Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
JONAH ENGLE, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Meth is an evil drug, a toxin that arises from poverty, and the role Big Pharma plays in this macabre dance is little understood. Here is a good assessment of the meth reality.
The first time she saw her mother passed out on the living room floor, Amanda thought she was dead. There were muddy tracks on the carpet and the room looked like it had been ransacked. Mary wouldn’t wake up. When she finally came to, she insisted nothing was wrong. But as the weeks passed, her 15-year-old daughter’s sense of foreboding grew. Amanda’s parents stopped sleeping and eating. Her once heavy mother turned gaunt and her father, Barry, stopped going to work. She was embarrassed to go into town with him; he was covered in open sores. A musty stink gripped their increasingly chaotic trailer. The driveway filled up with cars as strangers came to the house and partied all night.
Her parents’ repeated assurances failed to assuage Amanda’s mounting worry. She would later tell her mother it felt ‘like I saw an airplane coming in toward our house in slow motion and it was crashing.’ Finally, she went sleuthing online. The empty packages of cold medicine, the canisters of Coleman fuel, the smell, her parents’ strange behavior all pointed to one thing. They were meth cooks. Amanda (last name withheld to protect her privacy) told her grandparents, who lived next door. […]
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Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
TINA CASEY, - Clean Technica
Stephan: Here is some more good news about solar. Click through to see the illustrations, it will make the story clearer.
A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has just announced a new breakthrough in the field of graphene research, leading to the next generation of high-efficiency solar cells, computers and other advanced technologies. Graphene, a new material that was discovered less than 10 years ago, is an ultra-thin, superstrong, superflexible electron conductor. As for how to explain the Berkeley Lab research in lay terms, let’s just say that if graphene had a personality it would have its own reality show, and it would give Total Divas a run for the money.
No, seriously. Researchers have already demonstrated that graphene possesses an outsized talent for showing off its unique properties, which is surely one prerequisite for diva-ness. The other is a highly developed sensitivity to minor irritations, and that is the focus of the new Berkeley Lab research.
A Graphene Mystery
To understand the significance of the Berkeley Lab breakthrough, let’s start at the beginning. Graphene consists of a sheet of carbon only one atom thick, with a distinctive lattice structure similar to chicken wire.
On the plus side, graphene is an extremely efficient conductor, far more efficient than silicon. However, this is where graphene’s diva side kicks in. To translate graphene into on/off […]
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Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
ARTURO GARCIA, - The Raw story
Stephan: This is why nothing is going to be done about climate change. This Republican cretin, whom you would avoid if you met him a party, is the Vice Chairman of the House Science Committee. Rep. Rohrabacker has been making an ass of himself in the Congress for years, yet has been sent back to the House year after year by the citizens of Orange County, California, and it is them I blame. But it is all of us who will pay the price for his, and their, willful ignorance.
Click through to see the video of Rep. Rohrabacker actually expressing his views.
A Republican member of the House Science Committee jovially dismissed global warming as a plot to institute a ‘global government
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Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
TOM KENWORTHY, - Climate Progress
Stephan: More on the increasingly severe water trend in the Southwest. This crisis is developing even faster than most earlier reports have indicated. Two or three more years of drought and cities that depend on the Colorado River for water, are going to face very hard choices. It is my view, as I have said many times, in SR, and my Explore essays, that we are going to see a migration out of the Southwest as a result of climate change, the rise in temperature, and the lack of water.
his week, to see how climate change will pull a nasty water surprise on the desert Southwest, you only need to look at one river.
Lake Powell is the giant reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border that backs up behind Glen Canyon Dam and is the linchpin for managing the Colorado River. The Colorado basically makes modern life possible in seven western states by providing water for some 40 million people and irrigating 4 million acres of crops. It is also depended upon by 22 native American tribes, 7 national wildlife refuges and 11 national parks.
As soon as Monday, the federal government’s Bureau of Reclamation will announce the results of some very serious number crunching and model running focused on falling water levels in Lake Powell. It is widely expected that the bureau will announce that there is a serious water shortage and that for the first time in the 50-year-history of the dam, the amount of water that will be released from the reservoir will be cut. Not just cut, but cut by 750,000 acre feet – an acre foot being enough water to cover an acre one foot deep. That’s more than 9 percent below the 8.23 million acre feet […]
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Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
ADAM FEDERMAN, - Waging Nonviolence
Stephan: Here is one of the best assessments of what it is like to go up against carbon interests on behalf of a more life affirming path.
In mid-June, Bold Nebraska - a grassroots environmental organization opposed to construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline - obtained documents that detail how local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the company responsible for building the pipeline, are working together to undermine peaceful political protest. The documents revealed that the company, TransCanada, had briefed the FBI as well as law enforcement officials - district attorneys, attorney generals and county sheriffs - in Oklahoma and Nebraska on the potential threat posed by environmental activists and local landowners. In their PowerPoint presentation the company suggested that district attorneys should explore ‘state or federal anti-terrorism laws
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