Nicholas Earl Schweitzer of Atlanta, Ga formerly resided in Athens, GA, Laplace, LA and Huntington, WV. January 28, 1967 - January 4, 2007 "All that lives must die/Passing through nature to eternity." Hamlet, Act 1 Sc. 2 Died at home after a brief illness. He is survived by parents, Carol and Joseph Schweitzer of Huntington, WV; brother and sister-in-law Mark Schweitzer and Kelly Matheson; two nieces, Beatrice and Daisey, all of Toronto, Canada; many friends; and his two cats, Ursula and George, who are, incidentally, looking for a new home. Nick was a graduate of Marshall University and he attended the University of Atlanta, Athens, Graduate Program in Journalism. Nick was a Senior Creative Coordinator for Georgia Technology Authority. Nick had many aliases: Uncle Giraffe, Nicky and Uncle Chunk. Nick will be fondly remembered as a doting uncle, a media fiend, a connoisseur of ice cream, a master of the sarcastic remark, and a liberal thinker. God, how we miss you! A memorial service will be held in Atlanta Sunday Evening at 5pm. For details call 404-456-4426. In lieu of flowers, the family kindly requests donations to the Salvation Army, The Humane Society, or Aids Research, Henson Mortuary 304-736-8986

I only met him once but it was like we were childhood friends and I'm sure that a LOT of people had this experience with Nick. For him, my favorite piano peice, Nocturne, op. 33 by Samuel Barber (Roger Shields, piano):

The Ad Council is always blaming the victim. Remember the crying Indian who mourned over the public's littering? Of course, they didn't tell you that 95% of all pollution was corporate based. Remember recycling and having to separate the plastic from the glass? Of course they didn't tell you that if everyone did this and recycled everything that was recyclable that it would only put a dent in the landfills of 5% because 95% of the landfilling was being done through corporate, industrial waste. They also didn't tell you that the recycling process itself created pollution and was very intensive. Of course, self righteous adults back then didn't want to hear that it was pointless because it felt so good to be so superior and conscientious.

The most recent Ad Council insult depicts the public literally as pigs. Energy engorged pigs wasting electricity. Wrong again, it's the corporations that are wasting our resources, and not on necessities like cooking and heating but on the newest useless widget and they'll also spend millions was waste millions (of kilowatts) to convince you to buy through advertising (read legalized lying).

Now Australia is banning traditional light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescent light bulbs. Banning them. I wonder if someone made a killing off of a government contract to provide Australia with these new bulbs. Hmm. Or maybe the government has gone green? I suppose everyone will be spending their nights basked in a neon glow from now on in the land down under but it won't do a thing about global warming - and this from a country that won't even sign the Kyoto treaty.

Blaming the victim is becoming trendy. Now Oprah is blaming inner city school children for not being interested in learning and being more psyched about iPods. She is building a school in Africa because African children (well, girls because they look even more like Oprah, a female herself, than African children in general) are more appreciative. It seems Oprah has been fooling her megalomaniacal self because no one will tell the Empress she's naked. Yes, Oh great "O"krah, our children are spoiled brats and it doesn't have anything to do with how they're marketed to on an almost constant basis and how they're filled with high fructose corn syrup. No, it's because they're no good brats. African children are different. They're better. When you go to Africa they jump around you as if you're actually the goddess you are in your own mind. You weep at their spirit but you need to realize that they're desperate, not better. Their lives made them as desperate as our lives made us apathetic. You're confusing cause and effect because they treat you like the Queen you wish you were. But you'll never be a Queen here in America, just a shallow billionaire that no one will criticize because they're afraid of losing out on the golden dust falling off your luxurious lashes.

It's time for democrats and progressives to take the argument back from the realm of conjecture and scientific studies. We've already won this one folks and we did it back in the 1970's. The high-falutin' argument goes like this: pollution is bad. We can all agree and actually have all agreed that pollution is bad and contrary to weeping Indian commercials the primary polluters by far are the corporations. Period. The is indisputable.

I don't know how the corporate media framed the argument against pollution as a scientific exercise about the symptom of pollution - it's a mystery, but here we are. I cringe when I hear the phrase global warming because I know that every time we say it the simpletons grin in their unconscious fear of bewilderment and the corporate lackeys smirk in impish delight. I liked An Inconvenient Truth but I can't remember Gore saying the P-word even once (he may have said it but I don't remember it). The right wing is great at misdirection. They have us spending billions to try and prove an un provable position on global warming when the subtext is really about the indisputable fact of pollution. The irony is that global warming is probably correct. Snowstorms probably are the result of it because normally the temperature would have been colder and made snow impossible. Is this going to convince the average person? It's sad but it's laughable to even consider it.

Researching global warming is intellectually fun but in the larger scheme of things, what's the point? Doesn't it sound like an intellectual parlor trick over time? Our intellectual narcissism does us in every time, just like it got Nader, a well meaning person who couldn't resist the temptation to show the world how much smarter he was. Nader is smart but he's not savvy and he siphoned votes away from the smarter of the other candidates, Gore. There was no convincing a man on a mission to prove that he's not an idiot to the world. Bush, Nader's real opponent, was busy trying hard to prove the exact opposite, that he's not an intellectual. Bush may not be an intellectual but it's now painfully obvious that he's savvier that most people in Washington. How many Kerry's does it take to screw in a light bulb? Infinite because there are infinite ways of doing it and Kerry would carefully research and weigh every one of them - all the while we're in the dark.

Democrats need to wake up because that's our mission. We are the people, the smart and the less smart. The right wing, corporate mission is to fool us long enough to rob the purse that is our tax base. If you're against pollution, as any sane person would be, a right winger will called it global warming and then use billions of tax dollars to discover whether or not it exists and a lot of Democrats go along for the ride because it's intellectually fun and also because of the money. We've already won this argument so let's do away with symptomatic terms like global warming when the cause is what needs to be remedied and that cause is pollution.

from my journal at Daily Kos

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Source

Good advice that I've followed as a vegetarian for almost 10 years now. Nutritionism is the ideology that the nutrients of food are the same outside of their context. Of course, that's only true if you can figure out every interaction with every other chemical that exists alongside your desired "nutrient" - which is impossible. In a nutshell, sprinkling powdered vitamin C on your high fructose corn flakes isn't the same as eating fruit and may be a causative factor in the skyrocketing obesity in the US.

Like what quantum mechanics show us, the farther you go down the rabbit hole, the more vast it becomes. There's no magic, discrete particle at the bottom of it all, only another layer. We know about a lot of particles in food but what's the point of trying to reduce an apple into its "parts" which can then be reconfigured into an "apple"? We'll never know exactly what makes vitamin C work in an apple and not work as an added fortified powder (or even if the so called vitamin C is what's doing anything at all) but the trick may be as simple as "something in our biology knows the real deal when it consumes it."

The food scientists trying to create the next marketing buzz are out of luck because you can't make an apple better than it already is and you can't replace it with something that tastes less healthy - say, an apple turnover, and get the health benefits. Corporations are good at producing twinkies so how about they just stick to that and stay out of the "health" area which is something foreign to the entire idea of creating something for profit. It has never been profitable to be healthy and as we've learned from Fen-phen to diet drinks containing Aspartame to the gut busting Olestra in chips - it's all a bunch of BS.

Food doesn't have ingredients. The more ingredients in the "food" you buy (if you actually know what they are), the less healthy it is and that makes cereal one of the leaders in crap food. Something isn't healthy just because it's sprinkled with 100% of the RDA (whatever that means) of powdered vitamins. Is anything going to change on a global scale? It's doubtful. People are naturally trusting of corporations for some some reason. We'll buy whatever they market to us and feel superior if it's touted as "healthy". I suppose it's a personal journey. Movements by their very nature lack common sense.