QUOTES OF THE DAY

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.”
― Upton Sinclair

“Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”
― Upton Sinclair

“One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”
― Upton Sinclair

native advertising

“All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.”
― Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation

“Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.”
― Upton Sinclair, Oil!

Swimming in a Sea of Sewage

Off the microphone of RE

Aired on the Doomstead Diner on September 1, 2014

Discuss this Photo Essay & Rant at the Podcast Table inside the Diner

The Fresh Kills (sic) Staten Island Landfill

Park Ave, NYC Trash. No, this was NOT during the strikes of 1975 or 1981. This was shot in 2010

Cockroaches on the streets of Naples, Italy in 2012

Rats at the Buffet Table in NYC

Fishing in Beijing

More Chinese Fishing

Blue Water is soooo Yesterday…

Refreshing the Water Bottle in Shanghai

Biking is Great Aerobic Exercise!

TEPCO sez, “No worries, we will store all the water as Ice Cubes after we Freeze it”

BP sez, “Gulf Shrimp thrive on Corexit”

BC Scientists are BAFFLED by Starfish Melting disease!

Even Crabs get the Blues sometimes…

Snippet:

…Mostly, the trash is put “Out of Site-Out of Mind” in Landfills that are fairly distant from your Suburban bedroom community, so you don’t see them or smell them unless you take your own drive over to the dump to dispose of some of your junk. Mostly we employ public and private Garbagemen for this task, so you don’t see it unless you have one of these jobs. At least we used to call them Garbagemen when I was a kid, now they are called Sanitation Engineers. This sounds sufficiently technical we imagine ourselves to be cleaner I suppose.

Besides the individual waste is the Industrial waste which gets produced along with the products you buy and eventually send to the dump. This includes megatons of slag produced in mining operations and more tons of toxic chemicals. This stuff eventually works its way into the groundwater, which then needs to be “processed” to keep it potable, which takes enormous scale water processing plants in Big Shities which themselves take enormous quantities of energy to run, and after filtering the poisons out of your drinking water, they again need to be disposed of.

So you constantly fight an ever increasing pile of waste, which as the density of the population increases begins to overwhelm any natural processes which might recycle the waste into something which doesn’t pose a health hazard, not just for Hom Sapiens, but most of the other creatures sharing the environment with you…