Last month I took care of a friend’s landlord’s cats while they traveled on a cross-country road trip. I was very impressed by the certified organic cat food they gave their cats, Wayne and Babycat. The company is called NaturaPet and the brand is Innova EVO, which comes in both wet and dry.

Check them out yourself.

Here’s the list of ingredients in their Innova EVO Cat & Kitten product:

• Turkey
• Chicken
• Chicken Meal
• Herring Meal
• Potatoes
• Chicken Fat
• Egg
• Turkey Meal
• Natural Flavors
• Apples
• Carrots
• Tomatoes
• Cottage Cheese
• Dried Chicory Root
• Taurine
• Herring Oil
• Rosemary Extract
• Vitamins/Minerals
• Viable Naturally Occurring Microorganisms

Technorati Tags: animals, organic pet food

The NYPD says that 4,000-plus auxiliary police officers are the ‘eyes and ears’ of the police department; armed only with nightsticks, they are instructed to radio for the police and never chase an armed suspect.

The distinction that they were not trained, armed police made no difference to David Garvin, who saw their blue uniforms, chased them and gun them down in cold blood.

The precious few seconds that the two interacted with Gavin, gave the police enough time to respond to the scene and stop him before he could continue his killing spree:

“When the killer complied with an order by Auxiliary Officers Pekearo and Marshalik to drop his bag, they deprived him of a second gun and 90 additional rounds of ammunition. The fact that more people were not killed in Greenwich Village that night is in no small measure due to their heroic actions.” — NY Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly

The reason why I bring this story up is because I found out that Eugene Marshalik, who was a 19-year old student at NYU, was a recent graduate of my old high school, Stuyvesant. From what I’ve read and been told, Eugene graduated in 2005, was very well liked and excelled in all of his grades. He was a novice instructor who trained new members on the school’s Speech and Debate team. In fact, according to my friend Henry who is the Executive Director of the Stuyvesant Alumni Association, Eugene was actually scheduled to be a judge at a Stuyvesant debate competition yesterday. He was buried with a full police honors in Brooklyn today.

As I told some friends, it’s always sad when a young person dies a violent, tragic death; all the more so when he is from our community.

Technorati Tags: police, new york, greenwich village, stuyvesant

Live it up: “Who Killed the Electric Car” was a documentary that came out last year about the history of the electric car as it was developed, engineered, marketed and then literally crushed by American auto manufacturers, the oil industry and well-connected Republicans.

Here’s a trailer to check out:

The way I see it: You sow what you reap.

The Daimler/Chrysler merger is breaking up, GM is suffering from record losses, Ford is laying off thousands because they lavished expensive pay packages on their management instead of properly managing employee pensions and healthcare…

There was a long but very good article in this past Sunday NY Time’s Magazine section on how Toyota will very soon become the #1 auto company in the world, beating out GM.

Toyota’s philosophy matches Japanese culture which thinks in the long term, not the short term chase for profits like most American companies; they have a way of asking themselves how will this product benefit society first and us second.

That’s why the big Japanese companies are first with their hybrid vehicles like Toyota’s Prius.

Electric cars will make it big in Europe and Asia first because the power companies are all run by the state and the price of gas is way, way more expensive than here anyway.

So the movie should really be called “Who Killed the AMERICAN Electric Car?”

Isn’t it ironic that the greed of one American industry (oil) has done in another American industry (cars)?

(Yeah I know that part of the problem are trade tariff issues between US and Japan, plus their cheaper labor costs, and our expensive healthcare, but the American companies missed the boat on the electric car and they’re going to pay the price for it. Time will tell if they can grow a brain and catch up.)

Thanks to Monse babe for showing this to me!

It goes without saying that the “N” word is probably the most hateful and poisonous insult in our society.    Born in a past full of evil and injustice, it should have died out when the civil rights movement raised the consciousness of the world to our country’s racial problems.   

But, strangely, it didn’t.    

Decades after the beginning of the civil rights movement, the “N” word has reached a new status in American society. It’s popularized by the thug/gangsta culture, thrown around by black athletes who call themselves “role models”,  played up in cartoons, and defended by black entertainers.

Some blacks claim re-appropriating the word liberates it from its slavery past; some write it off as a term of endearment between friends; others say it’s been de-fanged of all its racial hatred so that it can be used to describe anyone worthy of contempt.

But when a bad word becomes part of everyday speech, does it erase the ugliness of its history?

No, it sadly does not.  No matter how you try to change the meaning of a word, some can never escape the ugly shackles of their violent past.   Using it today in any context demeans all those who lived and died and suffered through the Jim Crow era.

And that’s why it’s time to abolish the “N” word. 

But, really, why should I care anyway?  I’m not black, so what does all this have to do with me?  Simple, because the Civil Rights movement has evolved from the struggles of one race to improving the rights of all people, of all races. It doesn’t matter if you are black American, black West Indian, black African or none of these. Using the N-word degrades the dignity of us all.

I, too, have a dream. In that dream, it doesn’t make a difference if it ends in “-er” or “-a”, there is absolutely no justification to ever use that word in civilized society. 

For me, it comes down to a Litmus test: anyone — it doesn’t matter how rich, how educated, how much fame you have — anyone who uses the N-word absolutely has no class.  PERIOD.

Worthy sites in this post:

AbolishTheNWord.com

BantheNWord.org

(P.S.: That’s Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” in the intro of AbolishTheNWord.com)