26 November - News Surfing

 Grist
Risk, bacteria, and the tragedy of food-safety reform
It is impossible, it seems, to come up with a policy that zeroes in on the real systematic risk of the food system: the exponential expansion of hazard that comes from concentrating huge amounts of production in relatively small spaces. Food safety reform is evidently hostage to Big Food.
 Burkhard Bilger  teases out some of what is at stake in the food-safety wars. He shows that scientists are only just starting to value the importance of the microbial world for human life.
 "Given how little we know about our inner ecology, carpet-bombing it might not always be the best idea." He quotes the  biologist: "When you advocate your soaps that say they kill all harmful bacteria, you are committing suicide."
Duhigg looked at a spate of illnesses in a dairy-intensive Wisconsin county. He wrote:

There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

After an early thaw last year, some of those quarter-billion gallons of cow shit found their way into people's drinking water.
Runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.
In Morrison, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections.
People made cheese for millenia before the advent of pasteurization in the 19th century.
Listeria from Estrella Creamery cheese threatens only those people who knowingly buy the product, while runoff from Wisconsin's industrial-scale dairies infects everyone who lives nearby. And the threats from Estrella remain theoretical; unlike in that dairy-intensive Wisconsin county, no one has reported falling ill from eating Estrella cheese.

And yet federal officials take an our-hands-are-tied approach to the menace of tainted water in Wisconsin, and bring down an iron fist on the small dairy in Washington. It's hard not to conclude that the disparate responses stem from the fact that industrial-scale dairy farmers -- and the very few large processors that purchase their milk -- have bought influence in Washington, while artisanal cheese producers haven't. This is food safety as protection racket.

Latest exposé shows the egg industry’s problems are widespread and systematic 
Food-safety bill stalled; Stabenow named Senate ag chair 
‘Farmageddon’ doc tracks the coming food-safety showdown 
Is birth control in our water destroying the environment? 

Taking a Whack at Raw Milk - Again
I must admit that I am a bit perplexed by the proponents of raw milk. On average it seems that they spend a disproportionate amount of time twittering on Twitter and posting angry comments on blogs – mine in particular - about “Food Nazis” – of which I am apparently one, along with a long list of people not raw milk drinkers (the enemy or persecutors).
Bill Anderson - November 26, 2010 1:03 PM

Bill Marler,

It was not that we "scared people away" from legalizing raw milk in Wisconsin. Quite the contrary -- after the raw milk legislation was vetoed, the Dept. of Agriculture showed up for an armed raid of one of the farms which was a known supplier of raw milk. The subsequent news coverage of the raid created such a public outcry (even from many people who said they would never consume raw milk) that it forced the chief of the division of food safety to resign.

The farm that was raided had never made anyone sick. It had nothing to do with food safety.

The reason that the WI raw milk bill was vetoed by the governor (after being passed overwhelmingly by the senate and assembly) was because the dairy processing industry mobolized all of their resources to lobby the governor to veto it.

The governor, btw, has been in the pocket of big business since he was elected. Nothing new or special here. That is how politics works in America, regardless of political party. It is called fascism -- the merger of state and corporate power.

If you want, I can send you a list of all the corporate agri-business organizations that lobbied the governor to veto the Wisconsin raw milk bill, along with the letters they signed.

We worked hard to try and change the law, but the powers that be showed that there was no comprimise with their iron-fisted corporate control. Today, because of the public outrage following the farm raid, there is a panel of agri-business representatives assembled by the Dept. of Agriculture who are drafting a policy to legalize raw milk in Wisconsin. The regulatory burden it proposes is approximately the same as California's regulations for the sale of raw milk. The differences are that:

1) It will allow on-farm sales only. (As I'm sure you know, in CA, certified raw milk can be sold on the retail shelf and served at resteraunts.)
2) It is only for cow's milk, and only for fluid milk. It explicitly excludes goat and sheep milk, and explicitly excludes any cultured products such as butter, yogurt, cream, or unaged cheese.
3) It fails to establish a definition of raw milk. For example, milk which is thermally treated or which has gone through ultra-filtration rendering it essentially sterile is not the same thing as REAL raw milk. Yet both of these types of milk processing would fall under the regulatory system being proposed by agri-business, for the sale of unpasteurized milk.

I am all for food safety, Bill Marler. I just don't understand what those regulations have to do with food safety. They only have to do with protecting agribusiness. Yes, create the rigorous testing and hygene standards for certified legal raw milk. But define it, protect it as a standard of identify (like other dairy products are protected) and allow it to be sold and turned into cultured products (such as cheese, butter, yogurt, etc...) as any other dairy product is.

After all, culturing only makes it safer. The drop in pH (increase in acidity), and loss of moisture in the case of cheese and butter, all tend to make the product safer by inhibiting the growth of pathogens.

The whole ordeal shows that none of this debate about raw milk really has to do with food safety. We already have the tools neccessary to test and verify the safety of raw milk and products made from raw milk.

The dairy processing industry just doesn't want people to know the truth, that REAL milk from pasture-grazed heritage breeds of cows tastes better and is better for you than commercial milk and milk products. The more you process the milk, the worse it tastes and the worse it is for you. We are talking about putting an entire industry out of business here. Of course they are going to hide behind the noble rhetoric of "food safety" for as long as they can. Their actions, however, speak much louder.

Thanks for giving these guys more ammunition. Its not doing anything to make raw milk safer. Its just creating more public animosity towards the existing "food safety" authorities.

Electric vehicles get 20% fin incentive 
In a major boost to the Indian electric vehicles industry, the ministry of new and renewable energy ( MNRE) on Monday announced a 20 per cent financial incentive on the ex-factory price of electric cars and scooters sold in the country.
World over, countries are offering huge incentives for adoption of electric vehicles and in countries like China it has led to a massive growth of electric vehicles.

Banks Modifying Tiny Percentage of Mortgages in Need 


 Some doctors asking Medicare patients to switch plans
In September of this year, servicers completed about 147,000—only about 28,000 through the government’s program and the rest outside of it, according to HOPE Now. Meanwhile, about 5.2 million mortgages were in default (60 days or more behind), according to LPS Applied Analytics. Put those two numbers together, and you get a sense for the number of modifications being done relative to the need: In September, servicers provided modifications for about 2.9 percent of the total delinquent loans.


As this chart shows, that’s about how many the industry was doing before the government’s program launched in March, 2009:

Some doctors asking Medicare patients to switch plans 
Some local doctors, once again faced with a large cut in what the government pays them for treating Medicare patients, are telling senior patients they must switch by year's end to better-paying private Medicare Advantage plans.

Paul Williams, 72, was one of about 6,000 patients who recently received a letter from Highline Medical Group, a consortium of 35 doctors in eight clinics in the South Puget Sound area, telling them to switch plans by Jan. 1, when traditional Medicare reimbursements are set to shrink by 25 percent.

TSA Lies About Scanner Radiation Dose: 20 Times Worse Than They Say Claims James Ridgeway

Buying Africa: US Corporations Grab Land Across Continent 
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates more than 75,000 square miles have been acquired by foreign interests in Africa alone. A 2010 field study conducted by FIAN in Ethiopia found that the equivalent of up to 20 percent of the country’s arable land has been bought by or made available to foreign investors.
Dominion Farms Ltd., which bought swampland in Kenya in 2003 to turn it into a rice plantation, has reportedly intentionally flooded local farms to force the relocation of farmers.

When Citizens Are Merely Political Spectators They Get Rolled Over by the Political Class 
Ben Dangl: Often, when left-leaning Latin American presidents arrived in power over the last decade, they found themselves up against the military, Washington, D.C., global capitalism, and other pressures constricting their operations. From the start, these presidents either could not, or were unwilling to, carry out the reforms they promised on the campaign trail.
There is the moral and ethical lesson of going beyond unjust laws to survive. The landless movement in Brazil takes over unused land and transforms it into communities and farms that their millions of members thrive on. Workers in Argentina and Venezuela occupied their bankrupt factories and started running them as cooperatives. Activists in Bolivia banded together to kick out a giant corporation that privatized their water and put it back under public control.
Corrupt bosses, free market policies, repressive governments, unjust laws – they’re everywhere. The same economic ideologies have devastated communities across borders. In some cases, it’s the same corporation that’s trying to privatize the water in Argentina, Bolivia and the US.

Confirmation bias 
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.[Note 1][1] As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs.

Blackspot News Feed
The Harvest: Farming Sustainably in New York
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/ lauraflanders | November 24, 2010 Eating less meat might be better for the world, but it can definitely be delicious. Buckwheat is actually a fruit, a grain substitute that can be excellent for those with gluten sensitivities, or just a nice alternative to the usual. GRITtv’s Danya Abt and Zac Halberd took a trip [...]

Truth About Global Economic Crisis: Book Review by Joel S. Hirschhorn
by Joel S. Hirschhorn Featured Writer Dandelion Salad www.foavc.org Nov. 26, 2010 You want to read The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century, edited by Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, if you meet these criteria: you welcome information and analysis about critically important issues that come from great thinkers outside the [...]
Skin patch could offer pain relief with every flinch
Via John Evans at NewScientist: Unyong Jeong’s team at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, covered a flexible rubber film with a sheet of corrugated microporous polystyrene, with gutters around 3 micrometres wide and 1 micrometre deep. The gutters were then filled with a liquid and sealed with another rubber film. Finally, the first rubber [...]
An Endless Thanksgiving for America's Richest Citizens
Is a 'flat tax' benefiting the rich in the offing?
Bioencryption can store almost a million gigabytes of data inside bacteria
Antibiotics aren’t the only way we are going to make bacteria work: A new method of data storage that converts information into DNA sequences allows you to store the contents of an entire computer hard-drive on a gram’s worth of E. coli bacteria…and perhaps considerably more than that. ….. A single gram of E. coli [...]

Cut to the political heart of a U.S. holiday on the brink by Roxanne Amico
by Roxanne Amico Featured Writer Dandelion Salad Spiritmorph Studio Nov. 25, 2010 This is a post I wrote on “Thanksgiving Day.” [Before that is this very important reminder that “natural gas fracking” (DRILLING) has already been proven lethally dangerous to all land, air, water, food, and the communities living nearby. So, there is a protest [...]

Derrick Jensen: It’s Very Important for Us to Start to Build a Culture of Resistance, Part 2
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/ Democracy Now! Nov. 26, 2010 Author and Activist Derrick Jensen: “The Dominant Culture is Killing the Planet…It’s Very Important for Us to Start to Build a Culture of Resistance” We speak with Derrick Jensen, who has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement. He has written some 15 books critiquing contemporary society and [...]
Links for 2010-11-26
Swede broadcasts music from his stomach"A Swedish man broadcast music from his stomach for several hours via a mini audio system, but said he was disappointed by the sound quality."(tags:music tech nutter )
Untitled
.bbpBox{background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1289339734/images/themes/theme9/bg.gif) #1A1B1F;padding:20px;} This http://twitpic.com/3afdjf would be the @warrenellis inspired cookie cake I decorated for my roommate’s birthday. Enjoy.Fri Nov 26 19:46:20 via Twitter for iPhoneZoe BlackZoeswingsRblack
An Interview With Professor Elemental
A fine interview by Carl Watkins with Paul Alborough, alias chap-hop gentleman of performance Professor Elemental. This bit made me smile: GG:Your most recent single, “Fighting Trousers,” seems to really be picking up steam and is quickly becoming a viral video hit, collecting over 100,000 views in the week since it’s been posted. This week [...]
Open Source Superheroes, Idoru, and the Batman
(Continued from Brands, Prosthetic Identities and the Batman.) What if you could opt-in to a prosthetic identity like Batman’s or Kanye West’s? What if you could Be Batman? Mentioned here (and everywhere else on the internet) this week, J-Pop star Hatsune Miku is a fictional android, a sex symbol, a popular product spokeswoman, and the [...]
Raj Patel: Global food justice

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/ AlJazeeraEnglish | November 25, 2010 With more than one billion people around the world considered overweight, why are so many others still starving and struggling to fill their plates? Riz Khan – Global food justice see Claiming the Commons – Food for All on Haultain Boulevard Capitalism and Other Kids’ Stuff (2005) (must-see) Born Of The [...]
How Are the Kids? Unemployed, Underwater, and Sinking
In some cultures asking how the kids are doing is a colloquial way of asking how the individual is faring, acknowledging that the vitality of the younger generation is a good metric for the well-being of society as a whole. In the United States, the state of the kids should be an important indicator. Young workers bear the significant burden of funding intergenerational transfer programs and maintaining the structure of payments that flow in the economy. read more
Polar Ice for sale
Original pieces of polar ice will be sold in a shop in Amsterdam from this Friday the 25th. MyPolarIce is a venture led by Coralie Vogelaar and Teun Castelein. They went to the northern part of Greenland to harvest some of the finest polar ice still available. The pieces of ice were extracted from the [...]
Shape-shifting bra made of NASA space foam is the latest thing in ‘biocosmeceuticals’
Foam used to cushion astronauts derriere is now being used in bras. Nick Gilbert interviews Dr Tim Nielsen, who explains the more practical uses: “A derivation of the foam is used in the memory foam mattresses. It’s also used in the safety lining of racing car helmets, and so I realised it could have a [...]
The Chickens Are Not Impressed
That would be Gertrude and Gloria, two of the three rescued ex-battery hens I bought for the girls to keep. And they are not impressed. Their water was covered in ice, everything else was covered in frost, and someone has taken away the warm thing in the sky that they’d only just gotten [...]
CBO: Recovery Act Raised GDP and Lowered Unemployment but Effects Are 'Expected to Wane'
ABC News reports that the Congressional Budget Office this week released its latest report on the effects of the Recovery Act and found that it “raised the GDP, lowered unemployment, and increased the number of people with jobs.” According to the report, CBO estimates that the Recovery Act’s policies in the third quarter of the calendar year 2010 had the following effects (emphasis added): read more
On Eve of Egypt Polls, Mubarak's Ruling Party Tightens Grip on Opposition
Egypt's opposition politicians and their supporters have faced a steady stream of harassment in the lead-up to Sunday's parliamentary election. There's an upbeat mood in offices of the National Democratic Party (NDP) ahead of Sunday's parliamentary elections. read more
Robert Reich | Sarah Palin’s Presidential Strategy, and the Economy She Depends On
Monday night, Sarah Palin watched from the audience as daughter Bristol danced on ABC. Twenty-three million other Americans joined her from their homes. Tuesday, the former vice-presidential candidate started a 13-state book tour for her new book, "America By Heart," which has a first printing of 1 million. Her reality show on TLC, "Sarah Palin's Alaska," is in its third week. Last Sunday she was the cover story in the New York Times magazine. read more
Cancun Climate Summit: Time for a New Geopolitical Architecture
As we approach crucial climate change negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, the key question on many people's minds is this: what nation or nations will have the courage to stand up to the United States, which still represents the key obstacle to a binding agreement on global warming? If it looked unlikely that the U.S. would reduce carbon emissions before, the recent midterm elections have made such a possibility seem even more remote: many incoming Republican legislators simply deny that global warming…
Feeling Fat? Thanksgiving Is Only One Reason
The US is the fattest of 33 countries says a recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a group that advises governments on economic growth, social development and financial stability. Mexico and New Zealand are next runners up and the thinnest countries are India and Indonesia. Half of Americans were overweight in 1980 [...]
Newly named anti-gay hate groups plead victimhood but do not address charges
Apparently some organizations who are on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list and profiles of anti-gay hate groups aren’t happy about it and their spokespeople are addressing the issue.But the venue that they chose to address SPLC’s list and the way that they are saying (or rather what they are not saying) raises some questions [...] Related Stories Ignoring your hate group status won’t make it go away Of Michelle Obama’s Patriotism and Sarah Palin’s Ignorance of History How Does…
Author and Activist Derrick Jensen: "The Dominant Culture is Killing the Planet...It’s Very Important for Us to Start to Build a Culture of Resistance"
We speak with Derrick Jensen, who has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement. He has written some 15 books critiquing contemporary society and the destruction of the environment. His many books include _A Language Older than Words_, _Endgame_, _What We Left Behind_, _Resistance against Empire_, and _Deep Green Resistance_. "I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet," Jensen says. "I think it's very important for…
Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef on Barefoot Economics, Poverty and Why The U.S. is Becoming an "Underdeveloping Nation"
We speak with the acclaimed Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Neef. He won the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book _Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics_. "Economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty," Max-Neef says.

Why Religious Believers Are So Desperate for the Atheist Seal of Approval
Many religious believers are intent on getting atheists' approval for their beliefs. If you're hoping for that -- don't hold your breath.

 South Korea honors slain marines; commander vows 'thousand-fold' retaliation
China works to ease North-South Korea tension 

Smile, if you're in downtown Houston
Homeland Security picking up tab for 250-300 surveillance cameras

World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Food Crisis, U.N. Says 
Global grain production will tumble by 63 million metric tons this year, or 2 percent over all, mainly because of weather-related calamities like the Russian heat wave and the floods in Pakistan, the United Nations estimates in its most recent report on the world food supply. The United Nations had previously projected that grain yields would grow 1.2 percent this year

A ‘Crazy Bad’ Day in Beijing 
 After Beijing’s mostly coal-fired heating system kicked in for the winter, the pollution became what an official Twitter account of the United States Embassy in Beijing briefly referred to as “crazy bad.”

Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients
Doctors are complaining that they've been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying, privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of penny-pinching by Congress.

And that's not even taking into account a long-postponed rate-setting method that is on track to slash Medicare's payment rates to doctors by 23 percent Dec. 1.


It Begins: Medicare Patients See Long Waits for Doctors
 It turns out that failure of Medicare to keep up with private reimbursement rates has led doctors to charge for more tests and services:

Health Law Faces Threat of Undercut From Courts 
As the Obama administration presses ahead with the health care law, officials are bracing for the possibility that a federal judge in Virginia will soon reject its central provision as unconstitutional and, in the worst case for the White House, halt its enforcement until higher courts can rule.

U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More 
Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.
“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.
Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.