Saturday, February 14th, 2015
Stephan: This story will give you a better sense of proportion about what is going on in the U.S. with the police than anything I have read so far. The headline alone tells the story. What is wrong with us that we put up with this?
Pasco, Washington Police
With just 59,000 residents, the Pasco police department in Washington state have shot and killed four people in the past six months—more than police in the entire United Kingdom, which has over 80,000,000 citizens, in the past three years combined. In fact, Pasco police are on pace to have more police shootings than Germany, also with 80,000,000 citizens, over the current 12 month period. (emphasis added)
On Tuesday, February 10, three Pasco police officers shot and killed an unarmed man who had been throwing rocks. It’s hard to imagine, if the American public was told the below video (see video on site) was from Iraq or Syria or Cuba, that our entire nation wouldn’t be disgusted at the abuse of power and unethical use of force to senselessly kill a man.
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Saturday, February 14th, 2015
Stephan: A reader in South Carolina sent me this. At first I thought it was a joke but, no, it is an accurate report. Two things stood out for me. First, there is only one woman in the entire South Carolina Senate. Second, Senator Corbin, was elected by the men and women of District Five — made up of Greenville and Spartanburg Counties. When this is the kind of person the citizens of South Carolina elect how can one be surprised at the state of the state of South Carolina?
The problem in the U.S. is not the government, that is like blaming a fever. The illness is that a large percentage of the population votes for an anti-life agenda, finding something else of greater value than wellness, from the individual to the planetary, and elects the people happy to oblige.
Republican South Carolina State Senator Thomas Corbin
A discussion over a pending criminal domestic violence (CDV) bill took a bizarre turn this week when S.C. Senator Thomas Corbin – a “Republican” from Travelers Rest, S.C. – offered some bizarrely sexist commentary on the role of women in the political process.
Corbin’s comments – made at a legislative dinner held in downtown Columbia, S.C. – were reportedly directed at S.C. Senator Katrina Shealy, the only female member of the 46-person State Senate.
South Carolina State Senator Katrina Shealy, the only female senator in the state.
According to multiple witnesses who attended the dinner – held at Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse on Main Street (a few blocks from the S.C. State House) -Senate judiciary committee members were discussing the CDV issue, which has been […]
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Friday, February 13th, 2015
Darryl Fears, - The Washington Post
Stephan: When I left University I went to work for National Geographic Magazine and the first story I was assigned was the great migration of the Monarch butterflies. I knew nothing about it at the time and as I educated myself I came to realize the extraordinary annual pilgrimage of these seemingly fragile little beings was one of the great nature events of North America. For countless millennia the butterflies have flown, yet now this ancient pattern is breaking down, thanks to human activity. This report gives a pretty good sense of the state of things.
The migration of the Monarch butterflies is one of the great nature events, and it is now breaking down thanks to human activity.
Credit: Live Science
Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises and lions grab all the headlines, but what’s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, about 970 million have vanished.
It happened as farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies’ nursery, food source and home. In an attempt to counter two decades of destruction, the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a partnership with two private conservation groups, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, to basically grow milkweed like crazy in the hopes of saving the monarchs.
Monarch butterflies are a keystone species that once fluttered throughout the United […]
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Friday, February 13th, 2015
Jean Yamamura, - Santa Barbara Independent
Stephan: Neonicotinoids have passed off the stage of media attention, but they have not gone away. This is both bad and good news. Bad for Santa Barbara, California, and other cities where industrial agriculture is practiced in the surround area. Good news in that those same cities are finally being forced to address this issue. Perhaps finally the death -- in all sense of that word -- grip of the chemical companies is loosening, at least at the local level.
In Santa Barbara, California they have discovered that neonicotinoids have polluted the city’s surface water creeks and streams, and are part of the reason their bee population is in severe decline.
Credit: Santa Barbara Independent
A grave concern is growing over the use of neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide known to affect the central nervous system of invertebrates, most alarmingly of bees. In its first tests for the poison, the city’s Creeks Division found a “neonic” known as imidacloprid after the rains of February 2014, according to city creek reports. In fact, the monitors found the pesticide so consistently across their four creek sites (Arroyo Burro, Mission, Laguna, and Sycamore) that they suspected laboratory problems. Until this year. In 2015, post-storm tests again found imidacloprid in the city’s four major streams and also in spot checks of urban sidewalks and streets.
Neonics form the lethal ingredient in more than 400 U.S. products, […]
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Friday, February 13th, 2015
Peter Dykstra, - truthout
Stephan: Back in the early 1970s when nuclear power was seriously being questioned for the first time I did a great deal of research on this issue. I was in government at the time, and could get access to all kinds of information, and what I learned appalled and alarmed me about the safety of people who lived near nuclear power plants. I have been a passionate opponent of civilian nuclear power ever since and, since then, have seen much to confirm my original conclusions and nothing much to revise them. About 6-8 months after Chernobyl happened I had an opportunity to see Chernobyl close up, and images of that disaster I think will haunt me all my life. Here is the latest on this dreadful technology, and much of it seems to be good news.
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant-near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Credit: www.flickr.com
Everybody loves a comeback story. If you like the U.S. nuclear power industry, it’s a Michael Jordan-type gallant return. If you don’t like nukes, it’s more of a Gloria Swanson gruesome comeback in Sunset Boulevard.
Similar to both Jordan and Swanson’s character, Norma Desmond, the industry has tried more than one revival. The current one may be more about salvaging economically dicey nuclear reactors than building new ones.
Promise and peril
There is some promise for nuclear: projects in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee may yield the first new nuclear plants in decades. The industry and its advocates are touting new, safer reactor designs.
In addition, thanks to a Federal Appeals Court decision, utilities no longer have to add to the $30 billion burden of paying for the abandoned Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. And the Environmental Protection Agency is pressing hard for its rules to reduce carbon emissions, which would squeeze competing coal-fired […]
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