Who are you really texting?

Have you ever wondered about that unusual chat you had with a long-time friend, only to discover that s/he was away some place distant at the time? Or, about the sudden change in content, context and tone while engaged in a long bout of texting? Or, even the occasional emails from family members that make you wonder if they have stopped taking their meds?

Online voyeurism is a growing issue which few of us think about on a day to day basis, but which we should think about because it points to disordered personalities with potential access to intimate details capable of facilitating predatory behaviors against children and compromising adults.

In a recent experiment to test home camera systems, the New Zealand Herald hacked a collection of IP addresses with security cameras installed. The staff discovered that they could access homes and businesses with ease. Had they been true voyeurs they would have inserted themselves into the lives of their targets and learned more than any stranger has the right to know about the private moments of others.

It is probably wise to remember that everything has a camera attached these days, from  a simple dial-in dial-out to a smartphone, a tablet, laptop and desktop.

When dealing with the compulsive communicator in chats, texts or emails, it is easy enough, as an adult, to pick up change in tone based, often, upon basic levels of maturity, experience and intimacy. Most compulsive communicators lack the ability to adapt to the target's life experience and fail to incorporate those little personal details which build up over the years among and between people.

Sadly, it is easier for adults to think down to a child's level based, this time, on the lack of life experience, developing ego and trust issues. In other words, children as shown time and time again, cannot pick up on the nuance and subtleties of interpersonal communication.

The question now becomes, what do we do about the tablet camera as we prop up in bed, or that seemingly secure security system at home, or the smartphone which follows us into intimate places?

The Internet has moved beyond its cyber crime potential into a world of unrestrained voyeurism where we are visible in the street, at our windows, on the beach. Our voicemails are fair game to any sick mind with our password, and our correspondence is conquest and rite of passage in the real-time game of virtual reality.

And, we are the conduits, because we carry the tools voyeurs use against us with us 24/7.

The new eternal conundrum is, "What is privacy?"

With universal access to our lives, the issue of protecting online copyright becomes redundant.

The Internet is our perceptual signifier - the vehicle and expression of reality which makes life in the flesh a gossamer reflection on a screen.

Nothing is sacred, and everything is fair game.


Heather Vallance has worked extensively on defining information literacy as it applies to taken-for-granted knowledge and life skills. 

Research on Fukushima worth sharing

As I write, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children who have been robbed of their innocence and right to a full, healthy life. Neither they nor their parents have committed a crime, yet they are punished for simply being alive in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is the raw truth, the stripped down reality of Fukushima.

We owe it to these children to inform ourselves to the best of our ability so that if our paths ever cross with theirs we are, at least, able to offer the compassion they, and those who love them, will need to face their futures.

Global Research is a Montreal based independent research and media organization which provides simple, scientific and informative material on many important issues affecting us today. GR has released an ebook, a compilation of data on Fukushima and its impact, not just on the Japanese, but on the world as a whole, wherever the trade winds blow and the oceans flow.

The ebook is called Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation.

I strongly suggest that this be read and kept as reference.

The authors invite sharing.

There is no safe level of radiation exposure

Cancer Risk To Young Children Near Fukushima Daiichi Underestimated from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

Killing the future one child at a time

Are there gifts of radiation on your Christmas list?

In the rush to buy Christmas presents for those you love, you may forget to ask where the products were manufactured, and if the answer is Japan, were they shipped before 3/11.

This may sound strange, but anything manufactured or grown in Japan - after the Fukushima explosions which send radiation debris around the world on the Jet stream earlier this year - carries no guarantee that it is not contaminated to the point of injuring purchasers or users.

The unending log of lies both from the Japanese government and TEPCO, the constant alteration of research findings and radiation equipment readings, and the active suppression of information among Japanese citizens, should concern all of us at this time of year.

A gift as innocent as a Japanese manufactured camera or Japanese green tea could put a loved one at risk because there is no radiation monitoring of imports from Japan.

Yellow rice is a favorite dish on our Festive Season table, but I hesitate to buy fresh rice from the grocery store because of the level of contamination in Japanese rice, some of which has been exported but, seemingly, no one knows where to.

The amount of lies associated with the Fukushima cover up also suggests that companies, with the blessing of the Japanese government, are not beyond shipping contaminated products to other countries for repackaging, making it appear as if these are not from Japan. While there is no evidence that this is occurring, the idea set in several months back with a circulating rumor which suggested that products were being shipped to China for repackaging.

I would have put this rumor aside as a cheap shot at China-West trade, but given the lies, as I have said, I cannot help thinking that those who stoop so low to hide truth are capable of anything.

My Festive Season budget will be spent on products close to home. We have a great local meat supplier in Lake Land Meats, a Farmers' Market in town, and endless other suppliers of local goodies within easy reach. As for the yellow rice? I hope my dwindling supply of rice stocks in the pantry will see me through the holidays.

If you want to follow the Fukushima developments which could impact your day to day activities, visit Enenews and Fairewinds.

We have a certain responsibility to these kids

We are into the first birth cycle of Japanese children since 4 reactors at Fukushima disintegrated in March 2011, promising to change life as we know it for most of the Northern Hemisphere over time.

The truth of what happened will become harder and harder to ignore as the cycle extends into the future leaving behind a trail of children with chronic and acute physical issues known as the Fukushima Syndrome - at least among the medical staff who will have to deal with these children far from the public eye.

Teach your daughters to sing in silence

In her vision the old woman saw armies ranked against her Mistress, marching in lines one beside, one behind the other. Her heart faltered, stopped and beat again.

Her Mistress bent over her saying:
Daughter, my star is setting.  I too have dreamed your dream and felt the sun upon my limbs at midday.  But even in my decline I am powerful.

Teach your daughters to sing in silence.  Teach them to look for me beneath the waves at sunset so that when my star rises they shall be ready.

I will join you on the sands and offer prayers of praise for your souls, the keepers of my name, the faithful who have returned to the great waters.

From The Sybil
This allegory comes from A Woman's Book Of Allegory and uses goddess mythology to alert women to the fact that the destructive present can be overcome by inner song. 
When I speak of goddess mythology I mean that literally, not the so-called goddess mythology invented by the cosmetic industry. The allegory is written for all women who feel silenced by the destructive energies of our time, and tells the story of the last oracle of a dying priestess.
I use the concept of singing in silence not as being mute, but as singing regardless of being heard or not, because all song is universal resonance. Nor do I differentiate between songs. That is the choice of the individual woman.
Sing of trees, if you must. Sing of seas. Sing of injustice or in naive ignorance. Just find a song and sing. This is the message of the allegory.

Benefactors of the Fukushima legacy

It is easy to ignore the invisible. As humans, we do it all the time.

Radiation is invisible and, so, we choose to forget the Fukushima fallout in our rain and the creeping sickness spreading into our seas.

Ignoring between 5 and 20 tonnes of debris, some of which is likely to contain Fukushima contaminants, is not easy.

That debris is heading toward North American shores like a slow, lumbering monster - the stuff of nightmares, except, this time, we do not get to wake up.

 The water in the wake of the debris is radioactive.

While the Japanese government and TEPCO assure us that the ocean will dilute the contamination, early research results indicate that this is not true.

There could have been a reprieve if the contamination was related only to the March explosions at the nuclear plant, and the initial emergency dumping of tonnes of radioactive water off the Fukushima coastline. Could have been.

The contamination continues - 7 months after the explosions.

In a few years from now, children will be splashing in radioactive waves off the west coasts of Canada and the United States.

Long before then, these children will eat fish caught in contaminated waters, and sample rice which Japan continues to export despite the fact that exporters and government officials know the rice is toxic.

I would like to believe that Japanese authorities are suffering from a case of uncontrollable self-denial. That would lend a sense of human frailty to their decision-making.

But the decisions are cold, calculated economic ones.

Exporters need a market to survive even when that market is threatened by the toxicity of the exports.

This is no different to a parasite which survives only because it has a host - even when its dependence kills the host.

Perhaps, even more pathetic, is the realization that Japan as exporter is also taking the lives of its own children.

Fukushima released a monster, and we are all in its way.

***

This post is based on a personal summary of articles found on Enenews and Fairewinds websites.

The rescue cat

I stretch because I can,

because I have no fear of falling.

When I over-reach the chair
you’ll be there,
to catch and to cuddle,
you’ll be there.

In different lives,
my first and second,
stretching was an angst
punctuated by terror
and more meaningless error.

My third life was a cage,
an endless line of faces
which passed me by
for others, as yet more
took their places.

My fourth life began with a scratch,
with a click of the latch,
with fresh air.

A caring embrace and a collar,
a food bowl, all mine
with a friend to the end,
to the very end.

Now, I stretch because I can,
because I have no fear of falling.

My ancestor was killed by a watermelon

History shows that people will steal to feed themselves and their families. If pushed, they will even kill. In this world of hunger, there is no exploiter or exploited, only varying levels of very desperate individuals.

Dutch colonization of the Cape was a strategic business move by the Dutch East India Company designed to supply its ships with fresh produce on the journey between Europe and Asia. Like all big business the company wanted the most profit for the least amount of expenditure.

To this end, Europeans of different nationalities were lured with the promise of freehold land and a horizon of opportunity. To refugee Huguenots in the Netherlands it was a chance to kick start their lives in a place where they would not be murdered in their beds for their religious beliefs.

They arrived at the Cape laden with a casket of seeds and farm implements.

They thought, because there was no precedent for thinking otherwise, that they were moving to a secure, settled colony. In reality, they were dumped onto ox wagons and taken into the wilderness, to the base of a line of mountains which separated Dutch East India Company land from a group of very angry indigenous people who had been barred from roaming the Cape Peninsula at will.

The Huguenots were, in essence, the first line of defence for the Company, the expendable cannon fodder which would take the brunt of the anger and buy time for the Company's employees to build additional and layered levels of protection.

The Huguenots were not the first group of Europeans to find themselves in this position. Mercenary Germans and even Company employees, freed from their employment bonds, had preceded them. The difference was that the Huguenots were farmers and craftsmen with a smattering of military men - very few military men - in the mix.

Our family had one of the few military trained men in the mix. He had been an Army officer in Paris, so the story goes, and he was part of an underground movement which gave safe passage out of France to Huguenots.

Whether he was discovered, or whether he thought it was time to go, is lost in time, but he and his family migrated to Holland along the same escape system, and from there to their uncertain fate in the wilds of Africa.

The family arrived at the Cape and were taken to a patch of tenacious shrub and grass where they were unloaded and left to their own devices.

I have often tried to imagine how they felt as the truth of their situation dawned on them.

An alien world filled with the forlorn sound of night predators with only the flimsy walls of a makeshift shack between.

What little food they had was rationed as they scrambled to figure out how to reach the Dutch East India Company which lay at a distance across miles of sand and foliage - as they tore out scrub with bare hands and pitifully inadequate implements to expose a patch of land for seed.

And the desperation of knowing that that seed was their sole source of food and income.

Six months into the nightmare, my ancestors had a patch of green watermelon to show for their efforts. They guarded it with life and limb, and, so, when a Khoi made his way into the patch and asked for an unripe melon, the head of the household said no.

During the ensuing argument, the Khoi picked up a watermelon and threw it with some force at my ancestor's chest. The impact ruptured an artery.

A crazy way to die - in a food fight between two hungry people.