The gnashing of teeth and the wailing of women...

How DARE Obama get the prisoners out of Iran using diplomacy!11!!1  We need a WAR to prove how manly we are!1!!1

The oceans are warming at a faster rate than we calculated. They are also filling up with plastic.

Nuclear gypsies:  those who are attempting to clean up Fukushima.

George Washington was right.

Actually, there hasn't been a mass shooting every day in 2015.

Now they are not allowed to tell us where our meat has been raised or processed.  That makes me feel so safe.

The Onion actually has a good take on the idiots in Oregon.

Quantum knots.

Monsanto Files Lawsuit to Stop California From Listing Glyphosate as Known Carcinogen

Moon dust and cereal...

Moon dust and its dangers.

Negotiating with terrorists.

An Iraq War Veteran says what he thinks about war and warmongers.

Why ignorance is being embraced as a virtue in the GOP.

Life in the most religious states.

Tom Tomorrow gets it right.

Plastics, even non-BPA, can affect your hormones.  And pesticides may give your child autism.

10 invasive species

Women listening to men in Western Art History.  And speaking in a sexist language.

Cereal killers...

From Cats to Jellyfish to Chickens

Friday cat blogging on Sunday.

A wonderful perspective on religion and God from a religious man.

Sexy avatars in games affect players in the real world.

I may not want to eat anything ever again.... besides... we're all gonna die anyway.

Invasion by jellyfish the world over... could it possibly be because the oceans are warming?  If not death by jellyfish, how about being choked to death by weeds?

Can you spell hypocrite?

A sensible horror film.

Elizabeth Smart is just that.  Googling women and a verb.

Republicans went crazy in stages.  Tea party logic.  Lies told in Texan charter schools.

Changing oceans.

How historically correct is 12 Years a Slave?

One way to deal with the homeless.

Infected chickens sold by Foster Farms were not recalled.

Pot luck

Delicious forgotten words... we need to start using them now!

The mystery of Skeleton Lake in India.

The graph that shows what the US owes to everybody.

SEE!!  I told you raccoons were clever!

Eating at home v eating out.

Thank god my family and I live in California.

Anna Holmes and Jezebel.

Nate Silver's predictions for the Republicans.  Waving the Confederate flag at the most inappropriate time.

How Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild) probably died.

Could Boehner be playing to win?

Malala asks Obama to end drone strikes.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson critiques the film Gravity.  And we've been SuperNova'ed!

Finally!  Another planet we could call home, just in time, too!  We've really wrecked up this one!

Oh boy...

Chinese Chicken Processors Are Cleared to Ship to U.S.

Update: 9/10: Half of China's Antibiotics Now Go to Livestock

Newsflash, from a recent Public Radio International report: China's teeming factory meat farms have a drug problem. To make animals grow quickly under cramped, feces-ridden conditions, animals there get fed small, doses of antibiotics—creating ideal breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens that threaten people. 

A research team led by scientists from China and Michigan State University recently found "diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes in Chinese swine farms," as the title of the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, put it. According to a recent analysis by a Beijing-based agribusiness consulting firm, more than half of total Chinese antibiotic consumption goes to livestock.

The article points out that China is just following the US business model....

Additives, maps and books

Additives in our food.

Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp to Break up Planned Protest  TransCanada and Department of Homeland Security keep close eye on activists, FOIA documents reveal and what fracking is doing to Texas.

Being tolerant in gaming is hard.

The Onion is real news, right?

How to prevent rape.

Maps that can change your perception of the world.

Crimes against humanity.

And, sorry Australia, for shooting one of your baseball athletes.  We have these gun laws you see....

Finally... recommended books published after 2000.

From fossils to ... fossils.

Oldest primate skeleton unveiled

Americans speak differently across the nation.

Heracleion Photos: Lost Egyptian City Revealed After 1,200 Years Under Sea

Perspective from a dwarf on the character Tyrion in the TV show Game of Thrones

Chinese company cleaning up US pork?

The sugar beet is entirely GMO at this point.

Rebranding the Republican name is superficial fakery and people can tell.

Monday minibits..

Rep. Darrell Issa's big day... oops.  And Issa's interesting background that people seem to ignore.

Eat more bugs and save the world!  Basically because we are cooking the earth and things are going to die.  C02 in the air.

Europe banned these food production practices... and the US does them.

Normality v Normalcy.  Normality, please.  Normalcy just grates on the ears...

Thor's Day

Louis C. K. on racism.

Why walking through doorways makes you forget.

Stolen lives.

Ag-Gag Laws Help Agribusiness Hide Health Risks in Your Food

Monkey massage.

How many dead since the Newtown massacre?  This many and counting.

Monsanto owns the Supreme Court?

Medieval kitty prints.

7,000 year old cemetery found.. in a pond...

Amazing and stupid facts for you to peruse

Amazing facts about the human body.

Explaining what happened (and didn't happen) to the Senate filibuster.

Word for the day:  Defenestration.

Asking Dick Cheney about gun control is moronic... and gun owners heckle a father of one of the dead of Sandy Hook school.   Everyone should have a gun... especially these people.  And GPS makes kids end up getting shot in a man's driveway.  Booman addresses the gun violence problem.

And speaking of moronic, an Alabama GOP Congressman Proposes Amendment That Would Effectively Kill The United States Government and Arkansas introduces a “heartbeat bill” that would jail doctors for performing abortions after 6 weeks and (Fox News link, sorry) Mississippi bill would nullify federal laws

Homemade 'death ray'.

Corporations are so slow in taking toxic chemicals out of our food....

How safe is the chicken you eat?

Answer:  Not very.  And getting worse.

Stone soup

Kittens, Mitt!  Not puppies!  Kittens!

Goat man sighted in Utah.

Because without religion... I mean..Christianity..., you can't possibly have morals?

Batman Shooting: Mike Huckabee Blames Shooting on Lack of Religion in Schools

You are what you eat.  Even flavored with Methyl Iodide Pesticide.

Scottish hunt for anthrax killing heroin users.

America and guns: when will they learn? My guess, never?

It's industrial strength sugar

We could be driving our cars with it... A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

Nothing could possibly go wrong, they said....

Genetically modified grass blamed for mass cattle deaths in Texas

Preliminary tests revealed that the grass, an altered form of Bermuda grass known as Tifton 85, had mysteriously begun producing cyanide gas. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are conducting further tests to determine if some sort of mutation caused the grass to suddenly begin giving off the deadly gas.

 [snip]

Abel told CBS that he’d been using the modified grass for about fifteen years with no problems, until now. And he’s not the only one with a suddenly toxic pasture. Other farmers in the area who use the same modified grass have also found cyanide on their properties, though as yet no other cattle have died. Genetically modified crops have long been used to feed both humans and farm-raised animals. In recent years, however, activists concerned about potentially detrimental health impacts from GMOs have begun pushing for increased regulation and labeling of food products that contain modified crops. In California, voters will decide in November on a ballot measure that would require companies to label all foods containing GMOs. Such a law would be the first of its kind in the nation.

Only a few monolithic companies control our food

Does it make you wonder at all the health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, food allergies that are found in abundance in the United States and not as much elsewhere? Take a look at the diagram and ask yourself if these companies have your health in mind or only your money. And then notice that food stamps tie into to this as well...

Update 6/18: From the Guardian article about obesity:

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race. Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money. By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place.

Update 6/20:

The US long-term strategy was to dominate the global market in grain and agriculture commodities, as outlined in the early 1970s by Richard Nixon. This policy coincided with taking the dollar off the gold exchange standard in August 1971 to make US grain exports competitive in the rest of the world. However, in order for the US to become the world's most competitive agribusiness producer, it had to replace traditional American family-based farming with the now-widespread huge "factory-farm" production. In other words, traditional agriculture was systematically replaced with agribusiness production through changes in domestic policy. For example, domestic farm programs that had previously protected smaller farm incomes were phased out during Nixon's term in office. This policy was then exported to developing countries in a bid to make US agribusiness more competitive and to get a hold into foreign markets: The Nixon Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared war to create a vast new global market in "efficient" American food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance this new global agribusiness export agenda.[2] In Henry Kissinger's 1974 report "National Security Study Memorandum 200" (NSSM 200), he directly targeted overseas food aid as an "instrument of national power."[3] The policy shifts during the 1970s were toward increased deregulation, which meant increased private regulation by the large and powerful global corporations. This led to an increase in corporate mergers and the rise of transnational corporations (which today often have larger gross domestic products than many nation states).[4] As large corporate agribusinesses were creating their food production, storage and distribution monopoly, smaller domestic farms were going bankrupt and closing. (Although this trend was predominantly occurring within the US, it later spread to other developed nations, which were forced to "modernize" their agricultural industry to compete with global trade.) For example, between 1979 and 1998, the number of US farmers dropped by 300,000 and by the end of the 1990s, the agriculture (in the US at least) was dominated by large commercial agribusiness interests. The US also operated a foreign policy of offering financial assistance "to developing countries via the World Bank in return for these countries to open their markets up to cheap US food imports and hybridized seeds."[5] By the beginning of the 21st century, world supplies of cereal were under the control of a few US-based monopolies. Four large agrochemical/seed companies - Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont - controlled more than 75 percent of the US's seed corn sales and 60 percent of soybean seed sales. By the merging of giant agrochemical and seed companies, livestock could be fed on a huge diet of drugs in order to stimulate increased growth. It has been estimated that in recent years the largest users of antibiotics and similar pharmaceutical products are not humans, but animals, which consumed 70 percent of all pharmaceutical antibiotics. Statistics show, quite shockingly, that the use of antibiotics by US agribusiness increased from 500,000 pounds to 40 million pounds (an 80-fold increase by weight) from 1954 to 2005. As a consequence, the Center for Disease Control in the US has reported an "epidemic" rise in food-related diseases in humans as a result of eating meat containing large quantities of antibiotics. One Harvard University researcher, Ray Goldberg, who set up a research group to examine the revolution in agribusiness (including genetically modified organisms), reported: "the genetic revolution is leading to an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy business."[6]

Can we stop ourselves from poisoning the earth?

We use our oceans both as a pantry and as a toilet. We drill without knowing how to plug the holes. We genetically modify without testing.  Will we die before we learn we are poisoning ourselves and future generations? ... don't answer that.

 Following Garbage's Long Journey Around The Earth

 Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

The lesson of the Gulf of Mexico is forgotten...

Rules relaxed for reporting offshore oil and gas accidents: 

The North Sea safety regulator has lightened up the rules for reporting accidents offshore even as one operator in the field, Total, struggles to halt a gas leak that has been going on for over a month. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has introduced a new regulation that says injuries need only be reported if workers are out of action for over seven days. The former level was three days.

Exclusive: Shale causes rise in waste gas pollution

(Reuters) - The shale energy boom is fuelling a rise in the burning of waste gas after years of decline, a World Bank source told Reuters ahead of the release of new data, giving environmentalists more ammunition against the industry.

Monsanto's attempts to stifle reporters:

History is one damn thing after another....

And if you're not paying attention you ca... arrrghhhh



Antarctic ice shelf has shrunk by 85 % since 1995.  So stop exhaling!  It's all that carbon dioxide!

One kid saved by Obamacare.

So what is your opinion of protecting pedophiles then?

Yum yum... arsenic in chicken!

Vikings being maligned in movies.  Vikings having fun.

Dinosaurs were fluffy.  We've been looking at them nude all these years....

No BPA in food packaging!

Tell the FDA.

Study debunks myths on organic farms

The results are in from a 30-year side-by-side trial of conventional and organic farming methods at Pennsylvania's Rodale Institute. Contrary to conventional wisdom, organic farming outperformed conventional farming in every measure.
There are about 1,500 organic farmers in Saskatchewan, at last count. They eschew the synthetic fertilizers and toxic sprays that are the mainstay of conventional farms. Study after study indicates the conventional thinking on farming - that we have to tolerate toxic chemicals because organic farming can't feed the world - is wrong.
In fact, studies like the Rodale trials (www.rodaleinstitute.org/fst30years) show that after a three-year transition period, organic yields equalled conventional yields. What is more, the study showed organic crops were more resilient. Organic corn yields were 31 per cent higher than conventional in years of drought.
These drought yields are remarkable when compared to genetically modified (GM) "drought tolerant" varieties, which showed increases of only 6.7 per cent to 13.3 per cent over conventional (non-drought resistant) varieties.
More important than yield, from the farmer's perspective, is income, and here organic is clearly superior. The 30-year comparison showed organic systems were almost three times as profitable as the conventional systems. The average net return for the organic systems was $558/acre/ year versus just $190/acre/year for the conventional systems. The much higher income reflects the premium organic farmers receive and consumers pay for.
But even without a price premium, the Rodale study found organic systems are competitive with the conventional systems because of marginally lower input costs.

It puts to shame Monsanto and RoundUp and all the other Big Ag companies poisoning our food and our water.

When will we need geiger counters to go shopping?

Traces of radiation found in Japanese baby formula 

 A Japanese baby food manufacturer has announced the recall of 400,000 cans of infant formula that reportedly contain traces of radioactive cesium connected to the nation's recent nuclear plant meltdown. 

After panicked parents deluged Tokyo-based Meiji Co. with calls and e-mails, officials of the Tokyo-based food and candy maker responded Wednesday that they do not know how much of the tainted formula had reached consumers, but said the milk was manufactured in March and April and shipped not long afterward. 

The incident marked the second time this week that skittish Japanese citizens learned of more radioactive after-effects from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The facility was struck March 11 by an earthquake-triggered tsunami that knocked out its cooling system and led to several reactor core meltdowns that spewed radiation into the air, water and soil. 

On Sunday, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, announced that 45 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from a filtration system at the atomic plant, with some of the water possibly reaching the nearby Pacific Ocean. 

Critics say the leak counteracts assurances that Tepco has largely controlled the environmental damage at the coastal plant, located 220 miles northeast of Tokyo. The radiation in the water from Sunday's leak measured up to 322 times higher than government safety limits for various types of cesium. 

On Wednesday, plant officials acknowledged that nearly 40 gallons of water from the weekend leak had reached the Pacific Ocean. The water, which was used to cool the reactors, contained not only cesium, but strontium, another dangerous isotope, the utility said.

Update: The Japanese are trying to tell themselves their land contaminated by radiation will be salvageable.

Those who fled Futaba are among the nearly 90,000 people evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and another area to the northwest contaminated when a plume from the plant scattered radioactive cesium and iodine. Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes that those displaced can go home. The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if trial cleanups prove effective, has become a proxy for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Supporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance to showcase the country’s formidable determination and superior technical skills — proof that Japan is still a great power. For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Japan’s rebirth. Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades. So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields. And a radiation specialist who tested the results of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city found that exposure levels remained above international safety standards for long-term habitation. Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests that the government has not yet leveled with its people about the seriousness of their predicament. “I believe it is possible to save Fukushima,” said the supporter, Tatsuhiko Kodama, director of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo. “But many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes.”

Map of contaminated area in Japan.