I like John Mackey. He is a savvy food guy who enrages the bulk of his customer base with his libertarian economic policies while they make him rich. I can't say I share his love for Ayn Rand but I get where he is coming from. He believes in capitalism. and he should; only in America could you sell regular food grown a little differently and convince people it makes them healthier and they should pay more. They'd shoot you for that in Russia.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended operations at Central Valley Meat Co. in Hanford, Calif., due to video evidence showing dairy cows, some unable to walk, being repeatedly shocked and shot before being slaughtered.Four minutes of excerpts the animal welfare group Compassion Over Killing provided to The Associated Press showed cows being prepared for slaughter. One worker is seen suffocating a cow by standing on its muzzle after a gun that injects a bolt into the animal's head had failed to render it unconscious. In another clip, a cow is still conscious and flailing as a conveyor lifts it by one leg for transport to an area where the animals' throats are slit for blood draining.
A short while ago, a member of Sierra Wave Media took a picture of about 15 dead and deformed fish. They were abnormally swollen and had 'tumor-like' lumps. They sent Andrew Hughan, Public Information Officer for Fish and Game in Sacramento, the photo and he responded. “These fish are not representative of what we hope the public identifies as a DFG planted fish. There are always deformities present in nature and in raised fish, especially in the bottom ponds of the raceways where weaker fish tend to congregate. Unfortunately Gull Lake was the recipient of such a group of fish,” he told them.Well, sure.
Mount Tamalpais in Marin County is public land that has redwood groves and oak woodlands and a spectacular view from a 2571-foot peak. It also has a problem that isn't going to go away. Until August 2005, government scientists used the herbicide glyphosate, the chemical found in Roundup, to rid Mount Tam of French broom and other invasive shrubs that are a fire hazard and threaten native plants. But activists waged a campaign against herbicides and so they stopped and are now looking at plans because they have to either suffer through fires or spend 400% more money to not use herbicides, which is 600% more than their budget.
California is cursed with a need to regulate energy deregulation, so it can't do the obvious thing like let utility companies buy transmission lines or sign long-term contracts - instead, companies have to buy on the spot market but they can't pass that cost along to customers either, so in times of high energy demand, like right now, you are going to get rolling brown outs.But we have a new $500 million clean energy plant that just came online. No it isn't solar power, this will actually provide energy. It's natural gas, far cleaner than coal, making it the cleanest energy source in California since the state banned nuclear power.
I often joke that New York City residents seem to regard any place beyond the Hudson River as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where dark-eyed cannibals rule a savage environment until you reach San Francisco.It's why they don't mind dumping all their sewage there. It makes a nice barrier.But the latest bout of sewage was not intentional. And it impacted the first annual IronMan Triathlon in the city. The experience of those in the Aquadraat Sports IRONMAN U.S. Championship was not great this weekend - even for the exorbitant cost of doing anything in New York City.
Among misguided positions, radiation and pesticides are only slightly behind vaccinations and genetic optimization on the anti-science hippie scale. A 2011 analysis of the GSS showed that, along with harmless positions like that astrology is scientific, there was a big difference between the left and the right on knowledge of science issues like "Exposure to radioactivity doesn't necessarily lead to death" (67.5% left to 77% right) and "Exposure to pesticides doesn't necessarily cause cancer"(55.5% left and 66.8%) - bigger science gaps than the 9% difference between the right and left on evolution that gets all Republicans labeled 'anti-science'.
The Olympics can never be green, given that countries spend $14 billion tearing down and building stuff and then people fly and drive in from all over the place to watch. But they can at least be relatively green. As Melissa C. Lott at Scientific American Blogs notes, the Brits did it right; the event was built with sustainability as part of the planning. From recycling to energy efficiency, plenty of their materials and buildings are being repurposed, so in the Green Olympics of Olympics, London is #1
Like many, science journalist Carl Zimmer has become concerned about the ability of science to correct itself; at least on a culturally acceptable timescale brought about by instant media publication of studies.Arsenic life is one example, though clearly the system worked. While the article got published it was criticized quite rapidly and bloggers have caught stealth Creationist papers that peer reviewers missed too.
"The formation of a new science of biotic controls,” predicted Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring" 50 years ago next month, was going to save us from pesticides.She was wrong that DDT would give you cancer if you sprayed it but she was right in believing that the future of agriculture rested solidly on genetic solutions to problems that chemicals were then solving.Why, then, are her intellectual descendants so against science? Mostly, it's because they never read her book, they have simply read activists discussing what her book was about; being anti-agriculture and gravitating to what she perceived as the problem (DDT and pesticides) rather than one factor (misuse).
