One Way To Connect

by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

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Speak To The Kitty At The Old Address! We’re Just That Indecisive: Another Open Thread!

by Gary Farber

The  "Email Me" link under the kitty at the top left of this blog is now open for business and listening again.  That's obsidianinfo at yahoo dot com.

If you wrote to obsidianinfo at yahoo dot com in recent years, and received no answers, which has happened to many of you — in fact, there was nothing personal about it, I assure you — you weren't being singled out to be ignored.

Honest. It wasn't you. It's me.

I apologize. Blame me.

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The BABBLE Continues: An Open Thread

by Gary Farber. This is a variant of this post. Per previous announcement: The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's second meeting is announced. WHO: This is an open gathering; anyone reading this is invited.  In actuality, the main connector is that I can get you to read this.  You are … Read more

The BABBLE Begins

by Gary Farber

Per previous announcement:

The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is hereby announced. 

WHERE: CrepevineSpecifically.

5600 College Avenue, Oakland, CA


5600 College Ave, Oakland,
CA 94618
Ph: (510) 658-2026

WHEN: Saturday, December 11th, 2010, 1 p.m. until we're done.

PURPOSE: Socializing, meeting each other, fun.  Talking about what we talk about on Obsidian Wings and our other favorite blogs.  Flame wars dampened with beverages and cheer.

QUESTIONS: email gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com. 

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ObBABBLE

by Gary Farber The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is proto-organized and is hereby announced.  Name likely to change, as is everything else.  Frequency to start will be monthly, but subject to further detail and change; possibilities of every other weekend subgroups may occur, or may not. … Read more

Which Came First: The Regulation Or The Egg?

by Gary Farber

"One big 20-year experiment" has been conducted on what happens when you leave egg safety to lax federal regulation, spotty state regulation, and the market, and the results aren't pretty.

On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with salmonella.

“It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

If someone murdered nine people, and wounded five hundred, with a gun, we Americans would have paid as much attention to this as we did the Columbine high school massacre, or Nidal Malik Hassan, or Charles Whitman.

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