Companies

Twenty two years after losing his parents and 5 siblings to Union Carbide's criminal negligance at Bhopal, India, activist Sunil Kumar Verma has committed suicide after fighting for years with paranoid schizophrenia an illness which affected many Bhopal survivors.

Meanwhile, Union Carbide and its successor, Dow Chemical, has largely gotten off scott free.

From the International Capaign for Justice in Bhopal:

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.[3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.

One thing no one has ever been able to answer in any clear and logical way is why we invaded Iraq. It never was about a link to al-Qaeda because that was viewed as bogus the moment Bush tried to claim it. Remember that the ONLY link between Iraq and al-Qaeda BEFORE we invaded was an al-Qaeda connected ANTI-SADDAM Kurdish group who we supported. It never was about WMD because that was based on intelligence from a source KNOWN to be unreliable and Saddam didn't even have a functioning airforce and tank corps, let alone WMD, when we invaded. Plus, any and all supplies for WMD Saddam ever had were given to him by the United States during earlier Republican Administrations, with Rumsfeld personally involved in the deals. In other words we ALWAYS knew what he had and didn't have.

So why invade?

And why did Republicans prevent Clinton from going after Osama bin Laden long before 9/11? And why did Bush pull our troops out of Tora Bora when we had bin Laden cornered?

Why let al-Qaeda continue to function?

I think the answer lies in two simple observations. One is the government's redefining the current war (which they define as BOTH the war on Iraq AND the war against al-Qaeda and which they are trying to expand into Iran) as the "Forever War" (my interpretation of the official government name of "the Long War"). And second are the gross profits being made by large corporations, many directly connected with Administration officials, directly from the war.

From BBC News:

Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former bosses of energy trader Enron, have both been found guilty of fraud.

The two presided over the spectacular collapse of the energy giant in 2001 and are also accused of lying to investors about its financial problems.

Randy Cunnnigham, Tom DeLay, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff...

Slowly we are chipping away at the Halliburton/Enron Republican culture of corruption.

When it comes to technology companies, especially Google, I take their "benefit to mankind" with a huge boulder of salt; especially with my current experience with GoogleNews. They dropped culturekitchen from their rotation because it was not "newsy" enough. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to include such beacons of truthiness like LifeNews, ScienceDaily and my all time favorite, Men's News Daily.

Seth Finkelstein is the man I read daily for all things truthy about Google. I thought I was paranoid about the run around the search company has been giving me since December --basically, since the site was switched to a new platform. Then I read his post, British national Party and Google News. Real eye-opener in view of the next two kerfuffles involving Google in the last month.

The first one being the alleged "fight for privacy rights" that many netopians claim is what behind Google's fight to not release query information to the Justice Department. Yeah, right. They are fighting for the right to privacy but not of the regular citizen :

Besides going to Amsterdam, I also have been invited to speak at or participate in several other events.

This Friday I start participating online in the Media Center's "Media Center Conversations". The Media Center is a media-technology-society think tank; and in this online collaborative project, bloggers and journalists get to mix it up to talk about culture, advocacy, public policy, etc. This will go on until their Global We Media Forum, which is happening in London this year. I'm penciled in to go. I don't have all the details about the online comings and goings but know that LittleJudy and Ron Mwangaguhunga from The Corsair are editors who have lined up evil geniuses like Perez Hilton, Ronni Bennett from Time Goes By, Nichelle Stephens from the Nichelle Newsletter, Ramiro Burr from the San Antonio Express-News and the fellas at Yahoo!Buzz Index.

On February 11th there will be a progressive bloggers "summit" here in New York City at the Grassroots Media Forum.

My name is Liza, and I ... I ... I am voogle addict.

I went looking the clip where Isaac Mizrahi molests Scarlett Johanson's boobies and for some reason I ended up seeing a bunch of Danish clips and this one caught my eye :

Jens and Anders (sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie) are spoofing a Backstreet Boys video ... but ... but ... their spoofing a voogled spoof done by two guys only described as two Asian college guys. May I add they are hysterical :

When I said Video Google is going to be, I meant it just because of this. This is one of those baby steps we will need to take to make the web a truly diverse and viable multi-media platform.

What we need now is a non-proprietary, open-source version of Google video widget.

Google Video still is a good start.