Tell-A-Vision: Garden of Your Mind

Love this for inexplicable reasons, maybe just because. It is good to be curious and let our ideas grow.  Much is going on behind the scenes, underground and throughout the town overall.  People are talking and grumbling and comparing.

Just watch, somebody will call Mr. Roberts a Socialist. 

Via Bluegal at Crooks & Liars

Number of the Day

1,975: The number of charges filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that Walmart discriminated in pay and promotion decisions on the basis of gender.

In related news: "Walmart's outsourcing of jobs is driving down wages at American factories, according to a report from the National Employment Law Project." Walmart's garbage employment policies underscore the speciousness of waxing rhapsodic about "job creators" without any kind of qualifications about what kind of jobs are being created.

Walmart's increasingly expansive presence across the nation creates retail jobs—but does so at the expense of US factory jobs. (Not to mention the jobs lost at the smaller and/or independent retailers Walmart drives out of business.) Meanwhile, the jobs Walmart creates lack protections, benefits, and equal pay.

[Encinitas] needs fewer jobs like the ones Walmart is creating, and more like the ones Walmart endeavors to destroy to maximize profits. Source

More . . .

Revolution in Quebec

Press CC for English subtitles . . .

A great inspiration for budding film makers besides being relevant to our California student protests against tuition hikes and a great deal more in the US of A.  And corruption, misuse of police force, lack of humanity and greed are present here and millions of others towns and cities around the world. 


Remember this from last week?  

Citizen Tip = "All movements are born out of grievance." 

"This week the connection between our local reality, local grievance is linked to the worldwide, nationwide changes in full view of the world through live stream.  The corporate press in this country is still mostly absent in this global  story unfolding.  But, the vastness of millions protesting around the world is happening even if the US public is largely unaware of what is going on in this country and abroad." 

 And, sometimes its difficult to keep expectations excruciatingly low.

Via Common Dreams

Tuesday is Dues-day: Why Tuesday?

Today is Dues-day, but what are the dues?

Paying attention . . . Yes, by simply schooling yourself on how our local governance is organized, who are the players, what are the screw-ups, where is the money and what things get reported you can legitimately call yourself a citizen, an advocate for democracy.

Citizen Tip = Why do we vote on Tuesdays? 

It goes back to an 1845 law, established to give people traveling by horse-drawn carriage to take all of Monday to travel to the county courthouse after allowing Sunday to be devoted to rest. Yes, that's the actual reason.

"If we can move Columbus Day, Presidents’ Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Holiday for the convenience of shoppers, why not make Election Day more convenient for the sake of voters? First and foremost, it is time to end the deafening silence of good people on this vitally important issue. So we ask: Why Tuesday?" source

One could question if the day of the week is the most obvious reason people don't vote, but it does raise a host of questions about our political rituals in general for the curious, for the aware.

Way too many 19th century conventions are followed to the letter in 2012 for no apparent reason or for reasons that died long ago. Daylight Savings Time comes to mind.  Is that a statement with which you might agree? Sometimes it's easy to forget that we need to be aware of and to challenge the things around us that do not support our lives, our quality of life or our future.   Supporting the status quo is sometimes just inattention or inertia.

At the same time there is an equal challenge of abandoning or destroying things that have worked for a hundred or hundreds of thousands of years because of an immediate or short term need or profit potential.  See forests, wetlands, clean air, life cycle waste treatment, diverse planting and diverse animal species and healthy ocean life.

Hall Property (not yet) park

Good for the online reporting from Patch's reporter Jared Whitlock today in his article, Encinitas Community Park Update: Phase I Base Bids Higher Than Expected. Please visit the original article for the full story.

That last word in the title could have legitimately been "announced" or "promised" depending on what Mayor Stocks statement one wanted to quote.  This could have easily been the Myths Encinitas post today at Our Mayor.  The story is just beginning to be retold, so there is plenty of time for more posting here, there and everywhere. The following clip is a reminder of what the mayor said specifically about the Hall property bids and another clip from that speech concerning financials in general at the state of the city speech in April.



The following is a good note to encourage you to go read the post while considering this Hall property as just one aspect of the overall fiscal health of this city.

Cyrus Kamada 1:19 pm on Monday, June 4, 2012 

I believe our mayor Stocks reassured us earlier that these bids were going to come in below estimates. That was irresponsible and misleading. This "five soccer fields or bust" attitude has to end. We need to fold the Hall Park into the overall set of city priorities which include maintaining infrastructure, holding prudent reserves for anticipated pension costs, and addressing pressing needs such as the flooding in Leucadia.

Clarification: this is breaking news only in a sleepy beach town kind of way. Chill.

Battle Behind the Bottle

From the video description:

In the film students in the award-winning Pace University course "Producing the Documentary" highlight the unseen issues within the cork industry in Portugal. The students wrote, filmed and produced the entire project, traveling to Porto, Coruche & Lisbon to research and film.

The film makes the connection between cork harvested for wine bottles, a source of livelihood for 100,000 people, and the forests that are repositories for wildlife across Southern Europe and parts of North Africa.

When someone tries to tell you the latest far right fringe propaganda that sustainability is some sort of subversive word, let this person know how dead wrong that idea is. Even with technology, scientific advancement incorporated into this ancient industry - the basics remain as a viable means to make a living, to provide a population with a resilient industry.

Contrast this as an economic strategy with the Wal-to-Wal El Camino strip, where from Walgreens to Walmart, Encinitas business means job offerings of minimum wage exploitation of desperate workers.  The few businesses that are locally owned may be the exception to the rule.  But all businesses suffer when having to compete with the corporate chains.

This campaign season, let's ask our candidates to offer better alternatives for economic resilience.