Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and Chemicals of Concern

Learn about a few of the top ingredients and contaminants to avoid, based on the science linking each to adverse health impacts, and they types of products they're found in. To learn more about how chemicals impact your health and where they come from, check out the Your Body, Your Health section.

For each of the chemicals included in this section, a growing body of hazard-based evidence suggests connections to long-term health concerns like cancer and reproductive problems.

These are just a very few examples of the 10,500 ingredients used in personal care products. To learn more about other chemicals, visit EWG's Skin Deep database of cosmetic products and ingredients.

via safecosmetics.org

Annie Leonard has a new film called The Story of Cosmetics (toxics in and toxics out!). If you haven't seen her first film, The Story of Stuff, just google it and you'll find it - very thought provoking and worth taking a few minutes to watch. Her latest film really made me take a second look at the labels on some of the things I keep in my bathroom and use every day, things like shampoo and body lotion! Check out EWG's Skin Deep database - you will be surprised at the toxins you'll find in those products you might be using every day - even on your children and babies!

Posted via email from PIANORAMA

Nature by Numbers

A short movie inspired by numbers, nature and geometry, by Cristobal Villa.

Posted via web from PIANORAMA

Y'all Busted!

This rocks! 

 

Posted via web from PIANORAMA

Liquid Gold

A wonderful video by Globalbeat, describing a trip inside ourselves, a vision of universal harmony.

Posted via web from PIANORAMA

Lang Lang plays Mozart's piano.

Here Lang Lang plays Mozart's piano and tells how he almost gave up playing piano.

Posted via web from PIANORAMA

Untitled

Here is an amazing performance by Lang Lang of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2.  Enjoy the fireworks!

Posted via web from PIANORAMA

Reading John Taylor Gatto

We've all heard of the dumbing down of America, but reading a new book by John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, has made me realize that education in American is in much worse shape than anyone would have ever thought.

All I can say is, read the book, and see what you think.

Now, I come from a family of "educators" - sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts who have chosen teaching in the public school system, from elementary to university, as their life's work - people whom I admire and respect to the utmost for their intelligence, integrity and commitment to education. Yet, the system of compulsory schooling itself is corrupt and based on wrong principles which go against the basic freedoms and liberties upon which our country was founded.

John Gatto gives example after example of individuals who have achieved much, including the founding fathers of this country, inventors, writers, presidents, captains of industry and more, who had little or no schooling but taught themselves what they needed to know. He states, "mass abstract testing, anonymously scored, is the torture centrifuge whirling away precious resources of time and money from productive use and routing it into the hands of testing magicians. It happens only because the tormented allow it." And he asks us to STOP. Bring the testing empire to an end. In the tradition of Gandhi, and the great world changers who acted peaceably and with passive resistance, he says, "Let a group of young men and women, one fully aware that these tests add no value to individual lives or the social life of the majority, use the power of the Internet to recruit other young people to refuse, quietly, to take these tests. No demonstrations, no mud-slinging, no adversarial politics - to simply write across the face of the tests placed in front of them, 'I would prefer not to take this test.'"

Wow! "I prefer not to take this test."

Reading this book has inspired me to create my own blog page - as if I didn't already spend enough time everyday on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, or watching Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on msnbc.com, etc. - so I could write this one blog at least and spread the word.