Cover of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's ...

As clock ticks, tension rises over a federal shutdown

During the last major federal shutdowns in 1995-96, hundreds of national parks closed, veterans' checks and services were delayed, passport applications weren't processed and billions of dollars in government contracts were held up. Analysts expect more of the same if no deal is struck this time around.

Obama administration joins critics of U.S. nonprofit group that oversees Internet

With some Middle East countries shutting down the Internet within their borders to curb uprisings, the question of who runs the Web is increasingly figuring into global foreign policy debates. Some fear that governments such as those of Libya or Iran could more easily crush rebellions if they gained more control over the Internet's inner workings.
ICANN quietly wields vast influence over the Web, a power unfamiliar to many Americans and elected officials. Based in an off-campus University of South California building, the company has more than 100 employees and is led by a chief executive and a board of directors comprised of private sector executives and technology experts. ICANN's core function: Decide which Web addresses get seen on the Internet.

What we have and haven’t learned from ‘Climategate’

It's a numbingly familiar pattern in media coverage. The conservative movement that's been attacking climate science for 20 years has a storied history of demonstrable fabrications, distortions, personal attacks, and nothingburger faux-scandals -- not only on climate science, but going back to asbestos, ozone, leaded gasoline, tobacco, you name it. They don't follow the rigorous standards of professional science; they follow no intellectual or ethical standards whatsoever. Yet no matter how long their record of viciousness and farce, every time the skeptic blogosphere coughs up a new "ZOMG!" it's as though we start from zero again, like no one has a memory longer than five minutes.

Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden "universe of reality," to use Limbaugh's term. It's a reality being actively obscured the "lamestream media," academics, scientists, and government officials. Affirming the tenets of that secret reality has become an act of tribal reinforcement, the equivalent of a secret handshake.
In effect, the modern right has created is a closed epistemic loop containing millions of people. Within that loop, the implausibility or extremity of a claim itself counts as evidence. The more liberal elites reject it, the more it entrenches itself. Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it.
The notion that there is a global conspiracy by professional scientists to falsify results in order to get more research money is, to borrow Quiggen's words about birtherism, "a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe." Once you have accepted that shibboleth, anything offered to you as evidence of its truth, no matter how ludicrous, will serve as affirmation. (Even a few context-free lines cherry-picked from thousands of private emails.)

..... we must turn to agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. (Hat tip to an excellent recent post on this by John Quiggen.)

There's one thing we haven't learned from climategate (or death panels or birtherism). American society now contains within it a large, well-funded, tightly networked, and highly amplified tribe that defines itself through rejection of that society's "lamestream" truth claims and standards of evidence. How should society relate to that tribe?
We haven't figured that out. Politicians and the press have tried to accommodate the shibboleths of the right as legitimate positions for debate. The political press has practically sworn off plain judgments of accuracy or fact. But all that has done is confuse and mislead the broader public, while the tribe pushes ever further into extremity. The tribe does not want to be accommodated. It is fueled by elite rejection.

Biofuels From Tiny Organisms

When a Disease Messes With Men...

"...that's the position a lot of conservatives take. They want to be able to scare their daughters..."

Immunize

( As if my 'Corporate Farming' can compete ! )

Despite its Horizon brand, dairy giant Dean Foods really doesn’t get organic

The latest dust-up is over a new Horizon product called "Fat-Free Milk Plus DHA Omega-3."

In his In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan showed that the practice of isolating and synthesizing certain nutrients and adding them to food is a mug's game, a marketer's trick. It turns out, we don't understand all that much about human nutrition, but we do know that eating foods in their whole state tends to be healthier than loading up on isolated nutrients in the form of supplements and additives.
Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests that cows fed on grass produce milk with a healthier fat profile than grain-fed cows -- higher in the very kinds of Omega-3 fats that Dean is injecting into its "organic" milk in synthetic form. "Fat-Free Milk Plus DHA Omega-3" is a deeply absurd product -- the natural fats have been stripped out, replaced by ones conjured up in a lab.

Half of Men Have Genital HPV

India: past life regression therapy takes hold

Regulatory Flaws, Repeated Violations Put Oil Refinery Workers at Risk

An easily manipulated regulatory system allows companies to challenge citations for years and postpone mandated fixes. Despite calls for change, some refineries still run equipment to failure rather than maintaining it.
“We have decreasing staff levels, disinvestment in safety, a lack of training, and accidents or near-misses — indicators of catastrophe — being ignored,” Moure-Eraso : chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board

Tallying Coal’s Hidden Cost

in a new report, a team of researchers at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment tries to put a price tag on coal’s hidden costs.

.... simply tallying public health impacts, the study found that coal costs the United States economy $140 billion to $242 billion a year. Much of this burden is borne by mining communities in Appalachia, where premature deaths associated with coal mining cost local economies an estimated $74.6 billion a year.

Coal's hidden costs top $345 billion in U.S.: study

Those costs would effectively triple the price of electricity produced by coal-fired plants, which are prevalent in part due to the their low cost of operation

As Death Toll Grows, 100,000 Flee Libyan Violence

Estimates of the death toll in Libya have reached at least 2,000, and more than 100,000 people are believed to have fled the country into neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

US tightens military grip on Gaddafi

Western officials say any military intervention in the unfolding conflict would have to be coordinated by Nato and would require the approval of the UN Security Council, and that is far from guaranteed. Russia and China, who both hold a veto, have voiced their opposition to any outside interference. France too has cautioned about Nato involvement.

( It seems to me I heard this tune in 2003...just hum a few bars.

Threat of civil war looms in Yemen

Like Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Saleh even had a son, Ahmed Ali Saleh, positioned to succeed his father in office.

Now, the almost-65-year-old is fighting to avoid the same political end as Mr. Mubarak amid very real prospects of civil war, raising fears in the United States and other Western countries that grow increasingly concerned about Yemen becoming a staging ground for terrorism.*

All because a pesky bunch of mostly young protesters have sought to emulate protest groups in Tunisia and Egypt and trigger the ouster of Mr. Saleh.

( Standard protocol for invoking the specter of the known front for unwarranted aggression : fear of the unarmed in lands far away; Global War on Terra. Witness the absolute balderdash of such positioning concurrent with the following. )

Obama’s message an unnerving one for Arab rulers

By dumping Hosni Mubarak, America’s closest and most important Arab ally, Barack Obama has signalled to Muslims throughout the Middle East that repressive rulers can no longer rely on Washington and are vulnerable to ouster by uprising.

That may be realpolitik from a pragmatic president, but the Arab street may see it as America impotent; unable or unwilling to rule from afar by propping up loyal, albeit, thuggish regimes.

Ottawa prepares to join effort to aid Libyan opposition

Western countries including Canada now back the idea of entering Libyan territory, at least to evacuate citizens or deliver aid, effectively ignoring the Gadhafi regime’s claims to territorial sovereignty – but they have not yet agreed on the question of whether it will be extended to direct military intervention such as enforcing a no-fly zone.

( Expect the usual ploy from the 'Me Too!' PM )

U.S. silent as Iraqi regime cracks down

The Obama administration is conspicuously quiet when friendly Middle East regimes use ugly tactics -- including violence and imprisoning peaceful demonstrators -- to quell growing protest movements in their countries.

That's in marked contrast to the administration's tough stand when similar tactics are employed by unfriendly governments like the one in Iran. In a statement yesterday, the White House "strongly condemn[ed] the Iranian government's organized intimidation campaign and arrests of political figures, human rights defenders, political activists, student leaders, journalists and bloggers."

But in one of the least-noticed stories of the week, the U.S.-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq has resorted to imprisoning 300 journalists, intellectuals and lawyers in order to stop ongoing protests, according to a well-reported Washington Post dispatch from Baghdad.

The Post story reports that about 30 people have been killed -- at least some of them gunned down by government forces seeking to disperse protests. And the imprisoned dissidents are not being treated humanely, according to one journalist who was detained:

Just before they were freed, however, Hadi was held in a room where about 300 people sat on the floor. They had black hoods over their heads. Many were groaning, their shirts bloodied. Some wore suits and ties. An elderly man had passed out. Hadi recognized a friend, a TV broadcaster, among them.

The Palestine Papers As Theatre

The "unprecedented compromises" are actually a reiteration of the same parameters that have governed I-P negotations on Jerusalem since at least Taba. And as the parameters are widely known to anyone with an interest in I-P negotiations and access to the internet - you can read the entire Moratinos non-paper here at Ha'aretz, for example, where it has been available on line since February 2002 - there is no way that al-Jazeera can genuinely believe it is unveiling anything "unprecedented". T
hanks to The Truth About Camp David, we can trace the beginnings of what Clayton Swisher today calls the P.L.O.'s "unprecedented compromises" on Jerusalem right back to December 2000, when Israelis and Palestinians accepted the Clinton Parameters as the basis for their continuing negotiations on an I-P peace treaty.

Proposed changes to Egypt's constitution

What's Happening in Wisconsin Explained

What's really going on, as Kevin Drum has explained, is pure partisan warfare: Walker is trying to de-fund the unions that form the backbone of the Democratic party. The unions and the Democrats are, of course, fighting back. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein drops some knowledge [emphasis added]:

The best way to understand Walker's proposal is as a multi-part attack on the state's labor unions. In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin's unions can't deliver value to their members, they're deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections.

A Nonpartisan Correction to Robert Reich
Class war under neoliberlaism is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class,

Michigan approves plan to close half of Detroit schools

In an effort to close a yawning budget deficit, Michigan has approved a proposal to drastically shrink Detroit's troubled school system over the next few years.

The plan calls for the closure of 70 schools, which would cut the number of schools in the district in half by 2014, leaving only 72 public schools in Detroit. The closures would be on top of the 59 that were shuttered last year.

As a result, high school class sizes would jump to 60 students each over the next few years.

Emergency financial manager Bobb acknowledges that the current plan will drive parents and students away from the city's schools, which could actually make the situation worse. For each student that leaves, the school system looses $7,660 in state aid, according to Wasko.

In testimony before Congress earlier this month, Bobb said the cuts stem from structural issues that have developed over several years, including anongoing decline in Detroit's population.

He said student enrollment in Detroit Public School's has been halved over the last decade, falling 83,336.