is defined in terms of consumerism and markets, and wars, political ideologies and propaganda are sold to the consumer via the corporate media and public relation firms as would any other product, it is surprising that the majority of Americans have not yet become angry from having their intelligence repeatedly insulted by this unethical, ruthless and terribly arrogant administration.
The neocons promised us a revolution, they promised that they would flush the government down the drain until there was hardly anything left, they were fiercely determined and had an agenda, and they rammed it down our throat while America slept (literally speaking, as they passed most of their
unwanted legislations in the wee hours of the night without debate, and in the case of the un-patriot act, without elected representatives being given an opportunity to even read 20 pages of a 500 pages document).
Theirs was not just a revolution but an actual coup, if we are to examine the presidential elections "controversy" (the truth is always controversial when lies predominate).
Whether the neocons merely exploited or actually facilitated 9/11 (could it really be a coincidence that NORAD was shut down on that very day, are we to appear to be this gullible in order not to offend those who desperately cling to believing in their government because the alternative would be too
devastating?), they swiftly and masterfully took advantage of this event.
First they essentially neutered the Democratic party by claiming that whoever was not with them was with the enemy, and some democrats even echoed the slogan ... Then they forced their agenda of total population control as far as they could with the un-patriot act, with the creation of vast new
bureaucracies of surveillance and with the development of new technologies of "total awareness" (12 new satellites coming soon in a sky near you).
They eviscerated the Constitution repeatedly, giving the president alone absolute powers over the life (torture and life imprisonment) of anyone whether in the US or on foreign soil, in blatant violation of the fourth amendment and of the Geneva Convention. They also gave the president the permanent power to implement martial law, to restore public order with the use of the military at any time and at his sole discretion.
They even had the unbelievable audacity to ask Americans to spy on each other, to do as was done in the former Soviet Union for decades, where even family members could not trust each other; this alone, I suspect, would have been enough to cause anyone suggesting it to be called un-American during the
cold war, except by McCarthy, another adversary of the Constitution.
Of course they also unleashed their terror on Iraq ("shock and awe"), a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, and that they were itching to attack as far back as when Clinton was president and rejected their extremist agenda.
Are we to believe, giving the shrewdness and determination of these radical and dangerous ideologues, that they simply miscalculated the war and made mistakes in Iraq? Or did they simply make sure a durable mess, a serpent's nest was created in the Middle East, did they set up the conditions of international danger and permanent threats ("endless war") required to more easily continue implementing their imperialistic Anglo-American "Project for a New American Century," which includes a total military domination of the world by the US via the future deployment of illegal offensive space weapons (illegal because against international treaties), and a "National Security State" at home to suppress not only all dissent but simple questions, dialogue and the dissemination of relevant information?
So what does all this boil down to? It is difficult to cut to the chase without appearing to enounce just another conspiracy theory.
But looking at the fact, many people, (some, surprisingly, from totally different sides of the cultural and ideological spectrums, such as traditional indigenouspeople, anarchists and members of the John Birch society!), are starting to understand that we are moving very rapidly toward global corporate rule, towards the international control of not only all resources but all governments by corporate banking and corporate monopolies through such instruments of globalization as free trade, the IMF and the WTO.
And that this agenda is more likely than not to lead to a form of corporate fascism, to a lowering of all social, environmental and labor standards (it has began), to the progressive eradication of individual rights and freedoms and an ever greater control of populations and resources (it has began as well), to a state of hyper militarization, the use of corporate mercenaries and a blurring of civilian and military law enforcement (it has also been initiated), in other words to global and abominable tyranny.
Wake up, look around, smell the sulfur ...This is not business as usual, this is business as war and war as business, and these psychopaths are not playing, they are deadly serious!
I wish I could believe the Democrats have a different agenda, but understanding that the main players are controlled (financed) by the same corporate powers, it is unlikely that they would not follow a similar path of global and absolute corporate hegemony, differencing their policies just slightly enough to confuse people into believing we are living under democratic rules, that we the insignificant, easily manipulated and defeated people are actually represented.
Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.
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