Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince looks to be destroyed. The people need more doctors. I’ve heard about one major hospital that was destroyed, so it must be very bad.
Doctors Without Borders is in Haiti to set up clinics for treating the injured. You can donate now for that.
Most of the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, has been destroyed by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit yesterday. Bodies are lying in the streets. The death toll is expected to be enormous and the survivors need immediate help. The Red Cross is taking donations and sending teams to Haiti. You can donate to the Red Cross International Response Fund. Also, giving blood is always one of the very best things you can do because it fills the blood banks and can be used almost anywhere.
You can also donate to Doctors Without Borders, which is putting medical personnel on the ground in Haiti to assist in saving lives.
Ever wondered just what you’d do if you found someone on the ground unconscious? Here’s what you’d do. CPR. But there’s a new, simpler way to do it that works better than the old way. The video shows you how to do it.
A 5-year-old girl named Phoebe decided she wanted to collect cans in order to raise money from the 5-cent per can deposits. With the help of her day care center in San Francisco, she raised $3,736.30 from cans and cash donations. That translated into 17,800 people being fed via local food banks. If a 5-year-old can do that, imagine what wealthy Americans and corporations could do.
Marjane Satrapi is the author of the magnificent graphic novel, Persepolis. She also co-directed the movie adaptation of the book. Her story is about being a young girl growing into womanhood in Iran. She is now appealing for help from the United Nations to protect the people in Iran who are protesting against a brutal totalitarian religious regime for freedom. Here is her note:
Dear Friends
To all who believe in freedom and democracy
Please sign this petition to the United Nations to stop the violence,
arrests and torture in Iran.
The situation is really really bad.
Please forward it to whoever you know
Best and lots of love
Marjane Satrapi
Disney’s Pixar Animation Studio received a message from a friend of the family of ten-year-old Colby Curtin who was dying of cancer. The message told Pixar that the girl wanted to stay alive long enough to see Up. She was too sick to risk being moved to a movie theater and a DVD was the only possible option. It seems that Pixar management dispatched an employee to the girl’s home with a DVD, a poster and some toys based on the movie. The girl was able to enjoy the screening even though she could not open her eyes. As the movie played, her mother described the images on screen. The girl passed away several hours later with her family at her side.
This is sad story, but it’s a great thing Pixar did and it was a wonderful wish for a little girl to have. Very nice. I’m sure this simple act by a few people at a big company made a sick little girl very happy in her last hours. Well done, Pixar.
The Obama administration has committed what amounts to an act of terrorism. The president’s Air Force One backup plane was flown low in banking circles around lower Manhattan, trailed by an F16 fighter plane that appeared to most observers to be giving chase. In an FAA memo released today it became clear that the administration knew the flight could cause panic in New York but threatened the New York City police and the mayor’s office with federal sanctions if they let the secret get out into the public. The president has since apologized and said that he is furious and had no knowledge of the flight. But it’s his plane.
I am becoming increasingly concerned that my support of Mr. Obama may have contributed to placing an absolute incompetent in the office of president. An act like this shockingly callous flyover simply beggars belief. Having lived in New York City for ten years, I know that if you manage to send thousands of New Yorkers running out of their buildings screaming in terror, you have really done something profoundly frightening. New Yorkers are a hardy lot and have a real ‘been there seen that’ attitude. These people were terrified at what was happening in the sky above them. The windows of their buildings were shaking because the plane came in so low. It came right at them! The White House says it was for a ‘photo-op’ so that they could take pictures of their airplane with the Statue of Liberty behind it. Seriously! These people are running the United States.
I think that the hero-worship of Mr. Obama needs to end immediately and we need to ascertain just exactly what is going on here. The NBC video above which shows Obama’s press secretary saying ‘I don’t know’ about the flight is very scary. Perhaps Mr. Obama will consider parking a yellow rental truck in front of an Oklahoma federal building next week for a ‘photo-op.’ That should help build his reputation there, don’t you think?
By the way, NBC news anchor, Brian Williams is furious too and thinks somebody should pay for what happened.
Scientific American published the page of charts on the left. Click the image to get a high-res version. It explains how bad for the environment the production and consumption of meat really is. According to the magazine, the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as a car driven approximately 1,800 miles.
That’s very bad. Here’s another statistic: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.
The New York Times produced this environmental film that follows a group of Oberlin College students for a day of green ideas that they used on their group student house. Their sustainable living ideas are easy to do and fun. Their methods for capture and reuse of water are effective and cost nothing to implement. I really like their very balanced view of sustainable energy and resources. They also go out to peoples’ homes in the area and exchange regular incandescent lightbulbs for energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
In what appears to be one of the worst cases of literary censorship in modern United States history, Amazon.com has listed a wide range of books as what the company calls ‘adult material.’ It would appear that they have included any title that contains any material related in any way to homosexuality. By being placed on this ‘adult material list’, the books were essentially stripped away from any search results and made very difficult to find by browsing.
The following is from Amazon:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Candlelight Stories thinks that this represents one of the single most moronic statements ever delivered to the public by a prominent book seller.
The company has announced that this was due to a ‘technical glitch’ but there are very few bloggers who seem to believe that explanation. It would seem that plenty of ‘adult material’ was left available and that this effort was focused largely on non-heterosexual material. This is a terrible thing for a major bookseller to do. It’s a form of book banning. It reeks of ultra-conservative fear of ideas or differing lifestyles. Amazon says it was engaged in an initiative to protect its wide customer base by listing certain books as ‘adult material’ so that they would not appear at the top of search results and possibly offend someone. The complaints of someone who is offended by a book for adults showing up in a list of search results should not be listened to for even a moment. It is a very short step from this kind of censorship to a book burning. This is truly indicative of the danger in primarily relying upon a single online source for books.
It would be advisable to immediately move away from Amazon as a source for books. This kind of behavior, though given a flimsy explanation by the company, tends to indicate a general direction or pattern of behavior in a company. Candlelight Stories is looking into fully disengaging from our relationship with Amazon and will not be offering their products through our site. This blog stands fully opposed to discrimination, censorship or book banning of any kind whatsoever.
Once again, we cannot over-emphasize the importance of moving away from Amazon for book purchases. This is a very serious problem and the company’s explanation is insultingly false.
Here are links to several of the best book sellers on the internet:
Set to open on April 21, 2009, the World Digital Library will make freely available in multilingual format, significant materials from different cultures, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and others. The library promises to promote cross-cultural understanding and provide resources to educators. The Library of Congress is involved in the project along with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Library of Brazil, the National Library and Archives of Egypt, and the National Library of Russia.
There are a couple of videos that claim to show prototypes of the library. These look to me like quickly produced mock-ups of very little substance. If you were really building such a library online, you would not have only four or five paragraphs of text and two videos on your web site to show for your efforts. You’d be trying to show off how great your project is and how well it works.
I could be wrong, but this kind of mystery project that sits for years in ‘development’ and includes such enormous claims from such an international cast of characters always makes me suspicious. I take an ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ attitude. Sort of the like the absolutely transparent $100 laptop con job otherwise known as One Laptop Per Child, which has received a Fiasco Award.
After all, we already have The Internet Archive. It actually works. It has material from all over the world. It’s free. It’s easy to use. Why don’t these great libraries just use that?
In what amounts to a shocking display of callous disregard for handicapped readers, The Authors Guild threatened to sue Amazon.com over its text-to-audio feature built into the Kindle 2.0 ebook reader. It then negotiated with Amazon to allow authors to disable the feature for their books.
Apparently, the Guild and its member authors (who really need to have their names listed in public) have decided that the Kindle feature violates some mysterious copyright related to audio book rights. So the logic they use seems to suggest that if I worked in my garage to invent an optical reader that would read my own books aloud to me as I passed it over the pages, I would be somehow violating an author’s copyright. This is absurd.
The Reading Rights Coalition organized a protest in New York City a couple days ago to urge authors to allow everyone access to ebooks.
Read this amazing double-talk response to the protests from the Guild in which it pretends to have concern for handicapped readers. They keep insisting that a device that reads a book out loud is an audio book. No, dear Authors Guild, it is not. It is a device that reads books out loud. Like I do when I read to my wife. What if a very life-like robot walked around reading a book to itself out loud. Would that be an ‘audio book?’ Publishing companies are free to produce their own audio books and sell them and make contracts for them. But they cannot tell people not to build machines that read. Forget it.
The Authors Guild is mounting an attack on handicapped readers all over the world and should be made to look like the dinosaur it really is. Which authors are a part of this assault on the blind? Candlelight Stories wants the list. We’ll happily publish it. We’ll call the list, ‘Authors Who Don’t Want Blind People to Read.’
What Do We Do Now?
It’s happening.
The earth is getting warmer.
The world’s scientists agree on it.
What does it mean?
What can we do?
When do we start?
It’s Happening
The majority of scientists worldwide agree that the earth is warming up and that human activities are making it worse. The United Nations recently released a report by a group of the world’s leading scientists and it paints a bleak picture of global warming. It states that we are in the midst of a worldwide crisis and that mankind must do something about it immediately or face certain disaster. It’s very simple. You either trust the scientists or you don’t. Candlelight Stories trusts the scientists. They have done the research and studied the evidence. Their data looks at a time period covering thousands of years and leads them to the conclusion that mankind is polluting the atmosphere so badly that the earth’s temperature is rising quickly.
The economic recession has caused the loss of of millions of jobs over the past year. This means that many families across the country no longer have enough money to pay for their homes, medical costs, or their food. There are ‘tent cities’ springing up in many parts of the country where people who have lost their homes go and try to make do with the bare necessities. These people must have places to go for food.
Feeding America is the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity. They operate a network of 206 food banks. These food banks are very important in providing hunger relief for those who need it. They supply local soup kitchens and various programs that feed undernourished kids.
The food banks cannot keep up with increasing need as job losses get worse in every part of the country. You can help by donating to the food bank closest to you. When you contact the food bank they will tell you how you can help them serve the local community.