Nearing the end

So last week in class everything was just clicking. We were talking a lot about environmental racism with Pat Buckley's presentation on the biomass plant which was really good because I had heard about it last semester (only because of the Alternative Energy Systems class) but never really researched it. It was sweet that Pat found his senior project idea and possibly a graduate pathway in From the Ground Up. John Dayberry showing up was pretty...coincidental. His talks matched up really well with what we were discussing in class last time and his insights and experience seemed bountiful. I got pretty interested in helping him over the summer for the opening of the beach which hopefully will accept the Washoe name given to it. This actually just reminded me that I have to tell Ty to let his dad know I'd like to help.

For my service learning project I will be working with Food Hub in Truckee where they have a geodesic dome and are attempting to grow some food up here and also bring farm fresh food up from the foothills for distribution to local restaurants and institutions. I'm hoping to get a feel for how the logistics of inventory and distribution for food take place and end my service learning with some sort of procedure that can be used to inform institutions about the benefits of obtaining food locally and farm fresh and also how to go about switching to a program like Food Hub. This will probably be a seperate page on the FoodHub website. I've already contacted Susie and she's really excited to be getting help. Jaynie is also volunteering there and has started.

            Susie is still working on getting it started and Jaynie tells me she is modeling it after a similar program in Berkeley, California. Getting in on it from the ground level will help in seeing how it all comes together and how to get it going. I’m not too sure what my volunteer hours will consist of but I’m sure actually farming/gardening will be part of it.

            I have found some books but I am not sure if they will be the ones I end up choosing specifically. These books are: Advanced Planning in Fresh Food Industries: Integrating Shelf Life into Production Planning (Contributions to Management Science) by Matthias Lütke Entrup, Retailing Logistics and Fresh Food Packaging: Managing Change in the Supply Chain by Kerstin Gustafsson, Gunilla Jonson, David Smith, and Leigh Sparks, Food Supply Chain Management: issues for the hospitality and retail sectors edited by Jane Eastham, Liz Sharples, and Stephen Ball, and also Food Supply Chain Management edited by Michael A. Bourlakis and Paul W. H. Weightman.

My sole contact for now is Susie Sutphin and I have her email and phone number which I won't be posting on here.

I talked to her yesterday on the phone about starting to volunteer near the end of summer and then continuing on throughout the semester. I am available Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings as well as a block of time in the afternoon on Tuesday and Thursday so I feel like the 60 hours will not be a problem.

We discussed how a pamphlet which was my original idea probably wouldn’t cover enough and I wasn’t set on a pamphlet, it was just an idea. We brainstormed possibly adding a section to the FoodHub website discussing the contributions Jaynie and I will be putting forward and hopefully getting the school on board with Foodhub. Susie seems really excited and knowledgeable which excited me as well.

This service learning project, and my essay for your class as well as my essay on urban/vertical farming in Katie Zanto's class were all inspired by a group my friend started on Facebook called |HealthNet| that I instantly became involved it. It's all about spreading information on healthy living and eating and emphasizes eating raw foods, local organic foods, and juicing. It is definitely still in the works with a youtube channel and a website coming along. We are thinking about turning it into a non-profit based on education. I really hope things keep going well and this can somehow build off of FoodHub and combine with my Senior Project next spring somehow.

Last Class/Service Learning

This last class was mostly taken over by talking about our research and how it's been going but this led to a good tangent where we discussed a lot about GMOs and eventually it made a full circle back to something from earlier in the semester in Katie Zanto's class when Jaynie brought up Stolen Harvest. I have been seeing connections a lot between my classes and life ever since I transferred up here and I really enjoy the feeling of connecting those dots and seeing connections where I previously didn't. I always enjoy the classroom because no matter what I at least learn one thing new every single session and I can't say that for all my classes. 

For my service learning, which I'll be doing next semester, Katie Zanto told me about Food Hubs in Truckee where they have a geodesic dome and are attempting to grow some food up here and also bring farm fresh food up from the foothills for distribution. I'm hoping to get a feel for how the logistics of inventory and distribution of food take place and end my service learning with some sort of procedure in the form of a pamphlet or something that can be used to inform institutions about the benefits of obtaining food locally and farm fresh and also how to go about switching to a program like Food Hubs. I've already contacted Susie and she's really excited to be getting help. Jaynie is also volunteering there and has started and Kaila is thinking about it as well.

Economic Justice

So at the end of class last week, after having discussed economic justice and watched videos and talked about current events, we were asked to write down what economic justice meant to us, but I didn't really know still so I just went with the definition that was given. I now feel that economic justice can be defined as equitable payment of any type for equal input.

We started last class watching a clip of "From First to Worst" which was interesting and got me wanting to see the entire documentary which I plan to (I have it on my list) and it was pretty astonishing how greedy the more affluent districts were, that they would just got back to match the less fortunate schools instead of distributing the surplus equally. This led to bringing up how some California Universities, but CSUs and UCs, now cost more than schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Williams College. It's shocking to see PRIVATE schools costing less than California PUBLIC schools. This was the major thing that stuck with me from that class, even more so than our discussions of Adam Smith and his irrespective tone when speaking of the "savages" and how we don't have true capitalism, more of a crony-capitalism.

Oh ya, as of...2011 I believe it was, California spends $50,000 per inmate and $8,667 per student annually.

Education and Economy

Yesterday in class we discussed economic justice and ended up talking a lot about education and how you need to be educated to accomplish significant mobility in life. This article reminded me of that discussion as Congress is misleading the people and not giving them the proper knowledge.

Bernanke tells Congress they're too optimistic

I'll do a more complete post later

Oh ya, this is a picture I came across recently that is pretty eye opening.

The hunt begins

I did not attend class this past week because I had another assignment I had to take care of, but I have seen Betts' presentation before. She shows us how to access the databases on the school library website and shows us how to change up our keywords to get different results. She also shows us some convenient features such as being able to get it cited automatically.


I couldn't get Blogger to let me indent the lines following the first lines for the citation, sorry about that.


Barret, Mike. "Antidepressants Proven to Be Useless, Pushed on Public Anyway."Activist Post. 24 Feb. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/antidepressants-proven-to-be-useless.html>.
This article discusses information put forth by clinical trials and the FDA stating the basic uselessness and danger of anti-depressant drugs and how they are pushed to the public anyway. It discusses the side effects these medications bring about and how the medications do less than placebos.

Group, Edward. "17 Health Benefits of Cayenne Pepper | Natural Health & Organic Living Blog." Global Healing Center. 21 June 2010. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/benefits-of-cayenne-pepper/>. 
This is a quick article describing various health benefits of cayenne pepper throughout history and continuing today. It also links up to other articles about foods with health benefits such as açai berries. 





Kushi Institute. "Cancer & Diet Information." Kushi Institute. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.kushiinstitute.org/html/cancer___diet.html>.
The Kushi Institte provides many sources in a database of sorts. It contains newspaper articles, journal articles, and scholarly papers all that refer to the benefits of a macro biotic diet and how it positively impacts your health.




Masci, David. "Diet and Health." CQ Researcher 23 Feb. 2001: 129-60. Web. 3 Apr. 2012.
This is a fairly lengthy scholarly article discussing both the beliefs and disbeliefs of a diet's impact on your health. 


Munsterhjelm-Ahumada, Karin. "Health Authorities Now Admit Severe Side Effects of Vaccination." Truth Theory. 26 Mar. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://truththeory.com/2012/03/26/health-authorities-now-admit-severe-side-effects-of-vaccination/>.
This article discusses the severe side effects of vaccination, specifically the swine-flu (H1N1). It discusses how the mild illness was blown out of proportion and many European nations made vaccinations mandatory.


"Www.rife.org." Www.rife.org. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.rife.org/>.
This is a website dedicated to collecting all of the information they can on Royal R. Rife who, supposedly, had created a medical machine that used electromagnetic pulses set to different frequencies to destroy varying types of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The site has compiled newspaper articles, Rife's research papers, related patents, and more.


Silvertooth, E. W. "Special Relativity." Nature 322 (1986): 590. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6080/pdf/322590b0.pdf>.
This is a short article written by U.S. Air Force officer in which they repeated an experiment done originally in 1887 that tried to prove there is a field of energy that connects us all. The conclusion Silvertooth came to was that there was an energy field of sorts connecting. This ties along with Gregg Braden's work which I will be discussing.


"The Struggles of Aging Made Easy." Oldageequalssuccess. WordPress, 18 Mar. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://oldageequalssuccess.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/the-struggles-of-aging-made-easy/>.
This short articles pulls in information from various sources such as the US Department of Health and Human Services, Harvard studies, along with other studies and articles explaining the importance of fruits and vegetables and activity.




"Suppressed Medical Discovery Dr Robert Beck Cure for Cancer and Aids." YouTube. YouTube, 05 Feb. 2011. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkiX0jJJozk>.
This is a 2-hour long video that I have not gotten around to watching yet.




Zakaria, Fareed. "How to save American Health Care." Global Public Square. Cable News Network, 26 Mar. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/26/zakaria-how-to-save-american-health-care/>.
This article written by CNN correspondant goes over America's healthcare system and why it is failing due to insurance practices. He discusses how the system could possible be repaired and why the free-market system doesn't work with healthcare.

"Tapped"

Class this past week was pretty interesting. I totally forgot Jillian was going to be there and was surprised at first but you and her are a lot a like, she's rad. She had lots of information and is a serious community participant, and even wrote random notes on the board like you do.

I had never seen "Tapped" before or even heard of it. When it was brought up I thought it was the documentary on the US privatization of Bolivian water, including their rainwater, that my high school senior gov/econ teacher showed us but quickly learned it wasn't. I had no idea that companies like Hershey's could go in and basically take a community's water source for free and sell it at 1900x the cost of tap water. Its a joke, a big advertising media scam where they got us to start thinking we needed bottled water because its so much better than tap water, but oh wait, the processing of the bottles, and the big water jugs, leaves chemicals in the plastic that could cause obesity, breast cancer, prostate cancer, ADHD, ovarian cancer, neural disorders, and low sperm count; I knew BPA was bad for you but I didn't know it caused all that or that there was a chemical in the benzene family too.

After seeing Tapped I caught myself looking at water bottles and thinking about it every time I saw water bottles and of course the EPA would be on the industry's side, threatening that one guy that he could get fired for telling the people there could be cancerous chemicals in the environment due to the bottle processing plants or that the people had a right to complain about the companies. I'm glad he ended up quitting and working to fight against them,

"New Obama Executive Order Seizes U.S. Infrastructure and Citizens for Military Preparedness"

You've got to be kidding me. This violates so many rights, not to mention its authoritarian nature.

Please fight your consumerist short attention spam and read the entire article.

http://current.com/community/93706674_new-obama-executive-order-seizes-u-s-infrastructure-and-citizens-for-military-preparedness.htm

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

-Benjamin Franklin




UPDATE: This is actually just an update to an older EO that I didn't know about. These are not new powers being granted.