Do Not Mail List & Western Pharmaceutical Companies In China

My friend Per Terje inspired me to look for this, and I was happy to find it does exist! Reduce the amount of junk mail that comes to you! Register your address here, though for some of these, they ask payment:

https://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/opt_form.cgi
http://www.41pounds.org/

This one stops catalog mailings:
http://www.catalogchoice.org/

Here's a link to send Congress a message requesting a government sponsored "Do Not Mail List", but who knows how effective these things actually are:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/newdream/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=5076&t=default.dwt

Also, here's an interesting article:

Western drugs sell slowly in herb-happy China

Colleen Cheng and Angel Chen, Chinese marketing executives in their 30s, should be the ideal customers for U.S. and European drugmakers. So far, they are a tough sell. Glued to cell phones at an expensive Beijing restaurant, the working moms would fit in at any cafe in New York or London with their fluent English and stylish clothing. They spend hundreds of dollars monthly on herbs, acupuncture and supplements. What they don’t buy are Western pharmaceuticals, like Johnson & Johnson’s cold medicine Sudafed and Sanofi-Aventis SA’s sleeping pill Ambien.


“With Chinese medicine, it is all about balance,” Cheng says. For a cold, she boils ginger root in Coca-Cola. Rather than take a sleeping pill, Chen drinks Chinese white wine. “The effect of the Chinese medicine is very slow, but we continue to take it because we believe it is better for our overall health,” Cheng says. While China’s middle class has fallen for Buick cars and Starbucks coffee, medicines made by Western drugmakers haven’t caught on as quickly. The average Chinese spends $10 a year on pharmaceuticals compared with $900 for each American. The world’s biggest drugmakers, including Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, need to court customers like Cheng and Chen as sales growth slows in the mature U.S. and European markets.

Read more at: http://www.telegram.com/article/20071230/NEWS/712300333/1002/BUSINESS

I have to try

Maybe this is the most pointless task I could pursue, but there is always that little weakly glittering thing at the bottom of Pandora's box.
http://windofourlittlewings.blogspot.com/

Benazir Bhutto-From BBC

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm so that the "nefarious designs of terrorists can be defeated."
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack.
Ms Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), had twice been the country's prime minister and had been campaigning ahead of elections due in January.

It was the second suicide attack against her in recent months and came amid a wave of bombings targeting security and government officials.
Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister and a political rival, said her death was a tragedy for "the entire nation".
"It is not a sad day, it is [the] darkest, gloomiest day in the history of this country," he said, speaking at the hospital where she was taken.
The United Nations Security Council is to meet for emergency consultations shortly to discuss the situation in Pakistan after the killing.
Scene of grief
The attack occurred close to an entrance gate of the park in Rawalpindi where Ms Bhutto had been speaking.
Read more here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7161590.stm

Trillium

Public sectors fail, private sectors fail. Some cheery economists believe that non-profit organizations will step in to fill in the holes. Others say the market will do it by itself. Either technologies that could fill those holes will advance and become cheaper/more efficient, so investing will naturally be funneled towards them, or humans will once in a while deviate from the generic economic formula of making decisions based on self-interest alone. An example of investing for both self interest and for reasons that computers and economic models don't usually predict: http://trilliuminvest.com/ I met a lady who worked for this company a few years ago. It was the first hopeful thing I had come across in a long time. Otherwise, how else could anything (other than some beautiful supervirus) rein in the Foucauldian decentralized power mess of the world. (There is absolutely no single person, thing, or event to point fingers at, or to uproot.)

What you can learn from someone who’s trying to hide from the world on the floor of a bus.

My friend Warrick says that a person’s personality is pretty well set by the time they turn 25. If that’s the case, I’ve got about 3 months to wring some bitterness out of myself and cram a little more compassion in. I have a heart that’s filled with so much impatience and criticism. But I heard something on NPR (half of what moves me on a daily basis comes from NPR these days) yesterday that made me think twice about sneering when people say “being kind is truly the most important thing we can do on this earth”.

I heard photographer Michael Nye speak about his “Fine Line” project. He got to know people around his city who are considered to have mental illness. He photographed and interviewed them. You can see his project at this site: http://www.michaelnye.org/fineline/photoaudio.html
The words that made me think more about kindness came from the lady in the photograph on the bottom row that is second from the left.

The other interesting thing I heard on the same radio show was about the documentary “The Bridge”. The maker of the film had heard that the Golden Gate Bridge is the number one suicide spot in the world. People worldwide travel there to die. So he and his crew filmed the bridge every day for one year. Apparently they stirred up a lot of controversy, but also a lot of awareness with the film.
http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html

Robotic Camel Jockeys of Qatar

Qatar is a tiny little Persian Gulf country on a peninsula sticking off of the eastern side of Saudi Arabia. My friend Ivanhoe told me about this last night. (It's an old news story, but I hadn't heard about it.)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0715_050715_robot_jockey.html

July 15, 2005—Technology met tradition this week, when a camel race in Doha, Qatar for the first time featured robots at the reins. On July 13, workers fixed robotic jockeys on the backs of seven camels and raced the machine-mounted animals around a track. Operators controlled the jockeys remotely, signaling them to pull their reins and prod the camels with whips.
This feat of technology was also a development in human rights. Racing-camel owners in many Persian Gulf countries traditionally use children as jockeys, sometimes as young as four years old. Faced with pressure from human rights groups, Qatar outlawed the practice last December and looked to technology to keep the races running.
Officials approached the Swiss robotics firm K-Team, which came up with a compact solution. The new robot jockeys weigh 57 pounds (26 kilograms) and cost about U.S. $5,500 each.
The market for these robotic riders may soon be growing. In April the United Arab Emirates announced that it too would use robots in camel races. And in May, Oman declared a ban on child jockeys, effective this fall.
Sheik Abdullah bin Saud, the Qatari official in charge of the robot project, told the Associated Press in April that the goal of the program was to "improve the speed, the weight, the aerodynamics, to reach the ultimate goal of completely phasing out children used as jockeys."

Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio

I just listened to a talk by Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio(http://www.alternativeradio.org/) called "Rolling Back Corporate Power."

He compared the struggle abolotionists in the 1800's faced in fighting against the status quo of what was and wasn't constitutional with the struggle modern American communities face in fighting for the constitutional rights of humans over corporations. As it stands now, because of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company ruling the Supreme Court made in 1886, corporations have the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution. If you've seen the documentary "Trading Democracy" (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html), that kind of corporate status, given by our constitution and by NAFTA, might make you feel as nervous as I do about the whole mess.

Here are some websites related to Richard Grossman:
http://www.poclad.org/
http://www.zmag.org/intgrossman.htm
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoB.html
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1993/08/mm0893_06.html