Stephan: The corporate media either doesn't understand the bee problem, doesn't care, or doesn't want to offend a corporate master. But the earth cares a lot about bees, and so should you, since your ability to eat is closely correlated with their health. If you use pesticides in your garden, or on your lawn, you are part of the problem. Stop it.
Source: 'In Situ Replication of Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder,' Chensheng Lu, Kenneth M. Warchol, Richard A. Callahan, Bulletin of Insectology, June 2012
The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
The authors, led by Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides ‘convincing evidence’ of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.
The study will appear in the June issue of the Bulletin of Insectology.
‘The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated,’ says Lu. ‘And it apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees. Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment.’
Pinpointing the cause of the problem is crucial because bees — beyond producing honey — are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of the crop species in the U.S., including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and livestock feed such as alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses, experts estimate.
Lu and his co-authors hypothesized that the uptick in CCD resulted from the presence of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid introduced in […]
No Comments
Stephan: This is polemic but, boy is it the truth.
This why we can’t have nice things anymore.
For nearly a week the media has been pressured to focus on an irrelevant distraction involving President Obama’s silly claim that the ‘private sector is fine,
No Comments
DON LEE, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Everybody got bailed out but the middle class. We are going in exactly the wrong direction. What we should be doing is hiring public employees to rebuild the infrastructure. That tactic is what every Republican President since Nixon has used to reverse the ravages of recession. I now believe that the Republican Party is willing to crash the country's economy in order to defeat Obama and regain power whereupon, they will immediately begin following this proven path to recovery.
Washington-
The Great Recession took such a heavy toll on the economy that the typical American family lost nearly 40% of its wealth from 2007 to 2010, shaving the median net worth to a level not seen since the early 1990s.
The Federal Reserve said in a new report Monday that median family net worth, the point smack in the middle of those richer and poorer, fell to $77,300 in 2010 from $126,400 three years earlier after adjusting for inflation.
The fall came with the collapse in the housing market and massive layoffs that slashed people’s incomes, and the pain was felt by families across the board — young and old, well-educated and less so, with children or not.
But the biggest impact was felt by young middle-age families, those headed by people ages 35 to 44. For this group, the median net worth — total assets minus debts — fell a whopping 54% in the three-year period to $42,100 in 2010. Such was their financial hardships that only 47.6% of these families said they had saved money in 2010; that was the lowest among all age groups, where an overall average of 52% of families saved some money that year.
More recent quarterly data […]
No Comments
MARC CAPUTO, - The Miami Herald
Stephan: There is something very interesting going on in response to the Theocratic Right's attempts to limit voter rolls, and to suppress voting amongst those populations likely to vote for Democrats, the poor, the ethnic, students, and the elderly. At the county level there are still electoral officials who retain real integrity, and take public service as just that, a service. It is so rare in politics today that it is notable. And here is how it is playing out in Florida -- the state most identified with this movement to destroy democracy.
The 67 county elections supervisors - who have final say over voter purges -are not moving forward with the purge for now because nearly all of them don’t trust the accuracy of a list of nearly 2,700 potential noncitizens identified by the state’s elections office.The U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the state to stop the purge.
‘We’re just not going to do this,
No Comments
YAMICHE ALCINDOR, - USA TODAY
Stephan: This is how a country eats itself alive. By failing to compassionately manage poverty as, say, the Scandinavian nations do, we are condemning growing populations to live outside of society. It began under Nixon when public residential mental health facilities were closed, and patient populations were dumped on the streets.
These people, now far greater in numbers because of the financial collapse and the loss of the social safety network, are not going to vaporize and disappear. When there are enough of them they will begin to congregate somewhere and create squatter settlements like the favelas of Brazil.
A growing number of cities across the United States are making it harder to be homeless.
Philadelphia recently banned outdoor feeding of people in city parks. Denver has begun enforcing a ban on eating and sleeping on property without permission. And this month, lawmakers in Ashland, Ore., will consider strengthening the town’s ban on camping and making noise in public.
And the list goes on: Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.
The ordinances are pitting city officials against homeless advocates. City leaders say they want to improve the lives of homeless people and ensure public safety, while supporters of the homeless argue that such regulations criminalize homelessness and make it harder to live on the nation’s streets.
‘We’re seeing these types of laws being proposed and passed all over the country,’ said Heather Johnson, a civil rights attorney at the homeless and poverty law center, which opposes many of the measures. ‘We think that criminalization measures such as these are counterproductive. Rather than address the root cause of homelessness, they perpetuate homelessness.’
Vagrancy laws
Cities that […]
No Comments
