Crisis in food, farms, and agri-business

I see lot's of articles concerning unhealthy food and unsafe practices being promoted by agri-business with their large bank accounts while the FDA and other civil government agencies target small agricultural producers trying to offer healthy alternatives to their well-educated customers that seek out their products. This is a great article that I think provides a fairly good overview of the issue and some sustainable solutions coming out.

I definitely believe that the next major crisis could be food or possibly water. We must begin to develop sustainable lifestyles and systems that accurately steward our natural resources.

‎"Progress" at what price?

Last Stand for the Xingu River

On a river in the Amazon Basin in Brazil, plans are progressing to build a massive dam, called Belo Monte. The dam(s) will have massive negative impact on the lives of people that have lived in the region for centuries as well as negative environmental impact for the region. Over the years the indigenous people in collaboration with others opposed to the project have been able to slow the advance of the project but it is still progressing and construction is very close to beginning. Those that oppose the project are becoming more focused and organized to stop the project.
Integrity, wisdom, humility demand that we look at the drivers for the need for more electricity production which the proponents say these dams will provide. Love, compassion, righteousness, prudence demand that we look at the impact on others and long term environmental impact that the actions will have and speak out for the oppressed and "weak", at least politically and monetarily weak.
Here is a petition to the Brazilian Government:
I support the demands of Brazilian civil society and urge you to defend the Amazon and its people and stop the Belo Monte Dam Complex.
Sign here.

ustream.tv vs justin.tv

I just found this draft from 3/27/2009. I don't remember the specifics of what I wrote here but I will post these rough notes. Hope it helps!

We started using ustream.tv instead of justin.tv. We could not get the XH-A1 Video Camera to connect to the firewire port on the Windows laptops and then we found camtwist for the Mac which is very nice for controlling the video input. Almost anything can be used as a video input.


viewers not having to login to access the integrated chat and can set their own name in the chat
the ability to change audio and video inputs without stopping the broadcast, of course CamTwist now fairly well covers that for the video
I just discovered the ability to type text as an overlay onto the video screen, very on the fly, I used it as a replacement for streaming the pp slides with the camera feed