The Oregonian Editorial Board, - The Oregonian
Stephan: 50,000 bumblebees had to die in a parking lot to get this point across: Pesticides and herbicides are killing bees, upon whose work the world's food supply depends.
The recent discovery by shoppers of 50,000 dead bumblebees in a Target parking lot was pure B-movie material, as if the sky had rained death. But the carcasses were especially concentrated beneath some 55 European linden trees recently treated to resist infestations of aphids, which issue the clear sticky liquid droplets that can mar windshields and perhaps a satisfying shopping experience.
Bee carcasses were collected and cut open by Oregon Department of Agriculture investigators. They were found to carry high levels of the popular, unregulated insecticide Safari. Agriculture officials quickly announced that bee-proof netting would wrap the canopies of the trees, at the Wilsonville Target near I-5, to ‘keep additional bees from blooms that have been attracting the pollinators.’
Soon enough, reports surfaced of hundreds of dead bumblebees beneath linden trees in downtown Hillsboro, and state officials quickly responded to take samples. It turns out the Hillsboro trees had been treated with Safari as well, though no link was announced between the chemical and the bee deaths. And the time between application and reported die-off was much greater than it was in Wilsonville.
State agriculture officials told The Oregonian’s editorial board on Tuesday that they expect to take up to two months in […]
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Stephan: This will undoubtedly be challenged in court. That said, read this in terms of its role in the Great Schism Trend. Think of this report also in terms of the DOMA decision, which will create states where one is married, and states where one is not. My prediction is that hundreds of thousands of LBGT men and women in the Red value states are going to migrate to Blue value marriage-equality states. The effect will be to drain away from the Red value states a largely affluent, educated subpopulation, leaving the states poorer. The result of that will be that Red value states will spiral downward like Mississippi which, if it were a nation, would be a developing country.
Major newspapers and cable and broadcast media have ignored Louisiana’s passage of a law that makes it a crime for journalists to publicly identify concealed handgun permit holders or applicants.
On June 19, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) signed a bill [2] that sets penalties of up to six months in jail [3] and $10,000 for those who publish ‘any information regarding the identity of any person who applied for or received a concealed handgun permit.’ The law includes exceptions for cases in which the concealed handgun holder is charged with a felony offense involving the use of a handgun.
Supporters cited [4] as their rationale for proposing the law a New York paper’s controversial [5] Decemberpublication [6] of a Google map that featured the names and addresses of local handgun permit holders, saying that the legislation was necessary to prevent local media outlets from publishing similar information. Most states, including Louisiana, have laws that make such information confidential [7], but Alabama is the only other state [8] that currently makes publication of that information illegal subject to a penalty.
The law’s passage comes during a furious debate over whether the federal government infringed upon freedom of the press [9] by naming a reporter […]
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Thursday, June 27th, 2013
Stephan: Trying to wade through the disinformation carbon energy interests put out is not easy. I found this report on what is going on in Scotland and could only wonder what is stopping the U.S. from doing this?
The reports discussed in this report are available on the Scottish Parliament website: Report on the achievability of the Scottish Government's renewable energy targets (PDF); National Grid evidence (PDF).
Click through to see the charts that accompany this report.
Squirreled away beneath a recent Telegraph report on the subtleties of badger-culling in the UK was this intriguing morsel of wind energy news, which would seem to challenge the idea that intermittent energy sources such as wind play havoc with grid management. For the 23,700 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy generated by wind in the UK between April 2011 and September 2012, only 22 GWh of electrical energy from fossil fuels ‘was needed to fill the gaps when the wind didn’t blow,’ it reports. Gizmag contacted the UK National Grid to find out the details.
The Telegraph’s figures come from National Grid Head of Energy Strategy and Policy, Richard Smith, speaking at the Hay Festival between May 23 and Jun 2. Gizmag has learned that he was drawing from a National Grid document sent to the Scottish Parliament in response to its own report of Nov 23 2012, entitled Report on the achievability of the Scottish Government’s renewable energy targets.
(Table: National Grid)
Table 1 of the National Grid’s document states that, according to its figures, wind farms generated 23,707 GWh of electricity over the 18 months in question.
(Table: National Grid)
Meanwhile, Table 2 of the report shows the energy provided by the […]
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Thursday, June 27th, 2013
MATT TAIBBI, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: Here is the final bit explaining the complete corruption of the financial sector; it deals with the debasing of the the rating agencies. It is blatantly obvious from many sources that the Obama Administration Justice Department has failed to serve the public interest. We are five years past the 2008 meltdown, and it cannot be denied that no real effort has been made at the Federal level to hold these corporations, or the men and women who control them, accountable. Thus, I do not see how it is going to be possible to avoid another meltdown. The system is simply too corrupt, I think it is going to implode again because of its unregulated greed.
What about the ratings agencies?
That’s what ‘they’ always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat’s nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.
But what about the ratings agencies? Isn’t it true that almost none of the fraud that’s swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s rubber-stamping it? Aren’t they guilty, too?
Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation’s two top ratings companies, Moody’s and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
‘Lord […]
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Thursday, June 27th, 2013
Stephan: Nowhere is the obvious and absurd dysfunction of the American illness profit industry made clearer than in comparison to Canada, a country that still has a vital middle class, and whose population is richer. They have universal healthcare, which costs a fraction of what it costs us in the U.S., and whatever disinformation you may read, I spend time in Canada every year, and I know of no Canadian who wants to give up universal birthright health care funded by a governmental single payer system.
It is, in my mind, one of the most extraordinary aspects of conservative partisanship that they refuse to understand this.
I’ve been watching with some dismay the wrestling match going on between the governor and the Maine Legislature over the opportunity offered by the federal Affordable Care Act to expand our MaineCare program.
Proponents of expansion of MaineCare make their argument on both moral and economic grounds. Such expansion would provide health care coverage for almost 70,000 low-income Mainers who will otherwise receive no assistance from the ACA. More coverage would result in better management of our burgeoning level of chronic illness as our population ages. That will drive down the use of expensive crisis-oriented emergency services as well as the illness-inducing stress produced by out-of-control health care bills in low-income patients already afflicted by poor health.
Since 100 percent of the costs of the proposed expansion would be borne by the federal government for at least the first three years of the program (gradually reduced to 90 percent by 2020), MaineCare expansion under the ACA would also provide significant economic benefits to Maine in the form of federal dollars and the jobs they will create in every county in the state. According to a new study released last week by the Maine Center for Economic Policy and Maine Equal Justice Partners, […]
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