Consumer Advocacy

We are incessantly confiscating ourselves into a world of unavoidable, sun-blaring big data. Our landscape, the environment, even outer space — all are inspirations of our very sci-fi existence; here clouds echo first of data centers proliferating far beyond the real clouds’ pouring; here our world wishes to lose touch with indolence, that moving forward and disrupting any inconsistency, is the key. After all, the ultimate fight remains against death; it’s a fight for remembrance through perennial interruption — against an otherwise ephemeral legacy.

American motorists have recently gone through a bipolar gasoline market. From the heights of a national average gas price of $3.49 per gallon on March 8th of 2014, $2.18, a month ago, to $2.45, today.  But such gyrations don’t reflect the huge difference in prices from state to state, especially in the last few weeks, California bearing the brunt of it.

You and I constitute the very system that we blame for the world’s problems, which is starkly illustrated at Christmas when we rob our fragile earth on the high streets in the name of Jesus. What better way to celebrate the birth of Christ this year than to unite under the banner of freedom and justice, and peacefully demonstrate for an end to hunger and poverty across the world, writes Mohammed Mesbahi.
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At a recent American Antitrust Institute (AAI) symposium in Washington, D.C., I asked the presenters about the ability of cash and checks to compete with the credit card industry and its strict controls on merchants. This obvious point becomes less obvious when one takes into account the expanding exclusion of cash/check payments due to the overwhelming expansion of goods and services that you cannot buy unless you have a credit card or a friend with one whom you can reimburse.

Oregon voters in two counties voted against GMOs, against Monsanto. That’s 2 to 1 in favor of protecting organic farmers, communities, farmers and our health from pollan and seeds of the Frankenstein variety.
Vermont has signed the nation’s first GMO-labeling law, effective July 2016 (again, incremental, slide-side change — labels — but it’s something, nonetheless).

It is a sea change, the kind of transformation that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said was caused by “gales of creative destruction.” In his model, systems change when new ideas, products, and technologies bring about the destruction of the old.

Jeff Drones for Dildos Bezos . . .  The TakeOver . . . The End Times . . .  Useless Collective Consumerism . . . The Empire is Daft and Dangerous!
Oh, hell, I’ve been challenged to write some positive stuff on the DV blog, like, what, five straight blogs in a row that are all hopeful, positive, about the real heroes and heroines and hard-working people who never get their day in the limelight, day in court, or 15 petrabytes of fame.

 New Artificial Frontiers and Uncharted Territories from the Synthetic Biologists
Ingredients produced using synthetic biology to be put into  cosmetics from one of the world’s biggest cosmetics companies.
Synthetic biology and the cosmetics industry?

In light of ongoing global negotiations on pressing environmental issues, it’s time for efforts to curtail the excessive influence of multinational corporations over public policy to be strengthened and scaled up at all levels – especially at the United Nations. 
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“Are Adjunct Professors the Fast-Food Workers of the Academic World?” Is this provocative, evocative, adversarial, or emblematic of an age of casino capitalism, corrupted Admin Class, and a see/ hear/speak no evil compliant groups of people who are in the 20 percent?