Anti-Bullying Message from 1949

Looking at the headlines since the election of President-elect Trump, the message is sadly every bit as relevant today as it was in 1949.

If The Bomb Falls: A Recorded Guide to Survival (Tops/PRI, 1961)

If a nuclear holocaust were to happen in 1961, you will need two albums. The Sam Sacks album I mentioned yesterday and this one.

Just kidding about the Sam Sacks album (or AM I?) This album was a cash-in from budget record label Tops (a subsidiary of geiger counter manufacturer Precision Radiation Instruments Inc.) for a nervous nation. But it covered all the basics. 

Audio at the bottom of the post.

It also included several government printed brochures and pamphlets.

Enjoy!

Support Net Neutrality

Tell Chairman Wheeler: Don't help Verizon kill Net Neutrality. 

Net Neutrality is a principle that says that Internet users, not Internet service providers (ISPs), should be in control. It ensures that Internet service providers can’t speed up, slow down, or block web content based on its source, ownership, or destination.

Net Neutrality is dead for the time being – but the FCC could stand up to Verizon and AT&T and pass strong rules.

Instead, Wheeler's proposed rules would divide the Internet into fast lanes for wealthy corporations and slow lanes for the rest of us. Internet service providers (ISPs) would be allowed to relegate content to the slow lane unless the content provider paid up.

That means that the speed you could stream a video, for example, would not just depend on the kind of Internet plan you purchase from your ISP. It would also heavily depend upon whether the entity hosting the video paid for the express lane so that it didn’t take forever to download. Not only is this anti-consumer, allowing corporations to decide what kind of content you can access on the Internet is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Sign The Petition

One Frightening Chart Shows What You Might Pay For Internet Once Net Neutrality Is Gone

Amid protests, U.S. FCC proposes new 'net neutrality' rules

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/15/us-usa-internet-neutrality-idUSBREA4C0SF20140515

Write directly to the FCC and let them know the importance of net neutrality

http://www.fcc.gov/page/fcc-establishes-new-inbox-open-internet-comments

My fellow bloggers and I depend on net neutrality to keep our content going. You need it if you use social networking like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, Instagram or others. Or enjoy streaming audio/video from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Pandora or other sources.

WE ALL make the content that makes the internet. Not the corporations or the wealthy few. If we lose net neutrality, only a handful of voices by comparison will be able to be heard and seen online. This is dangerous for both democracy and the medium by limiting the amount of information people can obtain by how much the content provider can pay to provide it. And inevitably even you to access it.

Save the internet!  

Take 10 Minutes To Learn The Metric Way!

Ahhh......the metric system. To this day the US, Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia are the only nations in the world who have not formally adopted the metric system.

While the US has authorized the use of the metric system since 1866, outside of science and a few other places, it was largely ignored. In 1975, Congress authorized a ten year plan for national conversion. Which seemed like a good idea.  Canada and Mexico already adopted it

And PSAs like this began appearing. (I remember watching this - my elementary school teachers were (quite reluctantly) trying to teach it and I tried to explain it to my mom and how nearly every country in the world uses it and now the US was changing over. She rolled her eyes and said with deadpan sarcasm "Wow. And all this time, I thought we won the war.....")

Today you find some uses of the metric system. Namely this:

 

And along the borders for our Canadian and Mexican friends

Speed limit sign in Blaine, WA.....just a few meters over the border.......

 

 And virtually all retail food/drink and household products in America have both standard (or imperial) and metric measurements listed on their containers. Wine and spirit bottles are also metrically portioned. And it's ubiquitous in the illegal drug trade. Foreign imported bikes also use metric nuts and bolts (I found this out with my old Peugeot 10 speed.)

So what happened?

Simple, for the most part, we Americans resisted. In fact, the government gave up around 1982 and closed the metric conversion office when then President Reagan made the first sweeping wave of government cutbacks, ending all funding for a national conversion.

However there are still a few hopeful holdouts. But it's doubtful Americans will ever convert.   

Classic TV PSAs From The '70s