Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Today’s Guest: Bruce Friedrich, Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at Farm Sanctuary Bruce Friedrich is senior director for strategic initiatives at Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization. Bruce has previously worked as a public school teacher …
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REPEAT PROGRAM
Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) The Power of Focus Laura Fox on using Light to heal relationships, (not sure of audio quality) Calls: trying to get into a new line of work; the power of focus for a group? Emails: Working with an ex Problems …
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Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) On today’s Green Front, conservative blogger, climate convert and content aggregator extraordinaire, D.R. Tucker joins me to discuss the latest schemes and tactics of denialists. From a faux controversy over light bulb choice to Michelle Bachman’s sanity, the inanity of it all …
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809111821.htm
ScienceDaily (Aug. 9, 2011) — Flax has been part of human history for well over 30,000 years, used for weaving cloth, feeding people and animals, and even making paint. Now, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that it might have a new use for the 21st century: protecting healthy tissues and organs from the harmful effects of radiation. In a study just published in BMC Cancer, researchers found that a diet of flaxseed given to mice not only protects lung tissues before exposure to radiation, but can also significantly reduce damage after exposure occurs.
“There are only a handful of potential mitigators of radiation effect, and none of them is nearly ready for the clinic,” says the principal investigator Melpo Christofidou-Solomidou, PhD, research associate professor of Medicine, Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Division. “Our current study demonstrates that dietary flaxseed, already known for its strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, works as both a mitigator and protector against radiation pneumonopathy.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110810085537.htm
ScienceDaily (Aug. 10, 2011) — Antibiotic use in conventional animal food production in the United States has created public health concern because it has been shown to contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can potentially spread to humans. A new study, led by Dr. Amy R. Sapkota of the University of Maryland School of Public Health, provides data demonstrating that poultry farms that have transitioned from conventional to organic practices and ceased using antibiotics have significantly lower levels of drug-resistant enterococci bacteria.
The study, recently published in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to demonstrate lower levels of drug-resistant bacteria on newly organic farms in the United States and suggests that removing antibiotic use from large-scale U.S. poultry farms can result in immediate and significant reductions in antibiotic resistance for some bacteria.
“We initially hypothesized that we would see some differences in on-farm levels of antibiotic-resistant enterococci when poultry farms transitioned to organic practices. But we were surprised to see that the differences were so significant across several different classes of antibiotics even in the very first flock that was produced after the transition to organic standards,” explains Sapkota, an Assistant Professor with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health. “It is very encouraging.”
CSIRO (Australia)
http://www.csiro.au/news/Forests-absorb-one-third-our-fossil-fuel-emissions.html
The world’s established forests remove 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere – equivalent to one third of current annual fossil fuel emissions – according to new research published today in the journal Science.
15 July 2011
This is the first time volumes of the greenhouse gas absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests have been so clearly identified.
“This is really a timely breakthrough with which we can now clearly demonstrate how forests and changes in landscape such as wildfire or forest regrowth impact the removal or release of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2),” says CSIRO co-author of the paper: A Large and Persistent Carbon Sink in the World’s Forests, Dr Pep Canadell.
“What this research tells us is that forests play a much larger role as carbon sinks as a result of tree growth and forest expansion.”
By Robert Scheer
Created Aug 10 2011 – 7:36am
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/37812/another-bailout-joins-the-goofball-economy
The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.
The 10-member committee’s three dissenters in Tuesday’s decision, all unelected Fed regional board presidents, are free-market ideologues who don’t believe the government has a role to play in reversing the nation’s economic disaster. One is a former Wall Street investment banker and vice chairman of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. The other two are University of Chicago school of economics disciples long committed to free-market purism and blind faith in the mathematical models that had much to do with radical deregulation and the subsequent collapse of the financial markets.
That view led Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, before he assumed his Fed position, to sign a petition that the libertarian Cato Institute placed in various newspapers opposing President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan.
By Mike Whitney
Created Aug 8 2011 – 10:38am
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/37782/swan-song-for-the-euro
We all know the drill. Bond yields start to spike in one of the smaller countries in the EU, and before you know it, the bigger countries are called in to bail them out. We’ve seen the same thing over and over again.
This time, Italy and Spain are in the crosshairs. Jittery investors have fled their bond markets for the safety of German Bund, US Treasuries and precious metals. The selloff has sent Italian bond yields into the stratosphere making it more expensive for the government to fund its operations. So, the debts and deficits get bigger and the downward spiral begins. Same old, same old. That’s why the ECB called an emergency meeting of the EU’s Governing Council on Sunday to slap together another 11th hour bailout before the markets opened on Monday. If they had ignored the problem, it would have been Lehman Brothers all over again; plunging stock markets, panicky bank runs, and a full-blown global financial crisis. Here’s a summary from Bloomberg:
On Turning Poverty into an American Crime
By Barbara Ehrenreich
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then — down at the bottom — “Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought…” or “I hadn’t realized…”
Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) On today’s show, we had Nicola in the studio to talk about the Free Art Scociety! Also, Derek from Detroit spoke with us on the organization FIST, a youth based activism group fighting imperialism and standing together. We also …
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Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by Penny Red
http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html
by Laurie Penny
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
Published on Monday, August 8, 2011 by Inter Press Service
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/08-7
by Dean Baker
WASHINGTON – The European Central Bank (ECB) is run by people who are not very good at economics. They continue to adhere to a fundamentally wrongheaded view of the economy and the central bank’s role within it.
Anti-austerity protesters faced down Greek police in Athens this summer. Similar confrontations happened across Europe as workers and student resisted draconian cuts to social services to please bond holders and the central bank. While the governments may be willing to inflict upon their population whatever pain the ECB requests, the popular movements are making this an increasingly difficult process. The governments of these countries are being forced to recognise that they must consider public opinion and not just accept the dictates of the ECB. Unfortunately, there is no internal pressure for change because, like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, acceptance of the ideology is the price for admission into the clique of economists who can influence the ECB.
The central tenet of ECB dogma is that the central bank should target a low inflation rate – two percent – and pretty much ignore everything else in the economy.
Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_crisis_of_humanitarian_intervention
by Walden Bello
Events in Libya and Syria have again brought to the forefront the question of armed humanitarian intervention or the “responsibility to protect.”
Our hearts all go out to the unarmed demonstrators seeking to bring down corrupt dictatorships that are a plague on their people. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people rose and deposed dictators on their own. Armed supporters of the Mubarak regime did attack and even fire on people in Tahrir Square, but a massive crackdown was avoided when the military decided not to take the side of the dictator.
Things have not been so simple since then. Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi came down hard on civilian protesters, providing the opportunity for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to intervene militarily by waging an air war and arming the rebels. Today, the Assad dictatorship’s massive repression in cities and towns in Syria that have risen in revolt has also sparked agitation for intervention in the West.
Is it ever legitimate to supersede the principle of national sovereignty with a military intervention aimed at protecting citizens from their government? And if the answer is yes, what circumstances would justify this course of action and how should it be carried out?
Bank Makes Huge Profits On Food Stamps
The Daily Bail
http://dailybail.com/home/jp-morgans-food-stamp-monopoly-the-more-americans-that-fall.html
JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly.
In the video posted above, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is “a very important business to JP Morgan” and that it is doing very well. Considering the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has exploded from 26 million in 2007 to 43 million today, one can only imagine how much JP Morgan’s profits in this area have soared. But doesn’t this give JP Morgan an incentive to keep the number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program as high as possible?
There are just some things that are a little too “creepy” to be “outsourced” to private corporations. The JP Morgan executive in the interview below does his best to put a positive spin on all this, but it just seems really unsavory for a big Wall Street bank to be making so much money off of the suffering of tens of millions of Americans….