Tuesday, September 18th, 2018
Todd C. Frankel, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: First, it was guns, now there is a movement trying to change even the simplest most commonsensical regulations on knives. There is a segment of the American population which would like to see people go about their daily business armed with guns and knives. It is a dystopian worldview more suited to horror movies than real life, and it arises from stupidity and fear.
LAS VEGAS — He ordered the 20-ounce rib-eye, and so the waitress at the upscale restaurant dropped off a wood-handled serrated steak knife. Doug Ritter ignored it. Instead he pulled out a folding knife, its 3.4-inch blade illegal to carry concealed here in Clark County. He flicked it open with one hand. When the steak arrived, medium-rare, he started cutting.
The steak dinner came as Ritter was savoring his many successful attempts at repealing the nation’s knife laws. Decades-old restrictions on switchblades, daggers and stilettos have fallen away in state after state in recent years. Much of this is because of Ritter and his little-known Arizona-based advocacy group Knife Rights, which has used tactics borrowed from the National Rifle Association to rack up legislative victories across the nation. And many of the changes have escaped widespread notice, obscured, in part, by the nation’s focus on guns.
But knife fans know. The morning after his steak dinner, Ritter walked like a celebrity into a major knife convention here.
Thank you for everything you’re doing for us. Really,” an official with knife maker Ka-Bar told him.
“I live in Louisiana, so thank you,” said another convention-goer, hailing from a state […]
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Tuesday, September 18th, 2018
Stephan: Like millions of older men, I have taken an 81mg aspirin every day, have done so for years. Turns out it's not a good idea. Here is a report on the latest research. If you have also been doing this talk with your physician.
The
primary study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial — considered the gold standard for clinical trials. Researchers at Monash University in Australia recruited nearly 20,000 people in that country and the United States, with a median age of 74. All of the participants were considered healthy at time of enrollment, with none known to suffer from heart disease, dementia or persistent physical disability.
Half of the study participants received 100 milligrams of aspirin a day; the other half received a placebo. (A typical “low dose” aspirin contains 81 milligrams of the drug).
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Tuesday, September 18th, 2018
Stephan: With almost no public awareness -- although SR has been following this trend for a decade, see SR archive -- the control of over half the world's food seeds has passed to just three chemical companies. This development has profound social implications and, I think, should be illegal. Here's the story.
Ten thousand years after humans became less nomadic and learned how to cultivate crops, veteran investigative journalist Mark Schapiro plunges into the struggle already underway for control of seeds, the ground-zero ingredient for our food. Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. (emphasis added) In “Seeds of Resistance,” Schapiro takes us to the front lines of a struggle over the seeds that remain — a struggle that will determine the long-term security of our food supply in the face of unprecedented climate volatility.
A Seed Chronicle Foretold
A seed story, like life, starts small and gets bigger.
In the mid-1990s, a letter arrived at a simple adobe-style office on a dusty lot on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. The site, headquarters of Native Seeds/SEARCH, an organization which saves seeds native to the southwest, is little more than a couple of garden plots and a refrigerator and freezer filled with indigenous seeds. Here you can find seeds that have inherited characteristics dating back as far as three-thousand years.
The letter came from a lawyer for the food […]
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Monday, September 17th, 2018
Costas Christ, - National Geographic
Stephan: Not every country in the world is like the U.S., so corrupted by greed and stupidity that they can't see the central truth of the future: climate change is going to change everything and the time to prepare for what it will bring is now. All day today I have been watching what is happening in the Carolinas. I find it at once depressing and astonishing seeing what the Republicans and the Republican voters in the Carolinas have not done, and the misery that stupidity has brought them.
As an antidote to watching that misery one of my readers in Slovenia sent me this -- yes, SR has readers in Slovenia, quite a number of them actually. Slovenia shows us the future can be happy but it requires making wellbeing instead of greed and stupidity the major social priority.
The church of St. John the Baptist sits behind Bohinj Lake in Slovenia.
Credit: Ermedin Islamcevic
The numbers give rise to the reason: There were 25 million international tourists in 1950. Last year, more than one billion globetrotters set out to see the world’s cultural and natural wonders—from the Serengeti’s Great Migration to the ancient Inca cities of Peru. We now have more places to go and more ways to get there than ever before. With that comes an even greater responsibility to safeguard our fragile planet for future generations.As the United Nations heralds 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, one place rises above the rest: Slovenia. Last year this Adriatic enclave, nestled amid emerald fields, snowy peaks, and sparkling waters, was declared the world’s most sustainable country. Slovenia achieved an eye-opening 96 out of 100 detailed sustainability indicators (think environment and climate, culture and authenticity, nature and biodiversity, among others.) And its quaint capital Ljubljana was also anointed
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Monday, September 17th, 2018
Nicholas Kusnetz, - Inside Climate News
Stephan: I am from Tidewater Virginia, I grew up in Gloucester County, and have been following what is happening in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area because it is the largest naval harbor in the world and I have been using it as a benchmark to show what the federal government is doing, or not doing, about climate change in the largest metropolitan area in Virginia. Here are the facts under the present mafia administration and its congressional zombies and they are not happy. The reality is that for lack of foresight and planning about 30 percent of the area is going under the rising waters, displacing hundreds of thousands of families and destroying the area's economy.
The water was a foot and a half lower when the naval station was established at Norfolk. Today, parts of the base are close to sea level. Credit: U.S. Navy
NORFOLK, Virginia—The one-story brick firehouse at Naval Station Norfolk sits pinched between a tidal inlet and Willoughby Bay. The station houses the first responders to any emergency at the neighboring airfield. Yet when a big storm hits or the tides surge, the land surrounding it floods. Even on a sunny day this spring, with the tide out, the field beside the firehouse was filled with water.
“It’s not supposed to be a pond,” said Joe Bouchard, a retired captain and former base commander. “It is now.”
Naval Station Norfolk, home to the Atlantic Fleet, floods not just in heavy rains or during hurricanes. It floods when the sun is shining, too, if the tide is high or the winds are right. It floods all the time.
“It is an impediment to the base accomplishing its mission,” […]
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It’s one of the most well-known tenets of modern medicine: An aspirin a day keeps the doctor away. But according to a trio of studies published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, a daily low-dose aspirin regimen provides no significant health benefits for healthy older adults. Instead, it may cause them serious harm.
