Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is how aggressive, life destructive, and single-mindedly focused on profit Fracking is. When it comes to people or money, as this report explains, the carbon industry is very clear on its priority -- profit first.
Note that I get many, perhaps even most of these reports from non-U.S., or non-corporate internet sources. (The one exception, in this case, is 60 Minutes.) Ask yourself: Why isn't this a story and Donald Trump's latest pronouncements are?
BARNHART, TEXAS — Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.
‘The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,’ she said, blinking back tears. ‘I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.’
Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.
Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.
In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, […]
No Comments
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
SARAH ERDREICH, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: This is what happens when faith not facts are used to make decisions. The anti-choice movements are wrong at so many levels because their arguments are based on lies they tell themselves and others. Here is an excellent example of what I mean. This is what happens when minority religious values come to dominate the State. It happens because the citizens in certain states vote in support of these policies. Ultimately, this is an issue resolved by voting.
A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco found that the vast majority of women that had an abortion felt that they had made the right decision. Researchers examined data from 843 women that sought abortion care between 2008 and 2010; of those that were able to obtain the procedure, 90 percent percent felt relief one week after the abortion, and 80 percent of those that reported having primarily negative emotions about their abortion still felt that they had made the right choice.
As I read about these findings, I thought about that popular boogeyman of the anti-choice movement, the so-called post-abortion syndrome. Anti-choice advocate Vincent Rue is credited with coining the term, which refers to an adverse emotional or physical response to abortion, in 1981, during testimony before Congress. Despite neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizing it as an official diagnosis or syndrome, the term gained traction in the anti-choice community, to the extent that in 1987 Ronald Reagan asked then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to write a report about the effect of abortion on women.
Koop — who made no secret of his personal opposition to abortion — and his staff were unable […]
No Comments
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
DANA GOLDSTEIN, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Here we see clearly stated the great failure of American secondary education, and some of the reasons this is happening. We know from social outcome studies that our system doesn't work, and we can look at systems that do. So the question becomes, who aren't we doing what works? The answer is cultural not scientific.
Why does the U.S. lag behind our peers when it comes to educating our students? Dana Goldstein on a new book that looks at school systems across the globe to come away with a startling conclusion: they value the intellect more than we do.
For all our national hand-wringing about standardized testing and teacher tenure, many of us immersed in the American education debate can’t escape the nagging suspicion that something else-something cultural, something nearly intangible-is holding back our school system. In 1962, historian Richard Hofstadter famously dubbed it ‘anti-intellectualism in American life.
No Comments
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
KEVIN BULLIS, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: It is interesting to watch trends peter out and, as this report explains, that appears to be happening with ethanol. Corn ethanol has proven to be highly problematic as a policy. This suggests that there does not seem to be much future for cellulosic ethanol either. Carbon energy, instead, is betting on Fracking.
A series of cellulosic-biofuel plants are finally starting to come on line after years of delay. But the new wave of plant openings, good news as it is for the emerging industry, also shows just how far it still has to go.
Earlier this year Kior, a startup based in Pasadena, announced that it had shipped its first renewable diesel, made from pine wood chips. Last week, the chemical company Ineos started making ethanol from wood chips and other plant materials at a facility in Columbus, Mississippi, that can produce up to 8.5 million gallons of fuel a year. By next year more than a dozen multimillion-gallon plants are scheduled to be finished in the U.S. Although the plants are considered commercial scale, they’re still relatively small compared with corn ethanol plants, which often produce 100 million gallons of fuel per year.
The facilities won’t come close to meeting the requirements set out by the 2007 renewable-fuel standard, which was central to President Bush’s efforts to bring fuels made from biomass to market. What’s more, many of the new plants will struggle in an already saturated ethanol market.
Cellulosic biofuels, made from materials such as wood chips and corn stalks, were mandated as […]
No Comments
Monday, August 12th, 2013
VALERIE ELLIOTT, - The Mail (U.K.)
Stephan: How ironic that as our chemical industry is destroying the bees honey has suddenly opened a whole new vista in healing.
Super honey’: A new type of honey has produced amazing results treating wounds and infections. The bio-engineered product Surgihoney was tested on babies, new mothers, cancer patients and the elderly for over a year in Hampshire hospitals.
Wounds and ulcers, including those infected with the superbug MRSA, healed within days, while the number of women who suffered infections after giving birth by caesarean section has halved.
It has also healed the wounds of soldiers returning from Afghanistan, and been used to treat acne and to protect the skin of cancer patients fitted with a catheter for chemotherapy.
Dr Matthew Dryden, consultant microbiologist at the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: ‘It will revolutionise wound care around the world.’
Honey has been used for its healing powers for thousands of years, although doctors favour penicillin and antibiotics.
However, Surgihoney, which is stored in 10g sachets, can kill bacteria, parasites and fungal infections while also encouraging wounds to heal.
Dr Dryden said: ‘I have conducted numerous laboratory tests and compared it with honeys from around the world.
‘I found Surgihoney better for treating every type of bug. So for the past year I have been using it on patients and the results have been amazing.
‘There are plenty of […]
No Comments
