MARLA CONE, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: Several readers wrote to ask if it was an exaggeration to say that the California coast was really being impacted by radioactive pollution, as the story I ran the other day stated. Here is the answer. Exactly what it means, and what else may be coming is far less clear.
The formal kelp study itself can be found at sfg.ly/HnYXQR.
Kelp off California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s coastline, according to a new scientific study.
Scientists from CSU Long Beach tested giant kelp collected off Orange County, Santa Cruz and other locations after the March 2011 accident and detected radioactive iodine, which was released from the damaged nuclear reactor.
The largest concentration was about 250 times higher than levels found in kelp before the accident.
‘Basically, we saw it in all the California kelp blades we sampled,’ said Steven Manley, a CSU Long Beach biology professor who specializes in kelp.
The radioactivity had no known effects on the giant kelp, or on fish and other marine life, and it was undetectable a month later.
Iodine 131 ‘has an eight-day half-life, so it’s pretty much all gone,’ Manley said. ‘But this shows what happens half a world away does effect what happens here. I don’t think these levels are harmful, but it’s better if we don’t have it at all.’
Spread in large, dense, brown forests across the ocean off California, giant kelp is the largest of all algae and grows faster than virtually any other life on Earth. […]
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Stephan: Whenever one examines our health system closely it is clear the illness profit model is a failure.
Source: The U.S. Infant Mortality Rate: International Comparisons, Underlying Factors, and Federal Programs (by Elayne J. Heisler, Congressional Research Service) (pdf)
A nation’s infant mortality rate (IMR) has long been widely understood to be an excellent indicator, not only of infant health, but of a people’s health and general well-being as well. Thus it is sobering news to read, in a recent report prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is part of the Library of Congress, that the 2008 U.S. IMR ranks 31st out of 34 developed countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That puts the U.S. behind every European nation on the list (including the 6 formerly communist countries of Slovenia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia); Asian countries like South Korea, Japan and Israel; and the Australasian countries of Australia and New Zealand. Out of the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. IMR is better than that of only Chile, Mexico and Turkey.
These rank rankings are actually part of a long-term trend, with the U.S. dropping from 12th in 1960, to 19th in 1980, 30th in 2005 and 31st in 2008. At the same time, the U.S. IMR declined by almost 75% between 1960 and 2000 (from 26.0 to 6.9), but has been flat since 2000, declining by only 4% […]
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NAOMI WOLF, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think this essay makes a very important point. Denying a person power over his or her own person, an historic and proven intimidation technique used by authoritarian governments, has been cropping up more and more as one of the US trends that reveals our future.
In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the ‘trespass bill’, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to ‘turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.’ He said he felt humiliated: ‘It made me feel like less of a man.’
In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are […]
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A. L. BARDACH, - The Wall Street Journal Magazine
Stephan: I found this a fascinating essay on the origins of yoga in the U.S.
By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at ‘The New Yorker,’ he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.
Though the iconic author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Franny and Zooey’ published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early 1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees.
After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger’s spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.
These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. ‘As soon as I think of myself as a little body,’ he warned, ‘I want to preserve it, […]
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Stephan: We must abandon industrial agriculture, for its dependence on massive amounts of petroleum and water if nothing else. And it can be done.
The Studebakers plying up and down Havana’s boardwalk aren’t the best advertisement for dynamism and innovation. But if you want to see what tomorrow’s fossil-fuel-free, climate-change-resilient, high-tech farming looks like, there are few places on earth like the Republic of Cuba.
Under the Warsaw Pact, Cuba sent rum and sugar to the red side of the Iron Curtain. In exchange, it received food, oil, machinery, and as many petrochemicals as it could shake a stick at. From the Missile Crisis to the twilight of the Soviet Union, Cuba was one of the largest importers of agricultural chemicals in Latin America. But when the Iron Curtain fell, the supply lines were cut, and tractors rusted in the fields.
Unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides that 20th-century agriculture had taken for granted, the country faced extreme weather events and a limit to the land and water it could use to grow food. The rest of the world will soon face many of the same problems: In the coming decade, according to the OECD, we’ll see higher fuel and fertilizer costs, more variable climate patterns, and limits to arable land that will drive cereal prices 20 percent higher and hike meat prices by 30 […]
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