Saturday, July 30th, 2011
STEPHEN MAGAGNINI, - The Scramento Bee
Stephan: My sister and brother-in-law recently visited us and, then, took off for a drive across Washington parts of Oregon, and Idaho, not have travelled in the U.S. for some years. They returned and spent a last night with Ronlyn and myself before flying back to France, where they live in the country. They were appalled by what they saw. The poor condition of the roads, the rusting bridges, the dying towns, the empty factories, and the depressed people had a powerful and unhappy effect on them. America, they said, is falling apart and failing its people. Sadly, I agreed and, increasingly, so do thousands of immigrants, as this story points out.
Note also the further confirmation of the trend SR readers will find very familiar. The best birth control in the world is an educated, happy, financially secure woman.
There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.
‘It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,’ Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. ‘We have become a middle-class country.’
Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.
An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Among metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, Sacramento County ranks among the lowest, with an unauthorized population of 4.6 percent of its 1.4 million residents in 2008, according to Laura Hill, a demographer with the PPIC.
The Sacramento region, suffering from 12.3 percent unemployment and the construction bust, may have triggered a large exodus of undocumented immigrants, González Gutiérrez said.
The best-paid jobs for undocumented migrants are in the building industry, ‘and because of the severe crisis in the construction business here, their first response has been to move into the service industry,’ […]
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Saturday, July 30th, 2011
PETER FINOCCHIARO, - Salon
Stephan: Several of my conservative readers -- yes it seems about 12 per cent of SR readers are on the right, some the far right, and I welcome them all -- sent me a report written by University of Alabama researcher Roy Spencer and published in the peer reviewed journal Remote Sensing.
The paper argued that global warming was a hoax. To a person my correspondent's all said some variant of: see, Stephan you just won't acknowledge that there is strong countervailing evidence against your point of view. Naturally, I took this all very seriously and I spent some time over the past couple of days digging into it. You may well have seen references to this paper, since the media has given it a big play.
The first thing about it that made me suspicious was that it was funded by Heartland Institute a front organization of the petroleum industry, particularly ExxonMobil. It didn't take long to discover that Spencer has a long relationship with this organization and is part of the denier movement. The Forbes columnist who gave this story legs, James Taylor, similarly has an association with Heartland.
I soon found a number of critiques of the Spencer's work, and have come to the conclusion the paper can only be described, charitably, as profoundly flawed.
Tuesday I go out of town for a week, and I just don't have time to write the whole thing up, but I found this exegetic essay which I think gets the story pretty straight.
July has been marked by an abundance of new evidence and arguments that point to the adverse effect of man-made climate change. But, surprisingly, it’s been a controversial study from a controversial scientist that has generated the most buzz. Unsurprisingly, a slew of prominent right-leaning websites are pointing to it as proof that global warming is a hoax.
The report, by University of Alabama scientist Roy Spencer and published in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing, argues that heat is actually escaping from Earth much more quickly than current climate models predicted. This assessment, if accurate, could mean that the dramatically rising temperatures that scientists currently anticipate would not ultimately occur. The hypothesis hinges, as LiveScience points out, on the idea that clouds trap heat in our atmosphere, not carbon dioxide, and there’s nothing we could, or should, do to affect that.
Of course, in the highly charged arena of global-warming politics, a study like this is catnip for climate-change deniers. Forbes columnist James Taylor sparked a furor on Wednesday when he published a piece that claimed: ‘New NASA data blow gaping hole in global-warming alarmism.’ From there, the usual suspects (e.g., Fox News, the Daily Caller, NewsMax) piled on, along with the […]
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Saturday, July 30th, 2011
MIKE LUDWIG, Reporter - truthout.org
Stephan: God, Obama is a disappointment. I think we social progressives -- people who want a country that is compassionate and life-affirming, that puts people first and corporations second -- should mount our own candidate and campaign for him or her. I certainly would.
The Obama administration is supporting genetically engineered (GE) agriculture in more than 50 national wildlife refuges across the country and watchdog groups say internal emails among top administration officials reveal that the GE plots are a priority in the White House.
Earlier this year, a settlement in a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and its allies halted the planting of GE crops in US Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife refuges in northeastern states. Now PEER claims the Obama administration is working with the biotech lobby to shield GE plots in refuges from future legal challenges.
A January 10, 2011 email obtained by PEER reveals that biotech lobbyist Adrianne Massey contacted Peter Schmeissner, the senior policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology, about the legal challenge to GE crop plantings in northeastern refuges.
Massey, who has made a career out of promoting biotechnology across the world, promotes the public policy of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a lobby funded by Monsanto and other biotech firms.
The Obama administration recently created the White House Agricultural Biotechnology Working Group and GE crop opponents claim the interagency group has teamed up with BIO to boost exports of […]
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Saturday, July 30th, 2011
DEBORAH WHITE, - About.com
Stephan: We don't have any money to feed our children, or educate them, or give them decent health care, or safe housing, but we have plenty of money for this, the Iraq War the American media has forgotten, and that should never have happened. Look at the little counter on the left side of the website. Look how much money has been spent. Click through to find out what it has cost your community.
Let’s start with this: 4,469 US Soldiers Killed, 32,130 Seriously Wounded.
For your quick reading, I’ve listed key statistics about the Iraq War and occupation, taken primarily from data analyzed by various think tanks, including The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, and from mainstream media sources. Data is presented as of June 30, 2011, except as indicated.
U.S. SPENDING IN IRAQ
Spent & Approved War-Spending – About $900 billion of US taxpayers’ funds spent or approved for spending through November 2010.
Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq – $9 billion of US taxpayers’ money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.
Lost and Reported Stolen – $6.6 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money earmarked for Iraq reconstruction, reported on June 14, 2011 by Special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction Stuart Bowen who called it ‘the largest theft of funds in national history.’ (Source – CBS News) Last known holder of the $6.6 billion lost: the U.S. government.
Missing – $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)
Mismanaged & Wasted in Iraq […]
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ALEXANDER HIGGINS, - Examiner.com
Stephan: Those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest, and who are breathing in 'hot' particles from Fukushima have a particular interest in knowing what is going on over there. The Japanese government and the Virtual Corporate States who influence Japan as much as the U.S., and who have a common interest with the government in covering up the corruption and incompetence so abundantly displayed in these events have no interest in making it possible for us to find out.
apan has passed a law that will enable the police and contractors to monitor internet activity without restriction to ‘cleanse’ the Internet of any ‘bad’ Fukushima radiation news.
As I previous reported, Japan has officially ordered the censorship of any reporting of the truth about the Fukushima nuclear radiation fallout by ordering telecommunications companies and web masters to scrub any stories negative stories from the about the disaster.
Japan Officially Orders Censorship Of Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster
The government of Japan has issued an official order to telecommunications companies and web masters to censor reports which contradict the state media reports that the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster is over.
Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster
The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation.
The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by […]
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