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 GIVE PEACE A CHANCE The Dove of Peace flies from site to site through as many countries as possible. Please help it make a line around the globe by taking it with you to your site, by giving it to someone for their site, by passing it on to another continent, or to the conflict areas of the world... My thanks to Cosmic Rose The Cosmic Cabdrivers' Guide to the Universe, in its various sections and blog pages, is dedicated to providing useful information and stimulating thoughts, ideas, and humor for intelligent beings everywhere, seeking peace, justice, and equal prosperity for all. Contributions and feedback are welcome.  The Cosmic Rat WHAT'S A COSMICRAT? |
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
 We have re-elected the President, an important and vital achievement, but there is work yet to be done. We must urge him, Congress, and one another to continue to build a more fair and humane economic and social system at home, and a foreign policy that is more peaceful and just. As President Obama said, the obligation of a citizen does not end at the voting booth.
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MULTIPLY BLOG ARCHIVE Multiply.Com has closed, but my words will live on Cosmicrat Opera RSS The Debt Crisis Lie The Advantage of Not Owning Stuff-- The circular economy: from consumer to user. --February 10, 2013 Trayvon Martin never got to vote. --February 6, 2013 The Politics of Skin in America Reluctant Emancipation Remote Control War --February 8,2013 The Right To Keep And Bear...Slaves What does the Second Amendment to the US Constitution have to do with slavery? That's a good question. The answer is: everything. --January 21, 2013 
Through the Looking Glass Links to over 700 mirror sites for Wikileaks, perhaps the most important web phenomenon of the decade. I strongly support Wikileaks and anyone who is dedicated to revealing the truth to the people of the world, including: Bradley Manning, nominee for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament submitted a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee for the 2012 prize for his 'individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world. The revelations-including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq-have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about American overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.'  
The people should be the deciders! We should have a National Referendum for any war.
WORLD TIME Seattle, Washington... Phoenix Arizona Edmonton, Alberta... Kansas City, Missouri. St. Petersburg Florida... Rio de Janeiro, Brazil London, England... Vilnius Lithuania, Tel Aviv, Israel... Baghdad, Iraq Beijing, China Phoenix, Arizona, USA (Home of CosmicRat) St. Petersburg, Florida Birthplace of CosmicRat) Oslo, Norway (A friendly, peaceful place) Vilnius, Lithuania Kabul, Afghanistan AFGHANISTAN OCCUPATION DEATHS It's Time to Leave the Afghans in Peace. Beijing, China
Chomsky on Civil Liberties, Obama and the Future of Progressive Politics by STEVEN DUREL GASOLINE PRICES 2005-2011 -A reference to refute Republican lies. River Bend Blog The real story from inside Iraq The Right to Migrate STOPPING DESPOTISM--the Al Gore speech An eloquent and insightful statement about the danger from the Bush Administration. THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH An unpleasant job, but someone has to do it. THE LESSONS OF WORLD WAR ONE People and politicians alike knew the truth then. Why didn't that help? VOTE COSMICRATIC We need one world government. THE DANGER IN RELIGION Many think of religion as a gentle and good thing, but it is also being used to cause violence, destruction, and loss of freedom. THE ATTACK ON TRICKY DICK Did the government learn nothing from the failed Nixon assasination attempt? COALITION POLITICS IN AMERICA How the Republicans win elections, and what we should do about it  
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RAT NOW. RAT HERE. Below are my most recent Rat Now articles. The link at the bottom will take you to the page where all past articles can be found. Stop Monsanto!Monsanto and Co. are quietly trying to take control over the everyday fruit and vegetables we eat.At least the EU is fighting them, and has recognized the threat Monsanto poses to the world's health and fuel supply. Most corporations are greedy, but usually they at least produce something of value, even if they charge too much and pay workers too little. But Monsanto is the closest thing to a criminal enterprise you can find that is still legal. It shouldn't be legal. This is a company that tries, and often succeeds, to PATENT LIFE. It would be hard to get more insidiously evil than that. This summarizes the Monsanto threat well: Monsanto, the chemical giant that gave us poisons like Agent Orange and DDT, has a super-profitable racket. Step 1: Develop pesticides and genetically modified (GM) seeds designed to resist them, patent the seeds, prohibit farmers from replanting their seeds year to year, then send undercover agents out to investigate and sue farmers who don’t comply. Step 2: Spend millions lobbying government officials and contributing to political campaigns, get former Monsanto bigwigs into top government jobs, and then work with them to weaken regulations and push Monsanto goods into markets across the world. Monsanto is driving an industrial farming takeover -- trampling small farmers and small businesses as vast ‘monoculture’ farms of single crops leech the land of nutrients, diminish genetic diversity, and create dependency on fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. The irony is, it’s not clear that the decimation of natural, sustainable farming has brought any boom in crop yields. Just more profit for the corporations. Our governments should step in, but Monsanto’s lobbying obstructs them. Monsanto’s near monopoly is breath-taking, with patent rights over 96% of the GM seeds planted in the US. And despite concerns about health and safety, the same patents allow Monsanto to prevent any farmer or scientist from testing their seeds! Still, a few countries have banned or restricted Monsanto products. They claim their products cost less, but often farmers are lured into multi-year contracts, then seed prices rise, and they have buy new seed each season and use more herbicides to keep out ‘superweeds’. In India, the situation is so dire that one cotton area has been called ‘the suicide belt’, as tens of thousands of the poorest farmers have taken their lives to escape crippling debt. (from an Avaaz.org email) Seeds of discontent (Texas Observer) Monsanto sued small farmers to protect seed patents, report says (The Guardian) Political contribution discloslures (Monsanto) The Real Monsanto Protection Act: How The GMO Giant Corrupts Regulators And Consolidates Its Power (ThinkProgress) Monsanto Protection Act put GM companies above the federal courts (The Guardian) Biodiversity for food and agriculture (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) Monsanto’s harvest of fear (Vanity Fair) Wikileaks shows US pushes GM on EU (The Guardian) USDA Greenlights Monsanto's Utterly Useless New GMO Corn (Mother Jones) Crop Scientists Say Biotechnology Seed Companies Are Thwarting Research (New York Times) Additional sources (Avaaz) Millions Against Monsanto Occupy Monsanto-- As Monsanto has occupied our farms and foods, it's time we take them back. The World According to Monsanto-- a documentary -cosmicrat April 9, 2013 (updated April 26) The Trap of IndividualismThe ideology that calls itself conservative often promotes policies and acts in ways that seem not to make sense, and use tactics without principles, except to win at any cost.One thing that tells us that the ideology is secondary to the purpose. Usually we think in terms of an ideal, or set of ideals, inspiring a plan of implementation. With conservatives, it is the opposite. Their motivation is simple: greed. The ideology is built around the purpose of allowing an elite minority to continue to exploit the majority, who they hope to convince is an acceptable state of affairs, or at least prevent from effectively offering resistance. An article I recently read on the subject of the American gun culture and the promotion of the Second Amendment revealed some insight into a key aspect of the devious design of the manufactured ideological web, and how it serves them. From 'Operation Wetback' to Newtown: Tracing the Hick Fascism of the NRA The right to bear arms, an amendment that has been twisted loose from its original purpose, resulting in a heavily armed population in a society where that is not only useless but dangerous as well, serves to give gun owners a sense of personal power that is only an illusion. It turns them from a part of a society to a collection of individuals, distrusting other individuals, unable and unwilling to cooperate and organize with others to defend their common interests. Individualism: It sounds like a very positive concept. We are all individuals, with the right to be ourselves, say what we like, and do things in our own, perhaps nonconformist, way. But there is another side to individualism, and that is the side the conservatives use against us. Human beings are at their most effective when they work together to achieve common goals. That is the very basis of human civilization. Sharing our knowledge, discoveries, and effort is what built our fantastic advances in technology, science, and art. It has also enabled us to free ourselves from tyrannies. Human beings would not exist today if we had not learned to cooperate. Every living being has a drive for self-preservation, but we and other social animals evolved an innate tendency toward group preservation. Individually, we are vulnerable; together, we survive and prosper. Empathy is a vital survival trait. We often help and protect others, at risk to ourselves. Groups in which members did not have that instinct usually failed. Beyond mere survival, our social nature, as we developed our ability to communicate, share, and pass on knowledge and ideas to future generations, made us the dominant species we are today. Of course we don't all think alike or have the same abilities. Our individual nature is also important, resulting in new ideas, inventions, and specialization. When our ancestors reached the point of building structures, devices, and organization enabling us to be reasonably sure of daily survival, some, having acquired more wealth than others, began to believe that they did not need the rest of society. They felt that their wealth and the power it enables made them independent of, and superior to, the majority of their fellow human beings. This was an illusion then, as it is now. It not only ignores the history of collective human contributions to reach the current level, but the interdependent support of the entire population. This thought of being apart from the masses is nevertheless attractive because it seems to excuse the elite from responsibility for their impact on the rest of society. It has never been too difficult for the ordinary people to realize that the wealthy elite at any point in history use their power to obtain much more than their fair share of available resources with little or no regard for those they exploit for material gain. The wealthy and powerful know this, and the cost of their position is to live with a degree of fear that their power will not protect them from a unified and purposeful mass of common people, once those people decide that inequality and injustice have gone too far. In the past, alliance with an autocratic government was good insurance for the elite. It was the basis for feudalism, and, as industrialism developed, a marriage of state and corporate power, as in the British Empire, or fascism. The fascism of Nazi Germany was very attractive to some American capitalists, at least until the war made their advocacy 'politically incorrect'. In a democracy, wealth and power must rely on two methods: direct financial influence on elected representatives and propaganda to influence the electorate. They have been quite successful with both in the US. Perhaps the most insidious and effective themes of propaganda is the promotion of individualism as an ideal opposed to collective organization and action. With this twisted notion of opposing the two complementary traits which have actually together built our civilization, they seek to isolate each person from every other person. As the above linked article points out, the individual 'right' to own and carry firearms, no matter how unnecessarily deadly, gives the owner the illusion of personal power and independence, while increasing his level of distrust and fear of every other person, especially if there are perceivable differences between them. Those who attempt to organize people for collective action are portrayed as wanting to rob others of their individuality. Naturally the excesses of communist governments fed into this line of propaganda for many years, and was so pervasive that it is still useful. The propaganda seeks to label any idea but unregulated capitalism as 'communist' or 'socialist'. Over the last 40+ years the definitions have been escalated to the point of attacking the reforms by Roosevelt and those who followed him that actually saved capitalism from itself. Even democracy has been attacked, both rhetorically and tactically by those seeking to limit the right to vote. Democracy is, after all, the ultimate in collective, cooperative action. It enables the majority, who are not rich and powerful, to limit the priveleges of the 1% to control their lives. Our ability to use the democratic tools available to us is constrained only by the opposition of the propagandized. The best thing any of us can do is to teach someone to think. --cosmicrat December 23, 2012 More articles: |
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