TMI with Aldous Tyler

The rise in Autism Spectrum Disorder is indeed outpacing the advances in reporting and detecting it, and many people believe that vaccination is to blame. This is a dangerous red herring, as eschewing vaccination where it can be done reduces herd immunity among us all, and even more dangerous, allows us to ignore the real culprit: a study, released just yesterday in The Lancet, shows that the toxic mix of chemicals in our everyday environment to be the cause of the massive spread of brain damage being caused in our children. We cannot afford to erroneously blame vaccines.

Then, we have President Obama’s top people debating whether or not to drone-kill a fifth U.S. citizen. What if I told you Amazon would be an accomplice to it? There’s a lot more to drones than many realize, and we’ll go over that.

Finally, The weird weather that just keeps on coming is often blamed on a research base in Alaska called HAARP. However, like with vaccines being blamed for autism, the real issue is far bigger and focusing on HAARP simpy takes away from the massive efforts needed to combat the Climate Crisis. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. The Sochi Winter Olympics are only possible with the help of carefully preserved snow from last winter and snow guns used to try and reinforce that supply. Along the River Thames in England, communities are being flooded out by the wettest weather they’ve had in over a century. Meanwhile, California is experiencing the continuation of a three-year drought. Whether we are ready or not, the weather is changing, and it spells dire consequences. President Obama’s State of the Union speech could have misled you to think we’re heading toward a “cleaner, safer planet”. President he may be, but climatologist he’s not. We’ll discuss all that and much more today on TMI with Aldous Tyler, live at noon Central on WSUM 91.7 FM in Madison or via our Listen page.

When you’re an activist, you simply want to make the world a better place for everyone – but there are different ways to go about it. Steve Anderson used his monthly column, “Media Links” and the organization he founded, “OpenMedia.ca” to move some of his ideas all the way to the Prime Minister’s desk! We’ll talk to him about how there’s much more to be done in Canada and worldwide, and what we can all do to make our voices heard.

Then: Federal agencies are having to ship bottled water into West Virginia to help its citizens, who are beset with a horrible chemical spill into one of their most-used waterways, the Elk River. Nine counties are being told that they can not only not drink the water or even boil it for safety, they cannot bathe in it, and are only safe in using it “to flush toilets”. We’ll go in-depth.

Finally: With the Farm Bill negotiations finally underway, many of us were hoping that the Food Stamp subsidies would be restored to previous levels, including the farmers who feel increased demand for their product when people can actually afford it. That now seems in jeopardy. All that and more on today’s TMI, airing live at noon Central on WSUM 91.7 FM in Madison, and being streamed live via http://wsum.org and the Listen page here on tmitmitmi.com. Tune in!

TMI with Aldous Tyler is on hiatus this week, which means you have homework!  But don’t despair, you’ll have an extra hour of MisterG’s greenarrowradio to groove with while doing it on 91.7 WSUM FM in Madison or http://wsum.org/. On to the homework!

First, something fun: http://aldoustyler.com/ has a page devoted to saving some poor holiday inflatables (“Flates”) from their cruel and inhumane imprisonment. It’s a cause that’s full of hot air, yet one you’ll want to check out.

Then, there was an illuminating piece in The Atlantic about the NSA spying programs this week that included this clip:
“Once again, the government statement was sufficiently misleading to cause the newspaper to inadvertently misrepresent the truth in its paraphrase: The government didn’t state that location data wasn’t being held, just that it wasn’t being held under Section 215. DOJ was able to sidestep the request in court in part because the Florida lawyer cited the wrong program when asking for the records. And once again, Americans reading about the story and as yet unaware of programs beyond Section 215 thought, maybe our location date is secure after all.” You can read the entire work at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/how-americans-were-deceived-about-cell-phone-location-data/282239/ and I highly encourage you to do so.

Finally, there’s a new analysis of what happened to Easter Island that is in some twisted ways a story of “success”, but it is one that is even more chilling than the story of failure we’ve been told about it for so long. To wit: “On Easter Island, people learned to live with less and forgot what it was like to have more. Maybe that will happen to us. There’s a lesson here. It’s not a happy one. As MacKinnon puts it: ‘If you’re waiting for an ecological crisis to persuade human beings to change their troubled relationship with nature — you could be waiting a long, long time.'” Read the entire piece, and see why we may have to sound the ecological alarm even louder if we want to gain any ground at all: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/what-happened-on-easter-island-a-new-even-scarier-scenario

Check out those, and I’ll be back with more TMI next Saturday!