Image via WikipediaOxygen crash led to Cambrian mass extinction
Lack of oxygen combined with poisonous hydrogen sulphide killed off many Cambrian animals. Similar events are thought to have caused the massive Permian extinction 251 million years ago. There were several rapid extinction events in the second half of the Cambrian, Gill says. We do not know what caused the others but oxygen crashes are a definite possibility in those cases too
What drove it is still in question.
What is the real reason for the fish, bird kill?
Image via WikipediaOver the past several days Americans have been inundated with reports of massive fish and bird kills within the country. Today it has been reported that the wildlife deaths have expanded to other nations in the region, particularly Brazil, which was bombarded by 100 tons of dead fish that washed up on its shoreline.
Internal bleeding kills 5,000 birds in Arkansas, reason remains a mystery
Dead birds fall from the sky in Sweden 
Image via Wikipedia
Atlantic currents have seen ‘drastic’ changes: study
Scientists have found evidence of a "drastic" shift since the 1970s in north Atlantic Ocean currents that usually influence weather in the northern hemisphere and detected changes in deep sea Atlantic corals that indicated the declining influence of the cold northern Labrador Current.
They said in the US National Academy of Science journal PNAS that the change "since the early 1970s is largely unique in the context of the last approximately 1,800 years," and raised the prospect of a direct link with global warming.The Labrador Current interacts with the warmer Gulfstream from the south.
They in turn have a complex interaction with a climate pattern, the North Atlantic Oscillation, which has a dominant impact on weather in Europe and North America.
Image via WikipediaScientists have pointed to a disruption or shifts in the oscillation as an explanation for moist or harsh winters in Europe, or severe summer droughts such as in Russia, in recent years.
One of the five scientists, Carsten Schubert, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Acquatic Sciences and Technology (EAWAG), underlined that for nearly 2,000 years the sub polar Labrador current off northern Canada and Newfoundland was the dominant force.
However that pattern appeared to have only been repeated occasionally in recent decades.
Secondary Plant Metabolites: Vital Nutrients for a Healthy Diet, Natural Chemical Arsenal, or Both?
The US Military gives unlawful orders to kill in Iraq and Afghanistan daily
Why does Corey Clagett rot in solitary confinement for following an acknowledged unlawful order to kill yet those who gave the order remain free?This is really a story about how and why Corey Clagett is being hung out to dry and his life thrown away by the US Military when those who gave the orders should be taking his place.
There is no interest by the military on determining who gave the orders to Clagett’s squad.
Isn’t this a story about cruel and unusual punishment and when enough is absolutely enough?
On December 31, 2010 the story about PFC Corey Clagett was discussed in the National Examiner. He is currently incarcerated at Leavenworth Military Maximum Security Prison, Leavenworth, Kansas.
With today’s update you will find contact information for Corey’s two U.S. Senators, Lindsey Graham, and Jim DeMint, as well as, his representative from the first district, Harry E. Brown.
Red Tape Chronicles
Court: No warrant needed to search cell phone
Odds someone else has your SSN? One in 7
Courts: Using another's SSN not a crime
'Friendly fraud' a hassle for you, too
Hidden victims of the mortgage meltdown
AgCanada
- Australia wheat quality slumps in bittersweet harvest - 1/4/2011
- ADM Windsor canola meal shipments can resume - 12/29/2010
- MANA sells controlling interest to Chinese company - 12/29/2010
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- Dryness continues in Argentina - 12/28/2010
- Folicur label expanded to oats and barley - 12/28/2010
- GLOBAL FARMER POLL: Free trade or farm support? You decide - 12/24/2010
Labor's Coming Class War WSJ
Republican Congressional Priorities Reveal Their Real Agenda-- Further Concentration Of The National Wealth In The Hands Of Fewer Amd Fewer Families
Battle looms over US science funding
Battlefield Conversions: reason talks with three ex-warriors who now fight against the War on Drugs.
From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the War on Drugs changed over the years?
McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It's bizarre. We make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified ter·ri·fy
tr.v. ter·ri·fied, ter·ri·fy·ing, ter·ri·fies
1. To fill with terror; make deeply afraid. See Synonyms at frighten.
2. To menace or threaten; intimidate. of marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.
The drug war is an assault on the African-American community. Any police chief that used the tactics used in the inner city against minorities in a white middle-class neighborhood would be fired within a couple of weeks.
You don't have to identify yourself as a bigot bigot - A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see religious issues). Usually found with a specifier; thus, "Cray bigot", "ITS bigot", "APL bigot", "VMS bigot", "Berkeley bigot". anymore--you can be for the drug war and you really are getting "them."
The drug war has succeeded in militarizing police against their own people.
During the Vietnam War. I was hanging with Chinese drug dealers in Bangkok. They were smuggling smuggling, illegal transport across state or national boundaries of goods or persons liable to customs or to prohibition. Smuggling has been carried on in nearly all nations and has occasionally been adopted as an instrument of national policy, as by Great Britain heroin into the U.S. in the dead bodies of GIs who were transshipped through Thailand.
( Today bodies of servicemen are kept from public view )
In the chapter you contributed to After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century (Cato Institute), you argue that drug agents have come to recognize that their efforts ultimately have no impact on the drug trade. What's the mindset mind·set or mind-set
n.
1. A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person's responses to and interpretations of situations.
When you get in, the first thing you discover is that you can't touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because they're protected by the CIA or they're protected by the State Department. Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to the contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin Noun 1. mujahedin - a military force of Muslim guerilla warriors engaged in a jihad; "some call the mujahidin international warriors but others just call them terrorists"
mujahadeen, mujahadein, mujahadin, mujahedeen, mujahideen, mujahidin in Afghanistan. Those of us who work overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game, that it's a lie.
2. An inclination or a habit. of agents in this war?
The blanket prohibition of drugs, I think, is wrong.
Most individuals arrested by a cop eventually appear before a judge. These days, they won't be appearing in Judge James P. Gray's Southern California courtroom. Since publicly questioning the U.S. drug strategy, the Orange County Superior Court judge has kept himself off the criminal calendar. But, like Levine and McNamara, he has witnessed the reality of the U.S. drug war--as a defense attorney in the Navy, as a prosecutor in Los Angeles, and as a judge. Says the 56-year-old Gray, "We're flooding our courts with these cases that aren't making any difference whatsoever."
Does the law force you to adjudicate them in ways you think are counterproductive?
Gray: The answer to the second question is certainly yes. There are documented situations in which very conservative federal judges are literally in tears because they are required by the law to sentence a particular offender to a draconian sentence.
I was on Juvenile Court for Abused and Neglected Children. I can't get these cases out of my mind. It was common that a single mother--say she has two children--would hook up with the wrong boyfriend, who would be a drug dealer. One fine day he would tell her, "Look, Maria, I'll pay you $500 to take this package across town to Charlie." She basically knows it has narcotics narcotics n. 1) techinically, drugs which dull the senses. 2) a popular generic term for drugs which cannot be legally possessed, sold, or transported except for medicinal uses for which a physician or dentist's prescription is required. in it. She gets arrested and gets five years in prison.
What happens to her children? They come into my court as abused and neglected children. There's the mother in a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs hand·cuff
n.
A restraining device consisting of a pair of strong, connected hoops that can be tightened and locked about the wrists and used on one or both arms of a prisoner in custody; a manacle. Often used in the plural.
tr.v. and I tell her the truth. "You know, ma'am, you're not going to be a functional part of your children's lives for the next five years" She starts to well up with tears. Then I tell her that unless she's fortunate and has either a close personal friend or family member who is both willing and able to take custody of her children, they are very likely going to be adopted by somebody else by the time she gets out of prison. She dissolves into tears.
Taxpayers can start to dissolve in tears, also. Because for the next year they're going to spend $25,000 of taxpayer money to keep this mother of two in prison. We're going to spend upwards of $5,000 a month to keep each child in a group home until they are finally adopted by somebody else. So that's $60,000 a year per child, plus $25,000 for the mother. We are spending $145,000 of taxpayer money to physically separate a mother from her children. It just doesn't make any sense.
When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for a police officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that was outside of your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then you could search it. But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked, the police could not go in there unless they got a search warrant first. They couldn't go into the trunk of your car, they couldn't go into the glove compartment, and they couldn't go into the backseat.
That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you and everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers. They can search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels. They can go through and search everything.
Are you alleging a sort of bootlegger-Baptist coalition, where lawbreakers and prohibitionists end up on the same side of an issue?
Gray: De facto [Latin, In fact.] In fact, in deed, actually.
This phrase is used to characterize an officer, a government, a past action, or a state of affairs that must be accepted for all practical purposes, but is illegal or illegitimate. , yes. It was not set up that way. Just like it wasn't set up to discriminate against minorities. But it has evolved into an amazing alliance between the drug lords on the one hand, who are making just obscene amounts of money, and various officials who are getting paid money to enforce this. They both have a financial interest and incentive in continuing with the status quo.
When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually with two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their support. They both said that the War on Drugs isn't working, but the problem is even worse than I thought because most federal agencies get extra money to fight the War on Drugs. It's not just the obvious ones like the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA. It's the little guys too, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are addicted to drug war funding.
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