A Colossal Fracking Mess
The Delaware is now the most endangered river in the country, according to the conservation group American Rivers.
That’s because large swaths of land—private and public—in the watershed have been leased to energy companies eager to drill for natural gas here using a controversial, poorly understood technique called hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. Sixty miles west of Damascus, the town of Dimock, population 1,400, makes all too clear the dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing.
The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people’s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.
Fracking is an energy- and resource-intensive process. Every shale-gas well that is fracked requires between three and eight million gallons of water. Fleets of trucks have to make hundreds of trips to carry the fracking fluid to and from each well site.
Due in part to spotty state laws and an absence of federal regulation, the safety record that hydraulic fracturing has amassed to date is deeply disturbing. As use of the technique has spread, it has been followed by incidents of water contamination and environmental degradation, and even devastating health problems. Thousands of complaints have been lodged with state and federal agencies by people all over the country whose lives and communities have been transformed by fracking operations.
Carullo and the other activists of Damascus Citizens face an uphill battle because of the corporate and political interests stacked against them, the vast amount of money at stake, and the dynamics of our nation’s energy-policy debate. “What it is we’re doing here is trying to dismantle the whole propaganda machine that the industry is involved in,” says Carullo. “For example, ‘natural gas is the bridge to the future.’ That’s the industry’s claim. Only problem is, there’s nothing natural about this, because it’s the most unnatural thing you can imagine—hauling around tons of chemicals, taking pure water and turning it into the worst industrial waste on the planet!”
6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America
The anti-government, pro-corporate-rule Reagan Revolution screwed a lot of things up for regular people and for the country.
It seems that you can look at a chart of almost anything and right around 1981 or soon after you'll see the chart make a sharp change in direction, and probably not in a good way. And I really do mean almost
anything, from economics to trade to infrastructure to ... well almost
anything.
Conservative policies
transformed the United States from the largest
creditor nation to the largest
debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then.
Do Men Love Differently Than Women?
In couples therapy, women and men often have very different ideas about what it means to feel and show "love."
Beyond the frustration and resentment of the men I see is their utter bewilderment. Despite their time in therapy, they still don't have a clue about what their wives and therapists want from them. Partly this has to do with having different expectations from their partners—men just don't buy relationship-improvement books or read women's magazines or watch Oprah. They find words like, connection, attunement, and validation mystifying, used less to enlighten than to point out their deficiencies.Most of my male clients feel that their previous therapy experience was about forcing them to fit a template of what the Therapy World believes love and relationships should look like. While the therapeutic language of "intimacy" is supposedly gender-neutral, most men see it as reflecting values and ideals that appeal disproportionately to women.
If even a small fraction of what former Bravo Company 2-16 soldier Ethan McCord is saying is true, that orders were given at a battalion level in Iraq for
"360 rotational fire" against civilians in order to "kill every motherfucker in the street," upon being hit by an IED, then Congress must investigate.
This claim suggests a war crime which far surpasses errant bombs or overzealous individual soldiers in the heat of battle. This is the mass execution of civilians.
Are We Going Down Like the Soviets?
http://www.alternet.org/world/147261/are_we_going_down_like_the_soviets/
The Soviets made a devastating miscalculation: they mistook military power for power on this planet. Sound familiar?
Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military -- and its military adventure in Afghanistan -- when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.
Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan
“the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t. (And if you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)
Lost on the Fearless Plain
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.
The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.
For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.
Image via Wikipedia
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