Thursday, November 10, 2011

Some MESS-UPS / TRUE HERO!

Weeellll......so Perry (Republican debate) could not remember ... the third thing he would "do away with" if President.
ABC news showed tonight Perry was not the first famous or big-game "would like to be" person to have a brain freeze. It's happened to others, and they showed clips of it all.

The front of the brain they say, because of "up-tightness" or the mind just getting flustered, disconnects from the other part of the brain and .... bingo, you can't remember what you need to remember when you need to remember it.

No big deal really, should not have any effect on his run to be the Republican guy to run against Obama.

Talking about the left brain not connected to the right brain ..... Obama is a class example. Just think about all the things he promised, all the "changes" to come, all the "good old times again" he would bring to the USA.....need I say more .... well okay he may bring the troops home from ...... well you know .... hummmm .... that place overe there ....  ah, hum .... see it can happen to others besides Perry and Obama :-)
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Now I ain't into USA "College Football" (for you in the rest of the world, kinda like Rugy, why it's called "football" is crazy, as it does not have much to do with kicking a ball with the feet) , but we have this guy who is famous I guess in that area. His assistant coach, one time anyway, is having sexual encounters with boys in the "locker room" here and there at times. One fellow sees him having ... well you can imagine (it was given with plain words on the TV news) and reports it to this "head-coach" guy. He reports it to the College whoevers. But does no more, does not fire the guy, or more still call the police and etc.
So now it has all come out in sickening detail. This head-coach is fired - some of the students go on a rampage and protest. GIVE ME A BREAK.....the head-coach guy NEEDS TO BE FIRED!!!!

YOU TALK ABOUT MESS-UPS. This head-coach MESSED UP BIG TIME, and the students who protested his firing MESSED UP big time also.

LET'S GET REAL PEOPLE AND STUDENTS.......YOU MESS UP WITH SUCH SEX GOING ON WITH YOUNG BOYS (OR GIRLS) AND YOU DESERVE ALL THAT CAN BE LEGALLY THROWN AT YOU.

IT'S ALL JUST ONE HUGE DISGUSTING MESS UP!!!
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NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS - WE DO STILL HAVE A HERO - HERE AND THERE.

From the book called "MORE GOOD NEWS" by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, ABOUT THE PLANET WE LIVE ON. In the chapter on the "oceans" and in doing some right lawful things to safe-guard our oceans and all in them, we have this:

OCEANS

SALTWATER HERO

I never realized how much he risked, including his own safety. He literally walks into the lion's mouth like Daniel and continues to speak truth to power and call them out. I have never seen anyone ever challenge authority or challenge evil that way. And he pays the price for it.

Actor and Sea Shepherd supporter Martin Sheen

Readers may have seen an extremely popular television program on the cable channel Animal Planet called Whale Wars. It's a simple reality show. A film crew gets on board one of the two ships operated by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine N Go, and follows it around as its crew picks up people, repairs its often failing equipment, gets lost in ice fogs or trapped by glaciers, searches for whalers on the trackless seas, and confronts, head-on, the Japanese whaling fleet, shooting rancid butter at the harpoon decks and physically interposing their little inflatables in the icy waters between the harpooners and the whales. It all takes place in what is supposed to be a no-kill preserve claimed (but not adequately protected) by
Australia, deep into the Antarctic. One episode showed returning crew members and Discovery Channel filmmakers having their entire season's film seized by the Australian government at the behest of the Japanese (they went to court and got it returned); another shows a bullet fired by the Japanese nearly killing Paul Watson, the famous founder of Sea Shepherd. It's nail-biting action, and along with a recent feature called Sharkwater on the slaughter of another marine species, it's making Watson a global star.

Born in Canada's Maritimes, Paul Watson has been known for thirty years as an "environmental radical," destructive of property, although strictly nonviolent and even comical when it comes to his organization's actions against people. He helped found Greenpeace, but when it turned away from direct action campaigns, it lost Watson. To this day he remains the only person who has taken his helpless outrage at our treatment of the creatures who live in our oceans to the next step: physical confrontation. Watson sunk half the Icelandic whaling fleet in the 1980s and has become the world's expert on ramming, being more practiced at it than any modern navy. He does so to damage and cripple the huge boats illegally harvesting sea life so that they have to limp back to port for repairs, thereby cutting into their short killing season. Every year Sea Shepherd's activities are estimated to save the lives of around five hundred whales, including the huge majority of the population of endangered fin whales, as well as thousands of sharks, dolphins, and other forms of sea life. Until the next hunting season, that is, when, with the connivance of the very governments that have signed whaling bans or that supposedly defend MPAS, whaling fleets manned by Norwegians, Icelanders, or Japanese fishers set off to plunder again.

Marine equipment, that the Japanese have taken to ramming, at considerable danger to his crew's lives, doesn't come cheap. Paul Watson's NGO nonetheless devotes huge amounts of energy and money to protecting the creatures that live in our oceans. He doesn't worry too much about the way media and government have demonized him, saying, "we are answerable only to our clients." He doesn't mean Sea Shepherd members, the coastal communities asking for help, or financial supporters. He means, "whales, sharks, sea turtles, seabirds, dolphins, seals, fish, invertebrates, and plankton." Watson writes that "the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been in existence since August 1977 and during that entire period... we have never injured a single person, sustained a single serious injury, or been convicted of a felony crime anywhere in the world. Despite this, the stories are spread throughout the media that we are pirates, extremists, criminals, and even 'terrorists.' Why is this? Because our small non-governmental organization is the only conservation organization in the world that has the guts to take on superpowers and organized crime like the Yakuza, the shark fin mafia, and corrupt politicians."

In a wash of depressing news about the state of our oceans, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society - tiny, unique, embattled, indomitable - is one very rare piece of good news. The two ships and one helicopter that Sea Shepherd deploys operate in open zones or in ones that are supposedly under some sort of official protection. Australia can't complain when Watson chases off Japanese monster boats that are taking whales out of their waters illegally. Watson's popularity in that country and in neighboring New Zealand, where he enjoys support from the influential indigenous Maori community, has prevented the government from denying him access to their ports. There he generally receives a hero's welcome from the populace; the Australian government may not care about the whale populations, but most Aussies do.

So, although vilified as a pirate by the whalers he pursues and certainly by Canada's sealers, and often arrested when he comes into port, Watson is also a hero in the many countries that solicit his help, such as Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil, as well as Senegal, South Africa, Singapore, and Dubai. In 2000 Sea Shepherd signed an agreement with Ecuador to help that nation patrol and protect the Galapagos Islands, another World Heritage site being targeted by poachers, "eco-tourism" operators, and pirates seeking to kill sharks, the famous but endangered Galapagos tortoises, the islands' giant marine iguanas, and sea cucumbers. Sea Shepherd donated a 95-foot patrol boat and a full-time officer to the Galapagos almost a decade ago. Since then this work has extended to Ecuador's mainland, where Sea Shepherd helps the Ecuadorian Environmental Police protect one of the rarest mammals on Earth, the Amazon pink dolphin. In 200'7 the country awarded Paul Watson the Amazon Peace Prize for his work on both the islands and the mainland, and now, thanks to the Whale Wars series, he's also become a hero in places like the U.K., the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. But largely because of his long opposition to the Canadian seal hunt, a Mom-and-apple-pie voting issue in the Maritimes, he remains a pariah in his own country. Even the CBC is remarkably biased against Sea Shepherd's work.

In winter 2007, Watson was preparing to sail out of Australia to try to intercept the killing machine of the Japanese whaling fleet as they arrived in Australian waters to illegally slaughter whales. For most of a decade, Watson had been sailing under the flag of his own country, Canada. But just as he was ready to depart, and without any warning, newly elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper pulled his boat's registration. Harper gave no legal justification for doing so, but it was so late in the game Watson had no choice but to set sail or let the whales die. Without a formal registration, he would be on the high seas illegally himself, subject to any form of violence that the Japanese, or any other enemy, would care to dish out.

A few months previously, two representatives of a small group of Iroquois traditionalists from Quebec, Stuart Myiow Junior and Senior, had attended a Sierra Club of Canada national conference to deliver a workshop on native beliefs. Watson was a keynote speaker there, and they were in the audience. The Myiows were electrified by his account of his life and work. Following the talk they approached him as he was rushing off to catch a plane to get back to sea and asked if they could perform a special protection ceremony and present him with a medicine bag. The ceremony was an unusual and moving moment out on the grounds of the college hosting the conference, with Watson's ride to the airport waiting in the background. "We wanted to help somehow," Stuart Myiow Junior explained, "and all we could think to do was one of our most powerful ceremonies of protection. I don't know why I brought the medicine bag with me, and the tobacco and all that we needed - I just did." After this encounter, Myiow's longhouse, the small Mohawk Traditional Council on the Kahnawake Reserve just outside of Montreal, continued to follow Sea Shepherd's activities on their website. When Harper pulled Watson's flag, these friends racked their brains for what to do. "We thought, well, the Iroquois are a sovereign nation, as defined by our treaties with Canada; we have the right to travel without passports and to bargain with the government as equals. So why not register a ship?" They wrote Paul Watson, offering him a flag and registration documents. The flag was sent at once, but the full registration had to wait until the following June, when Watson made a rare trip to Eastern Canada to receive his flag.

The Mohawk Traditional Council experienced their own adventures with the flag and registry. Like most grassroots groups passionate about the environment, they're a small minority in the Kahnawake community, which is also only one of the eight reserves of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Other native people both in and outside their reserve challenged their right to speak for everyone and issue a flag in the entire confederacy's name. Stuart Myiow Junior made what turned out to be the perfect reply. He told his critics they were absolutely right: he and his group didn't have that kind of power. But the nation as a whole did. While they might start the very long process of discussing it and trying to come to a consensus, the whales would be killed.

"It came down to a choice between doing what little we can, as soon as possible, or doing nothing and letting the animals die," Stuart said. And the critics, to their everlasting credit, agreed. The flag was presented in the name of the entire Iroquois Confederacy, and it flies in full sight of the Whale Wars cameras today, an object of pride to many members of the Canadian aboriginal community and of course to that small group that wanted so much to help. As for Watson, he says that in all his life no one has ever done anything quite like that for him before-especially someone from his own country. He's even placed the story of his alliance with the Mohawk Traditional Council on Sea Shepherd's website, right next to another treasured letter of support, from the Dalai Lama.

The oceans are huge. Each one of us feels very small in comparison. Most of us spend our lives far away from the slaughtered wildlife and acidifying reefs, on land. And most of us don't have much money or political influence. But as Paul Watson and the Mohawk Traditional Council have demonstrated, that's no excuse not to do whatever we can to help, given the trouble our oceans are in. If much larger numbers of us actually do try, there's no telling how many creatures and how much ocean we can save.
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NOW THAT IS SOME GRITTY TRUE HERO IN MY BOOKS!!!

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