If you find yourself at the General Services Administration do not, I repeat, do not drink the water and never ever drink the water from a toilet!
There is something in the water over there that explodes!
Cows are terribly destructive creatures, especially in arid climates. Livestock are considered by a quorum of scientists as the No. 1 cause of species extinction, topsoil loss, deforestation and desertification in the American West. They muck or stomp or gorge out of existence streams, whole watersheds, rare grasses and shrubs, entire ecosystems in micro. Their big heavy hooves trample the soil, eroding it often beyond repair. Just as the cow is an invasive species, an exotic in the West—an import of Spanish missionaries in the 16th century—it brings invasive weeds that triumph in its midst: the water-greedy tamarisk, for example, along with the greedier Russian olive and the useless Russian thistle, better known as tumbleweed. A 1998 study from the Journal of Arid Environments found that a hundred years of livestock grazing on public lands near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was more damaging in terms of long-term development and recovery of flora than multiple nuclear bomb blasts.
...
I suggest yak as our new dinner flesh. My friend Rob Williams, a newspaper publisher and professor of journalism in Vermont, helps runs a yak ranch outside the Vermont village of Waitsfield, in the Green Mountains. I went to visit him not long ago, to walk the pastures where he keeps the 45 yaks that he and his two business partners tend for the production of yak ribs, sirloin, rounds, flank, ground and sausage. “I like to think that yaks are the greenest red meat on the planet,” Rob tells me.
Gov. Rick Scotts (R-FL) 'money saving' multi-million dollar scheme to expose drug abuse among Florida welfare families hasn't worked out. Test results of a program passed by Florida Republicans to drug test welfare recipients has shown only a 2.5% rate of illegal drug use among them, which is below the nearly 9% rate among all Americans. If they test negative, which almost all did, and if they fill out the government pee paperwork, they can get reimbursed from Florida taxpayers for the $10 to $25 dollar test from contracted (GOP/Rick Scott supporting?) private medical labs. Now, a Miami Herald columnist, Carl Hiiassen, has offered to pay for drug testing of all 160 Florida legislators, and presumably, Rick Scott himself. Carl Hiiassen believes the rate of drug abuse in the State House may be higher than with the jobless, as they 'whiz' away tax dollars on programs like this one.
By Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, September 27/28, 2011
....from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.
They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box. “Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”
Economics have been one driving force, with growing income inequality, high unemployment and recession-driven cuts in social spending breeding widespread malaise. Alienation runs especially deep in Europe, with boycotts and strikes that, in London and Athens, erupted into violence.
But even in India and Israel, where growth remains robust, protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change.....
By Lee Ferran, ABC News, September 27, 2011
The terror group al Qaeda has found itself curiously in agreement with the "Great Satan" -- which it calls the U.S. -- in issuing a stern message to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: stop spreading 9/11 conspiracy theories.
In the latest issue of the al Qaeda English-language magazine "Inspire", an author appears to take offense to the "ridiculous" theory repeatedly spread by Ahmadinejad that the 9/11 terror attacks were actually carried out by the U.S. government in order to provide a pretext to invade the Middle East.....
By Maggie Fox, The National Journal, September 27, 2011
Hospitals are about to get punished for so-called readmissions – when patients end up right back in the hospital after being discharged. Yet they’ve done very little to improve, researchers reported on Wednesday.
Hospital readmissions are considered an important measure of quality care. Health experts say it’s important to hold hospitals accountable for how well patients fare after they are discharged. The 2010 health care law hopes to force hospitals to take better care of patients and make sure someone keeps an eye on them after they are treated for a serious illness or have surgery.
Dr. David Goodman of the Dartmouth Atlas Project says his most recent data shows little or no improvement.....His team followed six groups of Medicare patients with a broken hip, pneumonia and other common conditions to see how they fared after a hospital stay.....
By Nancy Scola, The Atlantic, September 27, 2011
What does Facebook want from Washington?
A season of political moves should remind us of the corporate interests of the new Internet utilities....
By James Meek, London Review of Books, September 22, 2011
[...] Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He fixed me with an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the NHS,” they’d be kicked out the next day.’ [....}
‘The case we’re doing this morning, we’re going to make a loss of about £5000. The private sector wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘How do we deal with that? Some procedures the ebitda is about 8 per cent. If you make an ebitda of 12 per cent you’re making a real profit.’ You expect medical jargon from surgeons, but I was surprised to hear the word ‘ebitda’ from Porter. It’s an accountancy term meaning ‘earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation’.
‘Last year we did about 1400 hip replacements,’ he said. ‘The worrying thing for us is we lost a million pounds doing that. What we worked out is that our length of stay’ – the time patients spend in hospital after an operation – ‘was six days. If we can get it down to five days we break even and if it’s four, we make a million pound profit.’
I felt as if I’d somehow jumped forwards in time. Lansley has not yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. He’d barely been in power a year when I talked to Porter. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about profit and loss, as if he’d been living in Lansleyworld for years. Had the NHS been privatised one day while I was sleeping? [....]
[Democracy Now video podcast] Today, postal workers and their supporters are holding events across the country to press their demand for repealing the benefit-funding mandate and push back against calls for their workplace to be privatized. For months, Americans have heard dire warnings about the impending collapse of the United States Postal Service due to fiscal insolvency and a drop in the use of mail service. In early September, the U.S. Postmaster General told Congress that the USPS is close to default and unveiled a series of radical proposals to cut costs by firing up to 120,000 workers, closing several thousand facilities, scaling back deliveries, and reducing benefits for retirees. But many postal workers say the much-touted crisis facing the U.S. Postal Service is not what it seems. They argue the greatest volume of mail handled in the 236-year history of the postal service was 2006. They also point to a 2006 law that forced the USPS to become the only agency required to fund 75 years of retiree health benefits over just a 10-year span, and say the law’s requirements account for 100 percent of the service’s $20 billion in losses over the previous four years, without which the service would have turned a profit. Last week, Republicans introduced legislation to overhaul the USPS in response to a bill proposed by Democrats that would refund a reported $6.9 billion in over-payments to the USPS retirement plan, offer early retirement and voluntary separation incentives, adjust retiree benefits prepayment requirements, and preserve employee protections set out in collective bargaining agreements. We host a debate between Chuck Zlatkin, the legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union, and Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce in Washington, D.C. [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]
Frank Rich, September 25 New York magazine. One excerpt, reporting data on what independents believe and why it might not be a good idea to have a strategy of winning them over through appeals to bipartisanship and centrism:
This delusional faith in comity reached its apotheosis in the debt-ceiling showdown. With the reliable exception of Paul Krugman, who shuns Washington and calls centrism “the cult that is destroying America,” almost every Establishment observer in our own time bought into the magical thinking that the radical Republicans would never go so far as to risk a default of the American government. Only when the tea-party cabal in the House took Washington hostage did it fully dawn on the Beltway gentry that the country was in danger. But even now, Obama keeps being urged to make nice with the rebels so that he can woo independents, who, we’re constantly told, value bipartisanship every bit as much as the pundits do. The “all-important independent voters,” as the “Lexington” columnist at The Economist recycled the conventional wisdom earlier this month, “are said to be looking for a president who defuses partisan tensions, rather than inflaming them.” Said by whom? Mainly other Washington bloviators.
Obama, after all, is exactly that president. For the good deed of trying to defuse partisan tensions, he has been punished with massive desertions by the very independents who are supposed to love his pacifism. In the last Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll, his support among them had fallen by half since he took office, from 52 percent to 26 percent. Perhaps that’s because these independents, who represent roughly 36 percent of voters, are not the monochromatic ideological eunuchs they’re purported to be. One polling organization that regularly examines them in depth, Pew, has found that nearly half of independents are in fact either faithful Democrats (21 percent) or Republicans (26 percent) who simply don’t want to call themselves Democrats and Republicans. (Can you blame them?) Another 20 percent are “doubting Democrats” and another 16 percent are “disaffected” voters, respectively anti-business and anti-government, angry and populist rather than mildly centrist. The remaining 17 percent are what Pew calls “disengaged”—young and uneducated Americans, four fifths of whom don’t vote anyway. There’s nothing about the makeup of any segment of these “all-important independent voters” that suggests bipartisan civility has anything whatsoever to do with winning their support.
To pursue this motley crew of the electorate as if it had a coherent political profile is nuts. Its various subsets are on so many different sides of so many questions no ideological hermaphrodite could please them all. Rather than win these voters over with bipartisan outreach, Obama may instead have driven them away. His steep decline among independents is paralleled by the decline in voters who credit him as a “strong leader.”
In the same publication, same date of publication, see also this very short piece by Russ Feingold, "The Middle Road to Nowhere": http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/russ-feingold-2011-10/
3 guesses who it is. And of course his lemming Republican colleagues apparently stand helpless to prevent this idiocy from determining the outcome. Senator Paul, you're not Howard Roark. Roark was a fictional architect. You're a sitting U.S. Senator who, one hopes, feels some real sense of responsibility for the safety of the people you represent.
Speaking to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) this morning, independent stock trader Alessio Rastani predicted that a European market crash is imminent and many investors know it.
“This problem cannot be solved,” he said. “I’m fairly confident that the Euro is going to crash, and it’s going to fall pretty hard.”
Rastani added: “Personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession, which is, I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession. I dream of another moment like this. Why? Because people don’t seem to really remember. The depression in the 30′s wasn’t just about a market crash. There were some people who were prepared to make money from that crash. I think anybody can do that.”
“What I would say to everybody is, get prepared. It’s not the time right now to, wishfully thinking the government’s going to sort things out. The governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world. Goldman Sachs does not care about this rescue package, neither does the big funds.”
“In less than 12 months, my prediction is, the savings of millions of people is going to vanish. And this is just the beginning.”
By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, September 25/26, 2011
WASHINGTON — Labor unions are seizing on last year’s landmark Supreme Court campaign finance ruling to change how they engage in politics, developing ambitious plans to influence nonunion households in the 2012 election and counter corporate money flowing into outside conservative groups.....
....the ruling also changed the rules for unions, effectively ending a prohibition on outreach to nonunion households. Now, unions can use their formidable numbers to reach out to sympathetic nonunion voters by knocking on doors, calling them at home and trying to get them to polling places. They can also create their own Super PACs to underwrite bigger voter identification and get-out-the-vote operations than ever before.
As part of this overhaul, Richard L. Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., has said organized labor will be more independent of the Democratic Party, sitting out races where unions are disappointed with the Democratic candidate’s positions on issues important to them and occasionally financing primary challengers to Democratic incumbents.
The unions said they even intended to back a few Republicans they judge to have been generally supportive of their agenda, like....
By Michael Cooper, New York Times, September 26/27, 2011
....The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Several Southern states — including South Carolina, whose 11.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation — have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states that were struggling even before the recession.
For decades, the nation’s economic landscape consisted of a prospering Sun Belt and a struggling Rust Belt. Since the recession hit, though, that is no longer the case.....
Mother Jones: What do you say to kids who say they want to be like Omar?
Michael Kenneth Williams: I say, "No, you don't. No you don't." Nobody wants to be like Omar. Take his good qualities. Take his heart, take his kindness, take the self-respect that he has for himself as far as what he would not do. Take those qualities and adapt them into your life. But make no mistake, Omar was definitely a man in a lot of pain, a lot of emotional pain. He was a man that woke up one morning and was like "Oh, shit." Omar is a person that all hope was snatched from. All hope for anything better in life was snatched completely out of him, and that was what was left.
But make no error, there was the potential that this man had—he could've been president of the United States. We could've been saying President Little with no problem had he had the opportunity and the exposure.
MJ: Speaking of presidents, President Obama, back when he was a candidate, said you were his favorite character on his favorite show.
MKW: When he said that it gave me an insight into him as a human being. What it said to me, and not because I was on the show or anything like that, was that this is a man who really has his finger on the pulse of what's really wrong in this country. Because a lot of people won't allow The Wire in their homes because they don't want to look at that. They don't want to deal with those people, they don't want to give those people a voice that the show spoke for; they'd rather act like that don't exist. So when you have the future president of the United States not only acknowledging a show like The Wire but a character like mine, it let me know that he has his finger on the pulse of what's wrong in this country.
[Frances Moore Lappé] For years I’ve been asked, “Since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, have things gotten better or worse?” Hoping I don’t sound glib, my response is always the same: “Both.”
As food growers, sellers and eaters, we’re moving in two directions at once.
The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests. And for even more people, sustenance has become a health hazard—with the US diet implicated in four out of our top ten deadly diseases. Power over soil, seeds and food sales is ever more tightly held, and farmland in the global South is being snatched away from indigenous people by speculators set to profit on climbing food prices. Just four companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade; and in the United States, by 2000, just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years.
There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.” In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and worldwide it has been gaining energy and breadth for at least four decades.
Some Americans see the food movement as “nice” but peripheral—a middle-class preoccupation with farmers’ markets, community gardens and healthy school lunches. But no, I’ll argue here. It is at heart revolutionary, with some of the world’s poorest people in the lead, from Florida farmworkers to Indian villagers. It has the potential to transform not just the way we eat but the way we understand our world, including ourselves. And that vast power is just beginning to erupt.
[There are also links to articles in response by Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan]
The headline is misleading. Maybe there was too much dazzle but what went wrong is still a puzzlement. Still too many unanswered questions like who drove the price of silicon so far up and then so far down? speculators? company insiders? And did DOE secure any rights to the technology in exchange for the loan guarantee? If so, will it open source them? If it truly is the better mousetrap as claimed, I really hope we, through DOE, own a piece of it.
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington— It was the better mousetrap.
From Silicon Valley to the White House, Solyndra's unique solar panels left everyone gasping for a piece of the action.
Analysts gushed over the cylindrical design, so much more exciting than the dull, flat panels coming out of China. Company executives promised huge revenue, supporting thousands of permanent jobs, while a stream of state and federal politicians toured the Fremont plant, basking in what felt like the glow of the future.
Investors, convinced that Solyndra was the big one, the harbinger of a solar boom, poured more than $1 billion into the company, with the U.S. government guaranteeing 50% more in loans.
Then suddenly, the bottom dropped out last month. In a matter of days, Solyndra ceased operations, plunged into bankruptcy, was raided by the FBI and found itself thrust into a national political firestorm.
Nearly all the attention in the Solyndra case has revolved around the Obama administration's $528-million bad bet, with partisan congressional finger-pointing growing increasingly nasty. But in many ways, Solyndra's tale is one of irrational exuberance, a collective belief unswayed by blown sales projections, yanked IPOs, shuttered factories and fired executives.
This is insane. Initially, the scientists were charged with failure to predict a recent Italian earthquake. After realizing how insane that was, the prosecutors changed the charge to failure to warn that an earthquake was possible.
Egads! There are times when I wished American politicians had more faith in our scientists, but this is taking it to a whole new level!
It's starting to look like the question isn't how much trouble Scott Walker is in, but just how many criminals he will take along with him. And perhaps the most ironic part? The owner of a decrepit, broken-down old freight railroad sits at the bottom of this apparent pay-to-play scandal. So after terminating the $850 million dollar high-speed rail project, it looks like Walker is going to be quite figuratively rode out of town on a busted rail. I wonder what he looks like in an orange jumpsuit? Hope we get a chance to find out.
Practical applications may be years or decades away, but this is one impressive experiment.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Circulated at MoveOn, among many other places. I was able to cut out, so as to be able to paste here, the words from this National Review Online article, whose author critiques her comment.
Q: You say the crux of the problem with wheat is that the stuff we eat today has been genetically altered. How is it different than the wheat our grandparents ate?
A: First of all, it looks different. If you held up a conventional wheat plant from 50 years ago against a modern, high-yield dwarf wheat plant, you would see that today’s plant is about 2½ feet shorter. ...
Q: Can’t you just get around any potential health concerns by buying products made with organically grown wheat?
A: No, because the actual wheat plant itself is the same. It’s almost as if we’ve put lipstick on this thing and called it organic and therefore good, when the truth is, it’s really hardly any better at all.
Q: A lot of us have switched to whole wheat products because we’ve been told complex carbohydrates are heart healthy and good for us. Are you saying that’s not true?
A: ... An analogy would be to say that filtered cigarettes are less bad for you than unfiltered cigarettes, and therefore, a whole bunch of filtered cigarettes is good for you. It makes no sense. But that is the rationale for increasing our consumption of whole grains, and that combined with the changes in wheat itself is a recipe for creating a lot of fat and unhealthy people.
Q: How does wheat make us fat, exactly?
A: It contains amylopectin A, which is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than just about any other carbohydrate, including table sugar. In fact, two slices of whole wheat bread increase blood sugar to a higher level than a candy bar does. And then, after about two hours, your blood sugar plunges and you get shaky, your brain feels foggy, you’re hungry. So let’s say you have an English muffin for breakfast. Two hours later you’re starving, so you have a handful of crackers, and then some potato chips, and your blood sugar rises again. That cycle of highs and lows just keeps going throughout the day, so you’re constantly feeling hungry and constantly eating. Dieticians have responded to this by advising that we graze throughout the day, which is just nonsense. If you eliminate wheat from your diet, you’re no longer hungry between meals because you’ve stopped that cycle. You’ve cut out the appetite stimulant, and consequently you lose weight very quickly. I’ve seen this with thousands of patients.
[Brings to mind Djokovic's gluten-free diet.]
