Stephan: The food crisis trend is gathering momentum.
Surging pork and beef costs will keep pressure on U.S. food inflation, which the Department of Agriculture says will rise 3 percent to 4 percent this year, the most since 2008.
While the overall estimate for food inflation was left unchanged in today’s report, the USDA said prices for meat poultry and fish will jump 5 percent to 6 percent, led by beef, which may climb 8 percent, and pork, which could gain 7.5 percent. The beef estimate was increased by 2.5 percentage points from March and pork was raised 1 percentage point.
‘I suspect when December arrives we will see increases of 4 to 6 percent
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Stephan: The Climate Change Deniers rant on while nature, paying no attention whatever, shifts with increasing speed into environmental formulations no human has ever seen. I find it particularly tragic and ironic that Climate Change Deniers, who are concentrated in red states particularly in the South, central and southwestern U.S., are going to suffer notably from the extreme climate events we are increasingly experiencing. There have been several hundred tornadoes in this April, over 200 per cent higher than usual. And this is just the beginning. The level of destruction in those states, over the next 20 years, is going to be truly catastrophic.
It’s like a scene out of a sci-fi movie — thousands, possibly millions, of king crabs are marching through icy, deep-sea waters and up the Antarctic slope.
‘They are coming from the deep, somewhere between 6,000 to 9,000 feet down,’ said James McClintock, Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham Endowed Professor of Polar and Marine Biology.
Shell-crushing crabs haven’t been in Antarctica, Earth’s southernmost continent, for hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of years, McClintock said. ‘They have trouble regulating magnesium ions in their body fluids and get kind of drunk at low temperatures.’
But something has changed, and these crustaceans are poised to move by the droves up the slope and onto the shelf that surrounds Antarctica. McClintock and other marine researchers interested in the continent are sounding alarms because the vulnerable ecosystem could be wiped out, he said.
Antarctic clams, snails and brittle stars, because of adaptation to their environment, have soft shells and have never had to fight shell-crushing predators. ‘You can take an Antarctic clam and crush it with your hands,’ McClintock said. They could be the main prey for these crabs, he said.
Loss of unique mollusks could jeopardize organisms with disease-fighting compounds, McClintock said. Sea squirts, for example, produce […]
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NICHOLAS KUSNETZ, - ProPublica
Stephan: As with the Gulf, one can see in the reaction time of the petroleum industry, and in the competence of its response, that safety has been sacrificed to profit across the board.
When Chesapeake Energy lost control of a Marcellus Shale gas well in Pennsylvania on April 19, an emergency response team from Texas was called in to stop the leak. By the time the team arrived more than 13 hours later, brine water and hydraulic fracturing fluids from the well had spewed across nearby fields and into a creek.
Why did a team have to be called in from Texas, as the Scranton Times Tribune has reported? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
Drilling Regulatory Staffing in Your State
Search for how many wells have been drilled and how many gas regulators are in your state.
According to a plan that Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection announced in August 2010, a Pennsylvania-based emergency response crew should have been available to handle the blowout. The plan was created after Texas crews had to be called in to deal with two serious gas drilling accidents last summer. The first was a blowout at an EOG Resources well in Clearfield County on June 3 — it took the Texans 16 hours to arrive at that site. The other was a fire at a Huntley & Huntley well in Allegheny County that killed […]
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Thursday, April 28th, 2011
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is a new documentary by SR reader Suzanne Taylor, who has been a friend for many years. I have seen the documentary, and think this is a very good assessment of it. As the reviewer notes the images of the 'circles' are stunning. And Suzanne is very amiable. She doesn't condescend or make fun. So you get to hear from these people what they really believe, which is interesting. Skepticism gets boring. Agreement is not required, only a respect for sincerity.
I know some of you will write me and ask me what I believe about this. Here it is: I made a documentary on the circles myself in the 1980s, and came away from it feeling that while some were hoaxes, others could not be explained away so easily. Just writing this brings back the memory of talking with a British army officer who had been detailed to examine them. All night he and his crew stood on a hill looking out into the dark, seeing a field beneath them in the green glow of night googles. They had all kind of instrumentation. As the day broke the officer said to me, 'I turned around to take a leak, and there before me, in the other direction was a large and complex circle. I do not believe any method I know could have accomplished that without being detected.'
That and the interview with a young Mormon couple who had a circle appear in their field, just before harvest, which they did not appreciate at all. This is the other one that stands out in my memory. The young couple could not have been straighter. They had that integrity about being truthful that anyone who has Mormon farm friends would instantly recognize. I knew they were telling me what they had experienced.
If pressed to construct a scenario which would cover the observed phenomenon I would say this: Suppose at some future date some kind of retrocausal technology develops. You're in a laboratory in the U.K. and you want to test the technology in some objectively verifiable manner but you have to be careful not to set entrain some change in the past that could alter the future. Well, how about going back and leaving a design, randomly selected for you before you exercised this technology in the crop of a farm field. It would be sure to get recorded so, in the future, your present, you could go to newspapers or video of the era and see whether your design had been reported. Since the appearances were inexplicable, they would generate only short term local interest, and likely be dismissed as curiosities or fakes. Thus they would confirm, while producing few ripples.
A cheery, chummy documentary about the pastoral patterns inaccurately described as crop circles, Suzanne Taylor’s ‘What on Earth?
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Thursday, April 28th, 2011
SUZY KHIMM, - Mother Jones
Stephan: What you are seeing here is the creation of the New American Slavery.
Last August, two prisoners escaped from an Arizona penitentiary and fled to New Mexico, where they ambushed a couple, shot them to death, and lit their bodies on fire inside a trailer.
These fugitives didn’t escape from just any facility: They were housed in a privately run prison managed by the Utah-based Management Training Corporation. After the incident, a review by the Arizona Department of Corrections concluded that the prison had poorly trained staff and deficient equipment-including a faulty security system that emitted so many false alarms, the prison staff simply ignored it.
Episodes like this have raised concerns about the privatization of prisons, with critics long arguing that such facilities pose a threat to public safety and don’t save states much-if any-money in the long run. They also argue that such facilities pose a perverse incentive to keep people locked up. Still, the nation could soon see a major private-prison boom, as Republican governors and legislators across the country push privatization proposals to address budget shortfalls.
In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich has proposed selling five prisons to private companies-a move that would bring in an estimated $200 million up front-while Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal plans to sell three state prisons to private […]
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