Saturday, February 8th, 2014
D. S. WRIGHT, - Firedoglake
Stephan: Here you see the true face of modern Agribusiness, its deceit, its indifference to wellness, and evil commitment to nothing but profit.
According to a new report in the New Yorker, agribusiness giant Syngenta waged an underhanded campaign to destroy scientist Tyrone Hayes after his research showed that the company’s lucrative herbicide, atrazine, impeded sexual development in frogs. Atrazine is an extremely popular herbicide and is reportedly applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Corn has become one of the most widely used crops in the United States making its way into numerous products in the consumer market in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Syngenta’s atrazine is the one of the most widely used herbicides in America with around $300 million in annual sales – second only to Monsanto’s glyphosate.
According to documents obtained via a class action lawsuit Syngenta tried to discredit Hayes’ work and prevent him from advancing in his career for fear his work on atrazine would gain greater influence and lead to the firm’s profitable chemical being banned by the EPA. The chemical is already banned in the European Union.
The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The […]
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Friday, February 7th, 2014
Stephan: Reading this I had to wonder: what have we become when our surveillance police state is spying routinely on our elected representatives? What kind of country have we become?
The US National Security Agency likely collects intelligence on congressional lawmakers and members of their staff, a Justice Department official admitted at a committee hearing on Tuesday.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole of the US Department of Justice testified during a House Judiciary Committee hearing which was examining proposals to reform the NSA surveillance policies that have been revealed in an ongoing series of disclosures since June. Among the most damning revelations leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was the realization that the NSA indiscriminately forces companies to provide phone records belonging to millions of Americans.
Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA.) pressed Cole Tuesday on whether the NSA dragnet includes the number codes that pertain to congressional offices.
‘Mr. Cole, do you collect 202-225 and four digits afterwards?” Issa asked, as quoted by the National Journal.
‘We probably do, Mr. Congressman,” Cole replied. ‘But we’re not allowed to look at any of those, however, unless we have reasonable, articulable suspicion that those numbers are related to a known terrorist threat.”
This admission is not the first time members of Congress were given a clue that their activities might be being monitored. Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders – an Independent who represents Vermont – sent […]
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Friday, February 7th, 2014
ARTURO GARCIA, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I read this and thought: How will the Biblical literalists deal with this? The answer, I think, is that they will ignore it or deny it. It's really sort of pathetic.
Meanwhile, for those of us who actually pay attention to and value facts, it is fascinating.
Archaeologists at Tel Aviv University in Israel said they have determined that camels were not domesticated until much later than depicted in the Bible, the International Business Times reported on Wednesday.
The researchers, Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, said carbon dating of ancient camel bones places them in the latter part of the 10th century B.C., centuries after they were described as pack animals during the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph.
The bones were found during multiple excavations in the Aravah Valley, located along the border between Israel and Jordan, an ancient hub for copper production, which the researchers said points to the introduction of domesticated camels to the region by Egyptians.
‘The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development,” Ben-Yosef was quoted as saying. ‘By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries.”
The Times of Israel reported that the university released a statement calling the duo’s discovery ‘direct proof that the [Biblical] text was compiled well after the events it describes.”
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Friday, February 7th, 2014
LINDSAY ABRAMS, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: Once again, as has been true of so many other situations, we see in this report the profit for the few trumping the wellbeing of the many. It is literally killing American society, destroying the middle class, and corrupting our democracy. What continues to amaze me is how loyal Red state voters are to those who are degrading their lives.
The tremendous drought that’s currently affecting California has the state anticipating the need to conserve its remaining water – Gov. Jerry Brown has urged residents to cut their usage by 20 percent, and some are beginning to argue that it’s time to make restrictions mandatary. As climate change worsens, we can expect dry periods like this – not just in California, but across wide swaths of the country – to get worse, the demand for water more pressing. And the 97 billion gallons of water needed to frack our oil and gas wells isn’t helping matters.
Of the 4,000 oil and gas wells drilled in the U.S. since 2011, a new report from Ceres found, a full three-quarters owere located in areas of water scarcity. More than half – 55 percent – were in areas experiencing drought.
The Guardian reports on how fracking is increasingly competing with communities’ dwindling water supplies:
A number of small communities in Texas oil and gas country have already run out of water or are in danger of running out of water in days, pushed to the brink by a combination of drought and high demand for water for fracking.
[…]
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Friday, February 7th, 2014
DYLAN SCOTT, Reporter - Talking Points Memo
Stephan: If you read me regularly, particularly if you look at my Explore essays, you know I have been writing about the healthcare aspect of the Great Schism Trend showing that Red value states, and the politicians citizens of those states vote into office are literally damaging their lives. (See: At the Cost of Your Life: Social Value, Social Wellness. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900249-8/fulltext. Social Values, Social Wellness: Can We Know What Works? http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900346-6/fulltext) Here is yet another data point on that trend. It is a lethally tragic story.
As many as 17,000 Americans will die directly as a result of states deciding not to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, according to a new study.
Researchers from Harvard University and City University of New York have estimated that between 7,115 and 17,104 deaths will be “attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states” in a study published in Health Affairs.
“The results were sobering,” Samuel Dickman, one of the authors, said, according to the Morning Call. “Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”
They projected that 423,000 fewer diabetics would receive medication to treat their disease. If opt-out states had expanded Medicaid, 659,000 women who are in need of mammograms and 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears would have become insured, the study found.
“Low-income adults in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion will forego gains in access to care, financial well-being, physical and mental health, and longevity that would be expected with expanded Medicaid coverage,” the authors wrote.
In terms of health coverage, expanding states will experience a 48.9 percent decrease in their uninsured population compared to a 18.1 percent decrease in non-expanding states. Eight million people will remain uninsured because their states didn’t expand Medicaid, […]
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