STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Marijuana prohibition either by intent or simply indifference is an utterly racist policy. Here's why.
The New York Civil Liberties Union published a research report (PDF) Thursday detailing the vast racial disparities in the state’s marijuana enforcement regime, finding that black New Yorkers are, in some parts of the state, up to 9 times more likely to be arrested for pot than whites.
The NYCLU’s report follows an American Civil Liberties Union study published Monday that found non-whites nationwide are more than four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana despite higher usage rates among whites.
The NYCLU report found that the New York had by far the most marijuana arrests in the nation in 2010, beating even Texas and more than doubling the national average in spite of possession being decriminalized since 1977.
Though simple possession is a violation-level offense, so-called ‘stop and frisk
No Comments
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER and KEVIN TRENBERTH, - The Washington Post
Stephan: There is not much here that will be unfamiliar to SR readers, but this is an excellent assessment, by two very knowledgeable scientists, of the state of climate change. And it deals very straightforwardly with the climate denier nonsense that continues to clog the media.
Michael Oppenheimer is a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. Kevin Trenberth is a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In a recent op-ed for The Post, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) offered up a reheated stew of isolated factoids and sweeping generalizations about climate science to defend the destructive status quo. We agree with the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that policy should be based on sound science. But Smith presented political talking points, and none of his implied conclusions is accurate.
The two of us have spent, in total, more than seven decades studying Earth’s climate, and we have joined hundreds of top climate scientists to summarize the state of knowledge for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Climate Research Program and other science-based bodies. We believe that our views are representative of the 97
No Comments
MARK PETERS, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: Once again: water is destiny, as this report makes clear.
Click through to see a very useful map of the U.S. showing drought conditions in the country.
WICHITA, Kan.-A drought that is stretching into its third year is stressing drinking-water supplies from Kansas to New Mexico even as much of the nation emerges from last summer’s bone-dry conditions.
Some communities in Texas are down to 180 days or less of supply, while areas of rural New Mexico have been drilling deeper wells to keep taps running. Officials here in Wichita are looking at big-ticket items such as a pipeline and the reuse of wastewater because a reservoir that supplies nearly two-thirds of the city’s water was forecast until recently to run dry by fall 2015.
National data show a six-state region that also includes parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma remains extremely dry, even as parts of the Midwest and Great Plains have come out of last summer’s historic drought, with states such as Iowa and Illinois dealing with floods this spring.
A three-month forecast released Thursday by the National Weather Service predicts the drought will persist, or even intensify, in many areas already facing extreme conditions, while the drought in more eastern sections of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma will ease further.
And while the effects on agriculture-from crops withering to ranchers struggling to find grazing land-have garnered much of the […]
No Comments
MARTHA ROSENBERG, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I no longer eat anything that comes from a pig. Here's why.
You know things are bad in the pork industry when the whistleblowers aren’t animal rights activists, but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600 other US plants slaughtering pigs. [3]
‘During FYs 2008 to 2011, FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service, the regulatory agency within USDA] issued 44,128 noncompliance records (NRs) to 616 plants; only 28 plants were suspended, even though some plants repeated violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses,’ says the Office of the Inspector General report. ‘In one plant, flies hovered over an area where blood was being collected to be sold for human consumption’ (for products like blood sausage and blood soup). Twenty-two of the 28 plants that were actually suspended were allow to ‘continue to operate within a short period–some as little as one day after suspension,’ says the report. There’s a deterrent for you.
This is not the first time the USDA Office of the Inspector General has sounded the safety alarm about the meat supply. A 2010 report warned that farmers were feeding drug-laced milk, […]
No Comments
Stephan: Here is an extraordinary experimental study on the teleportation of information.
A new milestone has been reached in the development of a practical quantum teleportation system - researchers have for the first time succeeded in the teleportation of information between two separate clouds of gas atoms, over long-distances. And not just once, the method is apparently already extremely reliable - working every single time that it’s been attempted.
There are two glass containers, each containing a cloud of billions of caesium gas atoms. Both glass containers are enclosed in a chamber with a magnetic field. The two glass containers are not connected to each other, but information is teleported from the one glass cloud to the other by means of laser light.
It’s been possible for quite some time now to ‘teleport
No Comments
