Clipmarks | brotherhug's clips

What have they done to our beef?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:07:28 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: Industrial agriculture has transformed our meats into a product that is often hazardous to humans. The inhumane treatment of animals, the force feeding of foods that are not part of the animals' diet, the overcrowding, etc. have created unhealthy animals which in turn make us unhealthy.

The result is cheap food, lots of cheap food, cheap hamburgers, cheap toxic food that we pay for with our health.

Clip Source: www.motherearthnews.com

What You Need to Know About The Beef You Eat

Supermarket beef is an unnatural, industrial product. The good news is there are better and safer options.

There seems to be no end to cost-cutting measures in the modern feedlot. To further lower the cost of feed, which accounts for 60 percent or more of the total cost of raising cattle, many cattle are fed “byproduct feedstuffs.” This can range from nutritious ingredients such as beet pulp and carrot tops, to junk: stale bread or candy and heat-treated garbage. As one feedlot operator told me, “Byproduct feedstuff is anything that is cheap, keeps the cattle growing and can be found close to the feedlot.”

But you can find beef from cattle that were not fed filth, pumped up with hormones or treated with unnecessary antibiotics. And you can make sure it’s good and fresh. Better choices are beginning to pop up in natural and specialty grocery stores, on the Internet and in a growing number of traditional supermarkets.

Tags: beef, food, organic, sustainablility, health

Rice Field Art

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:47:59 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: Amazing temporary art created from different colors of rice plants.

Clip Source: www.funforever.net

Rice field art in the country of the rising sun. Each year these guys make new images on their field by planting rice in different patterns making various images. They use different sorts of rice for color. The result is amazing as you can see. It’s a pity they only last as long as it’s time to harvest the rice.

Tags: art, crop art

Futuristic Looking HDR Images from Russian Underground

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:34:49 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: englishrussia.com

Tags: photography, russia, hdr

Surreal Russian HDR Photos

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:32:55 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: englishrussia.com

Tags: photography, russia, hdr

Amazing Aerial Photographs of our Planet Earth

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:30:52 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: hellishhumor.com

Tags: photography, earth, nature

Hyper-realistic art

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:14:39 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: deputy-dog.com

9 artists who will blow your mind

even if you think photorealistic art is pointless (which i’m sure some people do) there’s no denying the skill and patience involved in these creations.

traveller - fibreglass & mixed media, 1988

‘61 pontiac - oils on canvas, 1968

alameda gran torino - oils on canvas, 1974

don’t shed no tears - acrylics on canvas, 2006

dust to dust - acrylics & oils on canvas, 2006

Tags: art, photorealistic

Recycling Water

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:43:45 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

Greywater Guerrillas: No Water Down the Drain in Vain

The Eco-Friendly Movement to Reuse Water From Showers, Sinks and Washing Machines

"When I learned how this lifestyle of using water and dumping it down the drain was affecting the world, I wanted to live a different way," Laura Allen said.

"It's not dirty, it's not contaminated. It's just some water with a little bit of soap in it and some dirt," said Woelfle-Erskine.

Gray water is the water that goes down the drain from your showers, sinks and washing machines. Humans would never want to drink it or wash in it, but it turns out that most lawns and most things in a garden love it. Allen and Woelfle-Erskine use theirs to feed a bed of tomatoes.

"The soaps that are in [the water] are actually plant nutrients," explained Woelfle-Erksine. "So there is phosphate in soap. There might be nitrates."

Tags: permaculture, greywater, environment, conservation

Water is a Right that is Being Taken away by Corporations

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:11:49 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: It's highly likely that within a generation, there will be wars fought over water. Our usage, particularly in the U.S. is far from sustainable, but even more dangerous to humankind and the planet is the privatization of water sources.

Clip Source: www.motherjones.com

Blue Gold: An Interview with Maude Barlow

News: In this recent interview with Mother Jones, water activist Maude Barlow describes how, more and more, developing countries are pressured into ceding control over their dwindling water supplies to private firms.

In 1995, a vice president of the World Bank famously declared that, as the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, so the wars of the 21st would be fought over water.

iant firms like Vivendi, Suez and Bechtel increasingly buy up impoverished nations' water supplies, taking sorely needed water and selling it at a profit, all with the blessing of transnational organizations like the World Bank and World Trade Organization.

this process isn’t sustainable.

once you privatize it, it’s very, very hard to turn back.

Tags: water, sustainability, privatization

Selling Dissatisfaction. Did My iPod Really Make Me Happy?

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:19:08 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: We're bombarded with messages telling us we need this to be happy and that to make us sexy. How can we be happy with our three year old car when that new shiny one on television will make others look at us with envy.

When will the madness stop? When we've all gone completely mad?

Wouldn't a walk through your neighborhood be more fun than trying to figure out whether to get a plasma or lcd large screen tv, that will have even bigger messages of dissatisfaction?

What pill are they going to sell us next to restore the happiness the ads are taking away from us?

Clip Source: adbusters.org

Advertising is Brain Damage

From Adbusters #73, Aug-Sep 2007

people are starting to ask some uncomfortable questions: Why am I being told to buy a new car a dozen times every day?

Why, in this ecological age of ours, do we need a $500-billion industry telling us thousands of times each day to consume more?

don’t we already consume enough?

People are starting to blame invasive advertising for the stress in their lives. A few of generations ago, people encountered only a few dozen ads in a typical day. Today, 3,000 marketing messages a day flow into the average North American brain.

Andrew Peat

The fun image that advertising has traditionally enjoyed is now giving way to a much darker picture of advertising as mental pollution. As more and more people make the connection between advertising and their own mental health, the ad game will be changed forever.

Tags: advertising, stress, happiness

Uncovering our Cities? Will it work here?

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:25:20 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: What would our cities look like without being covered with billboards? With all the other advertising opportunities, do we really need to keep cluttering every space with commercial advertisements? Do office supply stores really need twenty foot lighted signs on multiple walls? Do we really need to be subjected to corporate enticements all the time? Why can't we enjoy the scenery without it being ruined by all this visual pollution?

Clip Source: adbusters.org

São Paulo: A City Without Ads

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

And now it’s amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.

Tags: visual pollution, billboards, advertising

Imagine a City with no Billboards

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:45:23 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: www.utne.com

Sao Paulo: The Ad-Free City

The world's fourth-largest city rids itself of billboards

The bustling metropolis of São Paulo has gone ad free, much to the delight of aesthetes hungry for urban landscapes unpolluted by corporate entreaties. According to the decidedly anti-corporate Adbusters, the city of 11 million has been stripped of roughly 15,000 billboards since a new law went into effect in April. "The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution," explains Gilberto Kassab, the city's conservative, populist mayor. "We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector -- visual pollution."

Tags: advertising, billboards, visual pollution

Harmful Ingredients in Corporate "Natutral" Foods

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:46:33 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: www.newstarget.com

Many "natural" foods contain questionable taste additives like yeast extract

They used to rely heavily on MSG (monosodium glutamate), but when the public began to learn about the dangers of MSG and how it causes extreme headaches, reproductive disorders, endocrine system imbalances, appetite control problems, and nervous system disorders, the industry began moving away from MSG and toward other ingredients.

The link to obesity is very strong with these ingredients; if you eat a lot of foods containing MSG or similar substances, you will find it very difficult to stop eating.

Yeast extract was one of the first replacements for MSG -- it has the same effect on taste, and it contains a concentration of free glutamic acid, just like MSG. The difference is that it doesn't look as bad on the label, and food manufacturers can actually claim that it's all-natural.

Tags: fod, natural food, corporate food, yeast extract, msg

Biofuels Could Do More Harm Than Good

Thu, 10 May 2007 12:54:05 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Biofuels Could Do More Harm Than Good, UN Report Warns

Kelly Hearn
for National Geographic News

May 9, 2007

The global boom in biofuels is laden with environmental and social risks, even as it presents strong new prospects for mitigating human-caused global warming, a new UN study says.

The study also suggests that biofuels—energy sources derived from plant matter like corn or sugarcane—would serve better for heating and industrial power than for cars and buses, as is the current trend.

an unregulated biofuels boom will spawn deforestation, deplete soil nutrients, and undermine food security by monopolizing farmland.

"Current research concludes that using biomass for combined heat and power (CHP), rather than for transport fuels or other uses, is the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade—and also one of the cheapest," the UN report reads.

Tags: biofuels, energy, global warming, agriculture

Lotteries: A Tax on the Poor?

Thu, 03 May 2007 11:57:29 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: I've often joked that the lottery is a tax on those who are bad with math. However, with all the slick advertising that our states do to induce people to gamble using the lottery, it has become an unfair tax on the poor as well.

Clip Source: www.csmonitor.com

The gambling scam on America's poor

What kind of government spends millions of taxpayer dollars peddling false hope to confiscate cash from its poorest citizens to fatten state coffers?

Some scandals don't involve illegal activity – they're just outrageous and unjust. Take gambling in America. Abetted by Congress, legislatures from 48 states now sponsor gambling operations and lottery monopolies to balance their budgets on the backs of their poorest and most vulnerable citizens – while basking in the virtue of fighting tax increases.

In 1999, the bipartisan National Gambling Impact Commission found that 80 percent of gambling revenue comes from households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year.

More remarkably, players with annual incomes of less than $10,000 spent almost three times as much on gambling – in aggregate, real dollars – as those with incomes of more than $50,000.

Of the many ways government can raise money, gambling is the worst. It's regressive. And it can ruin lives.

Tags: lottery, gambling, taxes

Get Better Search Results

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:43:34 GMT

clipped by: brotherhug
clipper's remarks: This is part of a series of articles on search engines. There's some interesting new search engines listed also.

Clip Source: www.pcworld.com

Top Search Tricks

1. Put quotation marks around your query: For example, type "air conditioning" rather than air conditioning.

2. Use the minus (-) sign: This tells the engine, "I don't want this word.

3. Get definitions: Use the modifier 'define' as a handy way to make a search engine into a dictionary.

4. Ask in plain English: Today's search engines are constantly being fine-tuned to respond to real-world queries.

5. See quick weather previews: If you're flying to, say, San Francisco, enter San Francisco weather in the search box for a fast forecast.

Tags: search, search engines