The Final Wake-Up Call: Planet Earth

A United Nations panel of scientists and experts is releasing a report that they are labeling the 'Final Wake-up Call' to the international community on population, resource consumption, climate change, and the extinction of life on the planet.

The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are "among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century," he said.

The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those that the UN issues on the environment and called it "the final wake-up call to the international community."

LINK TO ARTICLE

Pollution, predicted fresh water shortfalls (drinking water shortages), threatened species including some that are critical to the food chain (in our oceans)...consumption of resources on a scale that is unsustainable...do we really need to change the way we live, consume, and interact with our environment? the air, the water, the oceans, the forests?

Accountability for our part in the current state of the world is not something that it seems large sections of the population care to consider. It is what is right in front of them that matters, and perhaps that is part of our human nature. Denial is, however, becoming a luxury that we can all ill afford.

Extinction rates currently are 100x as fast as previous periods of mass extinction found in the fossil record. Those mass extinction periods came as results of major shock to the planet such as massive volcanic activity. What is our major shock? certainly many believe it is CO2 levels, along with our other pollutants that kill off biodiversity, over fishing the oceans to unsustainable levels, over killing of mammal species for food medicine and trade, and the wiping out of entire habitats.

The planet is one massive system and everything is interlocked. We cannot change one thing without affecting the whole, without ultimately affecting ourselves. It is in our best and own interests to find, cultivate, or return to better ways of living that take into account the cycles and systems that we influence and are dependent upon. It is in our interests to use resources in better ways, to expect industry to share these values, to find ways to live cleanly without pollution. It is in our best interest to be, and act, as stewards of the earth and of the multitude of life forms upon it. We are the species on this earth that has the ability to effect change on massive scales. And we have. Now it is time for us to cultivate the responsibility and stewardship that comes with that ability.

Artificial Life Forms?

A scientist is expected to announce early this next week that he has actually created the first artificial life form. By learning the language of our genetic code, now scientists are beginning to write in that code. The result, and never before seen DNA strand that will be transplanted into a bacteria cell which it will then take over.

What follows, if this proves true, is a perpetual model for countless other DNA experiments to easily follow.

Some quotes from the Guardian Unlimited story:

Mr Venter said he had carried out an ethical review before completing the experiment. "We feel that this is good science," he said. He has further heightened the controversy surrounding his potential breakthrough by applying for a patent for the synthetic bacterium.

Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organisation, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?"

He said Mr Venter was creating a "chassis on which you could build almost anything. It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons".

Now, let's stop to ponder all the possibilities...

Bah, nobody has ever really thought out the consequences of using any of science we currently have, and that really hasn't harmed us has it? How bad could it be?

Mr Venter believes designer genomes have enormous positive potential if properly regulated. In the long-term, he hopes they could lead to alternative energy sources previously unthinkable. Bacteria could be created, he speculates, that could help mop up excessive carbon dioxide, thus contributing to the solution to global warming, or produce fuels such as butane or propane made entirely from sugar.

"We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking," he said. "We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can't expect everybody to be happy."

Yeah, see, we are going to get a new value system for life. So, you know, there is that trade off. I mean...what the hell does a 'new value system for life' mean?

The value of life seems to be relative to who is doing the valuing. In a world of questionable ethics and morals of those in the positions to use this new science, or more pointedly profit by it, one has to assume that those that can will. Where do we then, as a nation and as a world, put boundaries? where do we ensure that our values are not compromised in the name of money, power, or any so called quick fixes to the complicated problems that we create for ourselves. Will we use such knowledge for the greater good of all? or will we use it like a new drug to hide our symptoms, to ignore our deeper issues of how we conduct ourselves in relationship to the planet and one another. In a society more and more dependent on solutions in a pill what will the pharmaceutical corporations be selling you?

Chimera Project: Slippery Slope or Breakthrough?

Regulators in Britain have given the 'ok' in theory for researchers to go forth in creating human-animal hybrid embryos to search for cures for serious illnesses.

But here emerges the slippery slope that genetic manipulation of human DNA has opened to us as a species. Today it is research for cures of diseases like parkinson's, but what will it be tomorrow? It isn't hard to project what some might dream of doing because the possibilities may begin to exist.

Here is a link to today's news article: Human-Animal Hybrids

From the Mouths of Babes..Or in this case Dick

NEW TREK FILM - 2008

GET ALL THE DIRT ON IT HERE: LINKY!

No End In Sight: Documentary

Time to Speak Up about Air Quality and to Protect It!

Read about your public comment time to the EPA....find out about how our air quality is already far below what the EPA scientists and our doctors are calling for...find out about how Corporations are, and will continue, to lobby for less regulation and poorer standards for Air quality....

Sign the Petition and Learn More at: http://www.adoptthesky.org/

Landmark in Corporate Welfare

Here is a story about how you and I and everyone else are getting raped in our pocket book and our children's future by paying pharmaceutical companies WHATEVER they want for the drugs that go to Medicare recipients.

In fact, there are lists of prices for these drugs are secret and not shared. In fact, our government signed away its rights to edit the list of drugs they will pay for through this subsidy, pretty much ensuring that no cheaper, but no less effective, drugs will make it onto the list. Nor are they able to buy the drugs from the same companies, but made in another country for a pittance of what they cost to us here.

In the first year of this new program it is reported that pharmaceutical companies increased the prices of these drugs dramatically and that their profits have soared by 45%.

Smile, you've been f*k'd while you were trusting your elected officials to look out for you.

Corporate Welfare should be a Crime.

From the Christian Science Monitor: Linky Bit

CSM

By Mark Lange Wed Jul 18, 4:00 AM ET

San Francisco - Medicare Part D makes it easier for America's elderly to buy prescription drugs. It also gives drug companies a free ride on the backs of the next generation.

Social Security and other entitlements already threaten the nation's fiscal health. So why would Congress make Medicare Part D a landmark in corporate welfare? It may be a financial debacle, but it's a lobbyist's dream. Part D is a multibillion-dollar entitlement for the pharmaceutical industry that taxpayers will be underwriting for the rest of their lives, or until Congress fixes it, whichever comes first.

The White House and Congress claimed the private structure of the program would lead to lower drug prices. In fact, since the program began last year, the opposite has happened, thanks to the lobbying wizards of K Street. A fragmented band of more than 1,400 Part D insurance plans has had little negotiating power with the drug companies. Nor do those plans have much reason to bargain: Part D subsidizes patients on extended and expensive medication regimes at 80 percent.

Most remarkably the bill that Congress pushed through in 2003 didn't let the government negotiate drug prices. Why? Because the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) got no authority to define the "formulary" list of drugs for which Medicare will pay. Absent a credible threat to drop from that list any overpriced drugs that have branded alternatives – which the vast majority has – the government lost its negotiating stick.

Surprise! No price competition. So drug companies were able to raise rates for brand-name medications (that have comparable alternatives, but for which there are no generics) at twice the rate of inflation in the first six months of the program.

...snip...

When the bill was being debated, taxpayers were told the program would cost $400 billion. Today, realistic estimates put the figure at more than $1 trillion. The big drug companies, of course, love this. All those multiyear investments in lobbying have paid off – allowing them to use your tax dollars to boost their earnings.

..snip...

Kind of outrageous, isn't it? but who in congress is buying into this for us? who did we elect that would rather stiff your for the benefit of Corporate Welfare? And what could you do about it today?

Check out the top 20 list of congressional recipients of pharmaceutical lobbying largess in the last election, compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org). You'll see some familiar names: Sens. Orrin Hatch, Edward Kennedy, Joseph Lieberman, and Hillary Clinton.

During your next lunch break, call their offices. Ask their staffers why a failure to create real price competition in Medicare Part D should cost taxpayers and coddle drug companies. Or ask them how long the program can survive centrally planned profiteering. And you should suggest to them the following reforms:

First, sell medicines used by Medicaid "dual-eligible" patients to Part D plans at the lower Medicaid rates. Second, let congressional watchdogs monitor prices paid by Part D plans versus Medicaid's best prices (today both price lists are confidential). Third, let Medicare leverage global efficiencies by buying FDA-approved drugs made at FDA-inspected facilities overseas (they're the same pills, made by the same companies, at a fraction of the cost). And finally, fund staffing for the Food and Drug Administration to close its record backlog of more than 850 applications for generics, which typically cost 20 to 70 percent less.

..snip...

Bio Terror, 2001, Fascism, and You

I was wondering the other day about those Anthrax attacks back in 2001. You know, the ones that happened right at the moment Congress was thinking about the first Patriot Act. You know, the moment right before we took a hard turn away from our Rights and towards Fascism in this country. You know, that attacks that targeted a key congressman opposed to this legislation and to TV anchors. You know, prime targets to push FEAR and push that agenda for a particular group?

I was wondering about those reports that said the Anthrax was made by someone who had high levels of "considerable skill in microbiology and access to equipment". Experts in this field have said that even with staff and access to good equipment it would have taken them at least a year to come up with something this good. In fact, it was said that even the US Govt. doesn't admit to having such an advanced bio-weapon like this, as far as anthrax goes. And that there were only 4 or 5 people in the wealthy nation of ours that could have pulled it off.

So what happened to the investigation? 5 year later and we the people and congress are still waiting. What is the latest news? Heh, this is good stuff. The FBI has destroyed evidence, has not updated Congress on the investigation, and even now said that they are not GOING to update them on it.

The picture that is being painted is sorta bleak. And leads one to conclude, in fact, the logical and dark truth of it.

Read about this story here: Daily Kos

Houston Chronicle Cartoon Editorial on the "Feel Good" policy of the Admin

Highschooler Schools Bill O'Reilly

Watch it...

Wonkett on the OVP

Loved the Wonkette rap on the VP here: Linky

so much so that I want to put it here, at least in part. Enjoy...

The Cheney Story

Dick Cheney is so evil, the Post has started a blog about him. In a lengthy four-part series, the Post will lay bare the Dick Cheney story, and basically summarize and clarify everything we already know about him with but new, entertainingly terrifying anecdotes and interviews.

Like yesterday’s story of Dan Quayle visiting the new Veep in 2001:

“I said, ‘Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising … you’ll be going to the funerals,’ ” Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, ‘We’ve all done it.’ “ Cheney “got that little smile,” Quayle said, and replied, “I have a different understanding with the president.”

Cheney was not content to sit around and wait for Bush to die — after all, Bush jogs, it could be years yet, and there’s only a limited supply of orphan blood to keep Dick on his swollen, clotted feet. Instead, Dick invented a new job for the Vice President. He would not be content to bang gavels in the Senate and appear on Celebrity Jeopardy, as his predecessors had.

Cheney preferred, and Bush approved, a mandate that gave him access to “every table and every meeting,” making his voice heard in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” Bolten said.

He keeps all his papers in ridiculous cartoon safes, and stamps every document that he sees with “Top Secret” — like even the lunch menu and those little certificates they hand out when the Little League World Series champions meet the president. He asserts that he is, himself, his own branch of government. Here, for a laugh, is how he responded to the collapse of the second tower on 9/11:

Cheney made no sound. “I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed,” said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

While everyone else cried or shit their pants, Cheney decided to hire some lawyers, reinterpret constitutional law, and figure out how to get away with throwing away most of a century’s worth of war crimes precedent and policy.

As a couple other occasional stories have shown us, David Addington is the second-most evil man in the administration. Alberto Gonzales, as usual, comes off as a fucking moron willing to allow his name to be attached to any crazy document drafted by the OVP.

Dick Cheney also didn’t care about black people. A particuarly fun subplot of the first Bush term is the way NSA adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell never had any clue what the hell Cheney was doing, as he took complete control over policies supposedly under the purviews of their agencies. All documents prepared for Rice were secretly funneled to Cheney, and she and Powell seemed to learn what their administration was up to primarily by watching CNN.

Today’s installment is all about torture. If you happen to be interrogating someone who may not have anything to do with al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or the Iraqi insurgency, or maybe just looks funny, it’s very important reading. FYI, you can do almost anything you want to him.

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

We can’t believe those left-wing loonies in Cheney’s office would dare to restrict our boys from using every tool at their disposal during a time of war. If the CIA wants to cover suspected terrorists in honey and bury them up to their necks then goddammit they must have a pretty good reason to! Jack Bauer blah blah!

(Rice and Powell learned about that memo two years later, after reading about it in the Post — they are totally the comic relief of this whole story.)

Thankfully, even as Cheney’s power ebbs, ever so slightly, in these final years of the Bush presidency, as he finds himself often reduced to merely standing in bushes hundreds of court-mandated feet from journalists assembled at press conferences, even as reasonable-by-comparison officials join the administration, even as Bush himself has seemed to soften his “I can torture anyone I want for any reason” stance, we can all rest easy knowing that the damage he’s down to our nation, and the entire world, will not soon heal in this lifetime.

A year after Bush announced at a news conference that “I’d like to close Guantanamo,” plans to expand it are proceeding. Senior officials said Cheney, standing nearly alone, has turned back strong efforts — by Rice, England, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson, among others — to give the president what he said he wants.

Also he totally shot an old man in the face last year just for fun.

Angler [WP]

The Greatest Unknown Hollywood Contributor

This was such a pleasure to read that I am going to copy it here in full..

Article Source

Reel life was his real love

He may be unknown to moviegoers, but retiring Crossroads School teacher Jim Hosney has had a profound influence on what they see.
By Shawn Hubler, Times Staff Writer
June 27, 2007


'I actually have a theory that everything in Hollywood is directly or indirectly influenced by Jim Hosney.'
— Zooey Deschanel, actor
FOR a month now, young Hollywood has been planning a retirement party. The guest list spans the pop culture landscape — studio executives, novelists, Academy Award winners, sitcom writers, musicians. One proposal has Martin Scorsese jumping out of a cake.

The honoree will take the bus unless he can hitch a ride with someone. A lively, bespectacled bachelor who lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment, he can't drive. Nor can he afford a limo, though some of the most successful people in show business attribute their very sensibility as artists to him.

"Where do you begin? He shaped the way I think," said Ben Cosgrove, Paramount Pictures' senior vice president of production.

"I would not be the person I am today without him, or make the films I make," said Brett Morgen, the Oscar-nominated co-director of "On the Ropes" and "The Kid Stays in the Picture."

"Single biggest influence of my life," said screenwriter Alex Kurtzman ("Mission: Impossible III," "Transformers").

"I actually have a theory," said actor Zooey Deschanel, "that everything in Hollywood is directly or indirectly influenced by Jim Hosney. And if it's not the case, it should be."

Jim Hosney doesn't work in show business. He's not a critic or an emeritus studio head. In one of the sharper ironies of a field often disparaged as mindless and superficial, the most influential Hollywood player you've probably never heard of is a 63-year-old English teacher. This month, after a career that has spanned nearly four decades, he'll be taking early retirement from Santa Monica's Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, where he has taught high school film studies and literature for 25 years.

Before Crossroads, he spent a decade at the Westlake School for Girls (now Harvard-Westlake), and, since 1980, he has taught graduate-level film history on the side at the American Film Institute. Over time, he has become a minor cult figure on Los Angeles' show-business-heavy Westside, not only for his singular approach to great books and popular culture, but also for the legions of tastemakers who credit their understanding of L.A.'s signature art form — storytelling — to him.

Hosney's pop culture proteges number in the hundreds — writers, performers, moviemakers, film scholars at USC and UCLA. Jack Black and Maya Rudolph did some of their earliest work for him. So did producers Bryan Burk ("Lost," "Alias"), Jason Blumenthal ("The Pursuit of Happyness"), Danielle Renfrew ("Waitress") and Matthew Greenfield ("Chuck & Buck," "The Good Girl").

"There was not a single course he taught that I did not take," said filmmaker Jonathan Kasdan ("In the Land of Women"). Melissa Clark, novelist and creator of the children's TV show "Braceface," remembers being so inspired in his class that she'd turn papers in late just for the excuse to drive by his apartment. "It was like I had a brain crush," she said.

The costume designer from "Being John Malkovich" is a former student. So is the guitarist for the seminal '90s punk band Jawbreaker. So is the founder and organizer of Cinespia, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery outdoor film fest. Former Hosney students write for Vanity Fair, for this newspaper, for influential blogs such as the L.A.-based TruthDig. That's not counting the AFI graduate students or Crossroads parents who have consulted him on projects, from Dustin Hoffman, who drew from Hosney for his portrayal of a professor in "Stranger Than Fiction," to Michael Mann, who sought Hosney's opinion, among others, in putting together the Oscar montage he directed last year.

"He's one of the most important figures in contemporary film who is largely unknown," said Ron Yerxa, a producer of "Election" and "Little Children" and a longtime friend.





HOSNEY'S self-assessment is less dramatic.

"I'm a teacher," he said with a shrug. "I teach."

He was raised in Los Angeles, the younger son of Syrian immigrants, an apartment manager and a seamstress. As a child, he lived for stories — epic novels, double features.

"I wanted life to be like a musical," he remembered, sitting in his office at Crossroads. "I was always disappointed that people didn't burst out singing on the street."

In 1961, he graduated from George Washington High School with a full scholarship to Occidental College, where he eventually entered a doctoral program in Anglo American literature.

"I wanted to teach at the college level," Hosney recalled, "but while I was at graduate school at Oxy, I took a job, like a long-term substitute teacher, at the Westridge School, a girls' school in Pasadena."

Experienced only as a university teaching assistant, Hosney treated the teenage girls as if they were college students. It taught him a lesson.

"Never underestimate your students," he says now. "Those kids were great."

By 1970, he had taken that lesson to Westlake along with another he had learned at Occidental: that the study of literature needn't be limited to books.

At the time, Hosney said, cinema was just beginning to be taken seriously by scholars. At Occidental, his mentor — Marsha Kinder, who is now a USC professor of critical studies — had showed him "that movies are just as complicated artistically as novels, that they can be treated as works of art."

"He came in with his giant Afro and tie-dyed T-shirt, and he was about as passionate about literature and film as you could expect any human being to be, and still be coherent," recalled Nathan Reynolds, the now-retired headmaster who hired him at Westlake.

Hosney says he and the students learned together.

"I showed movies I'd always wanted to see but had never seen," he remembered. "We saw Vincente Minnelli, 'Some Came Running.' Douglas Sirk stuff — I remember teaching a class in film melodrama and showing 'Imitation of Life,' and they were all in tears by the end of the movie. But also Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Robert Bresson."

His courses focused on critical thinking and writing, he said, but grew to incorporate other disciplines.

"You could teach a class where, say, you were looking at American horror films but at the same time also reading Poe, Hawthorne, other American authors who wrote horror. You could show how the two mediums are connected, show the process of adaptation. Show how film is a cultural construct, what it says about American society."

As Hosney spoke, he moved forward. A compact man with cropped, dark hair and rectangular glasses, he is famously animated when he lectures. He leans into his audience, almost as if he is about to climb it; his long hands move as if painting a picture. At his back was a framed poster, in French, for the film "Taxi Driver."

"Why, for example, is 'Psycho' made in 1960?" he asked excitedly. "Why does 'Psycho' make more money than any other of Hitchcock's films?

"Well, it's the Kennedy election. The country is changing. And by now, the public is used to television. Go back and look at 'Psycho.' There are incredible sequences in it, but there are also some very stagy, talky sequences that come right out of television…."

And with that, he was off — the conventions of TV, the films of the '60s — until finally, he circled back to his original question and the answer Truffaut once got from Hitchcock.

"Hitchcock," he said, leaning in, "wanted to see if he could shoot a movie the way he had shot shows on TV." He smiled with such delight, it was almost as if he hadn't been teaching this insight for decades, almost as if you, the listener, had deduced it independently.





HOSNEY left the Westlake School in 1980. He had hoped to work in film with his friend Yerxa, but the position fell through. He quickly returned to teaching, by night at AFI and by day at Los Angeles High School, where he might have stayed, he added, had the public school credentialing process been simpler. But then he was offered the Crossroads job in 1982.

Crossroads was 10 years old but still scarcely more than a funky start-up, and with little of its current cachet. The students were less likely to be children of celebrities than of psychologists and dentists. The campus was in a warehouse district; a body shop had been cleared to make way for Hosney's classroom.

But what the school lacked in glamour, Hosney made up in intellectual passion. "He was a teacher who inspired us like no other," said Greenfield, now senior vice president of production at Fox Searchlight, who was a freshman when Hosney arrived.

Hosney lined his walls with posters of Freud and the Sex Pistols. He adopted a series of stray dogs with glitzy names (Rona, Madonna, Rocco) and brought them to school. Especially striking, students recall, was the way he found value even in their most off-base answers.

"He'd actually tremble when someone made an astute observation — he'd kind of lift his palm in the air with his forefinger extended and cry, 'Yes!' " recalled Blake Schwarzenbach, an ex-punk guitarist who now teaches English at New York's Hunter College.

"He made you feel smart, and, as a result, you got smarter," said Matt Tyrnauer, who is now a filmmaker and a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

Eagerly, they applied Susan Sontag's concept of fascist art to the work of Steven Spielberg. "We'd watch 'La Chinoise' or 'Week-End' by Godard and then he'd have us read Marx," recalled Tyrnauer. "We were in the ninth grade!"

When a Los Feliz art house screened Sergio Leone's classic "Once Upon a Time in the West," he asked who wanted to see it with him and was swamped with takers; it was the first time many of the sheltered students had been east of the 405.

"I had a mini existential crisis as a 10th-grader," said Charlie Dahlgren, the son of two scientists who says he has spent most of his adult life toiling to write screenplays that live up to what he learned from Hosney. "NYU paled in comparison."

"I remember the first day I came to his class, we were watching 'The 400 Blows,' and Jim saying, 'What does this mean?' " said Kurtzman's screenwriting partner, Roberto Orci, the son of an advertising executive who moved to L.A. from Texas. "And the really smart kids going, 'It's the illusion of freedom, but the character is trapped by the ocean, so the illusion of freedom is actually enslavement.' I mean, we were, like, 16 or 17 years old."

Dustin Hoffman, who had four children in Hosney's classes, said his lectures "were like great performances. It was theater, and you were there to be part of it."

And to do your homework.

"I had this big project in 1987, my senior year, that I was flaking on," Jack Black remembered, half-joking. "And I thought from, like, buttering him up all year I'd have an extension? But he turned out to be kind of a hard-ass. And I think I cried."

Hosney's records indicate that Black ended that year with an overall C+. Black said the blown final was such a source of discomfort that he initially avoided returning The Times' phone calls for this story.

"All roads led to me flunking," he confessed. "But it's a testament to the power of Hosney that I do not hold it against him. I really respect the man."

His most avid students dubbed themselves "Hosneyites," sneaking into his evening AFI classes and competing for the privilege of driving him there after school. (Traumatized by a high school accident in which he wrecked a friend's car, Hosney never earned a license.) Rare, however, is the Crossroads student with a memory of him anywhere but a theater, passenger seat or classroom.

"He was such an enigma," recalled actor Simon Helberg ("Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"), who as a teen studied Hosney so closely that he can still perfectly impersonate the teacher's big, wheezing laugh and signature exclamation — "amaaaaazing!"

"We were always trying to figure him out."





"I don't think they were missing anything," Hosney said, laughing. "I think when you become your job, then that, in a sense, becomes your life."

His brother, he says, lives nearby; he has three nephews and a goddaughter. ("She has a beautiful voice, and I used to give her musicals," he said. "Vincente Minnelli musicals. You know, he was called the Oscar Wilde of Hollywood.")

He teaches a monthly film seminar for Crossroads parents and alumni in his off-hours. For several years he went regularly to the movies with a group of fellow educators. ("We called ourselves the Westside Film Critics Association," Crossroads headmaster Roger Weaver said with a laugh.)

And some students have become friends in adulthood. Hosney moderates a book club for Eve Gerber, a former student who is married to a Brentwood producer. He officiated in a civil capacity at the 2002 marriage of documentary filmmaker Samantha Counter to her former classmate Kurtzman.

With all his contacts, however, he says he has been tempted only once or twice by show business. "I wrote a screenplay once with a friend, and it was disastrous," he said.

"I'm a teacher," he reiterated. The choice has had both rewards and drawbacks. According to court records, Hosney has declared bankruptcy twice in the last decade, most recently this year.

"It's my fault," he replied when questioned about it. "I wish it weren't there, but I'm just a bad person with credit cards — clothes, travel, electronic equipment, the opera." His court file shows his debt to be roughly equivalent to a year's tuition at Crossroads.

"It's a real tragedy of our culture that teachers get paid so little," said the 34-year-old Dahlgren, who, with several other Hosneyites, is exploring ways to help their mentor as part of the retirement party they're planning. "Because if this were a meritocracy, this guy would be a jillionaire."





ON a recent afternoon, Hosney sat in a darkened theater, long fingers rummaging through his buttered popcorn, waiting to see "28 Weeks Later," the zombie flick. A string of action movie trailers blared from the screen, clip after clip of the human race being threatened with annihilation.

"Do you notice," he whispered, "that in almost all of these, a superhero is needed to save us? There is no idea that people en masse might do anything about it. Isn't that interesting?"

Hosney said he "was never, never interested in Hollywood as a form of business." As art, however, he can discuss it for hours.

He thinks the film "Zodiac" was underrated by critics and that "Fight Club" was a kind of practical joke "in which a studio paid millions of dollars to make a film that attacks everything Hollywood stands for." The Desert Storm movie "Jarhead," he said, "is 'Waiting for Godot' set in the desert." The first of the final episodes of "The Sopranos" — the one involving the drunken weekend in the Adirondacks — he compares to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Hosney's former students say they can no longer watch a movie without imagining what he'd say about it. (Let alone make one. Kurtzman and Orci, for instance, swear they were channeling Hosney when they tried a European-style nonlinear narrative with "Mission: Impossible III.")

"He's like a little friend on your shoulder," said Amanda Micheli, who is now 35 and a documentary filmmaker in San Francisco. "It was like he opened up a way of seeing for me."

Now, she and others note, a generation of his students is coming of age throughout the entertainment world with Hosney figuratively on their shoulders.

"You constantly run into Hosneyites," said Paramount's Cosgrove, whose last job was as co-president of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's production company, Section Eight, which produced "Syriana," "The Good German" and "Good Night, and Good Luck."

"Brett Morgen was in a meeting across the hall from me last week. I talk all the time to my classmate Jason Blumenthal, who's a producer. My best friend, Brian Rousso, who was in his class, wrote the original screenplay for the movie 'The Reaping.' "

"He just infused every student he had with a great love of filmmakers," Rousso said. "You walked out of that class with such an enormous appreciation of cinema."

So it was on that afternoon as Hosney sat in the theater, the human race battling the zombies, the flickering light on his rectangular eyeglasses telling a tale from a land far away. On one level, it was just a movie. But on another, it was the most abiding of Hollywood stories: the story of the man who loved stories, and whom the storytellers came to love back, a story from the heart of L.A.

shawn.hubler@latimes.com

The VP Villian of Environmental Destruction

Here is a lovely piece devoted to Dick, our beloved VP, and what a bang up job he has done to kill of endangered fish, make sure nuclear waste will makes it way into our national aquifer, and pillaged national resources and habitat so businesses can make money off of the public trust.

Full Article

..and a snippit for fun...

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.

An estimated 77,000 Salmon died along the banks of the Klamath river due to the lack of water.

Lieberman vs. Iran

If you missed Joe Lieberman's tough talk on attacking Iran, you can get the recap from General Wesley Clark here:

Link here

After wrongly supporting George W. Bush's strategic blunder of attacking Iraq, and continuing to support Bush's failed policies after the invasion, Senator Joe Lieberman made irresponsible comments this weekend regarding military action against Iran.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Lieberman said, "If [the Iranians] don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing."

This type of "tough-talk" by the Bush Administration and folks like Senator Joe Lieberman is why VoteVets.org and I collaborated to create StopIranWar.com, calling for heavy diplomatic, economic, and political action to discourage the acquisition of nuclear capabilities by the Iranian government.

Senator Lieberman's saber rattling does nothing to help dissuade Iran from aiding Shia militias in Iraq, or trying to obtain nuclear capabilities. In fact, it's highly irresponsible and counter-productive, and I urge him to stop.

This kind of rhetoric is irresponsible and only plays into the hands of President Ahmadinejad, and those who seek an excuse for military action. What we need now is full-fledged engagement with Iran. We should be striving to bridge the gulf of almost 30 years of hostility and only when all else fails should there be any consideration of other options. The Iranians are very much aware of US military capabilities. They don't need Joe Lieberman to remind them that we are the militarily dominant power in the world today.

Only someone who never wore the uniform or thought seriously about national security would make threats at this point. What our soldiers need is responsible strategy, not a further escalation of tensions in the region. Senator Lieberman must act more responsibly and tone down his threat machine.

Visit StopIranWar.com, and sign the petition to President Bush today!

We cannot let people like Joe Lieberman dictate the terms of this debate.

Kidney Dialysis and Pop Can Tabs

I was recently asked about the collection of pop can tabs as some sort of donation for towards kidney dialysis for those in need.

A little research led to the discover that, even though many actually practice collecting pop can tabs for this purpose, it is a hoax.

Here is what the Kidney Foundation of Ohio says about it in their FAQ's:

Should I save my pop can tabs to help pay for dialysis?

This is a rumor that has been traveling the country for years. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, pop tabs will not buy a single minute of dialysis time for a kidney patient. In the early 70's, Medicare began paying for 80% of the cost of dialysis treatments. In general, the patient is responsible for the remaining 20%. We tell interested "tab savers" that if they would like to assist a kidney patient, save the entire can, recycle them and send the proceeds to the Kidney Foundation. We have several direct assistance programs available to help patients in need.

Evidently The National Kidney Foundation has been beating this rumor with a stick for years, but it still won't die. It has survived for at least two decades, and I have even found reference to the practice (actively advertised) on a children's hospital site. The bottom line, just redeem those cans entirely and you would be donating a lot more to the cause if this is how you would like to help.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Prometheun

Sci-Fi Writers Join War on Terror

Yes, that's right, now you too can fight terrorism for the homeland by having a doctorate and a penchant for writing and reading.

Full Article Here

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers.

"We spend our entire careers living in the future," says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they "need people to think of crazy ideas," Andrews says.

The writers make up a group called Sigma, which Andrews put together 15 years ago to advise government officials. The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin's Radio.

Now, the Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government's latest top mission of combating terrorism.

NASA SCIENTIST: Climate Near Tipping Point

Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.

With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."

The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

The forecast effects include "increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones," according to the NASA announcement.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

Will Ferrel as the Prez

Global Warming

Save The Internet

Making Your Kitchen Less Toxic

Or...Longevity Starts in the Kitchen.

I read this article on being more healthy and ridding toxins from our foods and kitchens and thought it was worth posting.

Article Link

Eating for longevity begins in the kitchen. You may be eating only organic, antioxidant-rich foods, but if you cooked your food on the toxic surface of your stovetop in a carcinogenic no-stick pan, you just might be doing more harm than good. Find out how to make over your kitchen for health and long life!

Cut the Grease Without the Toxins
When you are facing a stovetop with a buildup of baked-on grease, don’t turn to commercial oven and stovetop cleaners - that is like cleaning with poison.

Instead, try baking soda. Just sprinkle baking soda on your stovetop, let it sit for five minutes and then scour the surface with either steel wool or scrubber. For the stubborn spots that refuse to be removed, try spraying this mixture on: mix dishwashing liquid, borax, and warm water together; let it sit for 20 minutes, and then scour it.

Microwave: Nothing to Rave About
People in the U. S. think microwaves are an ingenious time-saving device and wonder how anyone ever lived without one. Think again!

Microwaves use super-fast particles to literally radiate the contents of water inside food and bring it to boil. Not only has microwave use been linked to causing infertility in men, but it also denatures many of the essential proteins in the food making them virtually indigestible.

If you must, use the low setting just to heat the foods. Or better yet, get a small toaster oven or steam oven and warm your foods. Take your time and warm up your food in a safe and healthy way.

Poisonous Pots and Pans
Are your pots and pans poisoning you? If you are using copper or aluminum cookware, they might be. These metals interact with heat and food, and leach into your diet; gradually these will accumulate in your body, sometimes reaching the point of toxicity.

Toxic levels of aluminum have been linked to memory loss, headaches, indigestion, and brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. High levels of copper can debilitate the immune system and enable cancer cells to proliferate.

After scouring with abrasives, even stainless steel can release small amounts of toxic metals like chromium and nickel. Nonstick pans - although convenient in the kitchen - contain Teflon, a plastic that in recent years has been linked to immune disorders and possible cancer conditions.

My suggestion is to use cookware with porcelain enamel coating or made of glass, cast iron, or lead-free, terra-cotta clay.

Bad News About Canned Goods
In today’s industrialized world, it is more important than ever to search out fresh food, as much for the health benefits of locally grown produce as for the health dangers presented by the alternative.

Canned foods, though easier to use than cooking from scratch, are a threat to your health. The substance bisphenol A, used to line food cans, is classified as an endocrine disruptor, a compound that can act like a hormone when it enters the human system.

Scientists have discovered that exposure to these chemicals can contribute to prostate cancer, breast cancer, cystic ovaries, and endometriosis.

I hope you receive the longevity rewards that come from making over your kitchen! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you live long, live strong, and live happy!

—Dr. Mao

George Tenet interviewed by John Stewart

Enjoy

Migrations of Animals Confused...

Scientists are now saying that Global Warming is the cause of the internal biological clocks of animals all the way from migratory birds to whales that are either mistiming their migrations or not bothering to even make them anymore as the seasonal changes around them become less distinct.

The bottom line for these species is that it leaves them vulnerable to being decimated by cold snaps and dramatic changes in their environment because they haven't moved on to their normal safer migratory grounds. Many need these various breeding, wintering, and stop over places to survive.

Full Article from Reuters

George Washington's Blog: 9/11 in Review

Here is a perspective that some will be familiar with, and others will not.

George Washington's Blog

Impeachment?

Where is the buzz on Impeachment these days? look no further and check out this link.

The Buzz

Electric Sports Car Rolls Out

A sports car that can go from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds — and is 100% electric. You have to plug it in for a recharge every 250 miles or so, but it's a small sacrifice for something that gets an equivalent of 135 miles per gallon (conversion of electric energy into gallons of gas gives the mpg amount).

Check it out at Tesla Motors Here

Oh, yeah, 2007 models have already sold out but you can try for 2008. All you need is 100 grand...

Bill Moyers is BACK

Legendary broadcaster Bill Moyers returns to PBS in this new series, which also features a blog and a site with free transcripts and clips. Bill Moyers has only been blogging for like, a week, and he's already the blogosphere's favorite blogger! He's that sexy.

Bill's Site

Watch the first episode on selling the war, and how The relatively small Knight-Ridder outfit consistently got it right. While the Washington Post and the NY Times got it wrong. Moyers does a very good job at pointing this out.

Arctic ice cap melting 30 years ahead of forecast

For all the non-believers out there...this just in...

Linky-bit

The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050.

No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."

That is because the ice reflects light and heat; when it is gone, the much darker land or sea will absorb more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said.

Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel.

"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said in a telephone interview.

..snip...

"It appears we're on pace about 30 years earlier than expected to reach a state where we don't have sea ice or at least not very much in late summer in the Arctic Ocean," he said.

He discounted the notion that the sharp warming trend in the Arctic might be due to natural climate cycles. "There aren't many periods in history that are this dramatic in terms of natural variability," Scambos said.

He said he had no doubt that this was caused in large part by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which he said was the only thing capable of changing Earth on such a large scale over so many latitudes.

...snip...

"We just barely now, I think, have enough time and enough collective will to be able to get through this century in good shape, but it means we have to start acting now and in a big way."

Goldman Prize Winners put it all on the line...

Have you ever heard about this Prize? Neither had I...

Read on...

Full Article

The digital age might allow us to transcend geography, but real places -- places far and near, exotic and humble -- still matter. Just ask the six winners of the 2007 Goldman Prize, who risk their reputations, their livelihoods, and their lives to protect very particular pieces of turf. Whether they're fighting for a stand of big-leaf mahogany in the remote Peruvian Amazon, a family farm in Ireland, a stretch of boreal forest in Canada, or an incomparable fishing stream in Iceland, they're committed to the dirt beneath their feet, and their dedication has deep roots.

"We knew we were going to lose everything we had," says Irish farmer Willie Corduff, who was jailed for opposing a gas pipeline on his land. "It wasn't a lot, but it was what was handed down to us, so it was an old tradition. And we loved where we lived. So I said, 'Look, I have to stand up for this.'"

Each year, the Goldman Environmental Prize honors such extraordinary dedication. The prize was established in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman (Richard Goldman founded Goldman Insurance Services in San Francisco, and Rhoda Goldman was a descendant of jeans-maker Levi Strauss). Winners represent every major region of the world -- Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South and Central America, and island nations -- and are nominated each year by environmental organizations.

The Phenomena of Deserted Bee Hives

There is a lot of these stories lately, including news from Europe, Asia, and Hawaii that bees are up and leaving their hives their young their honey and their queens. Also, parasites that normally attack hives or take over when bees abandon them are staying clear of these deserted hives far longer than they normally do.

Something is amiss, in a big way, and there are reports of losses of hives from 30% to 90%. This is not a good sign for Any of us.

Full Article

Snippetts....

"The bees were gone," David Hackenberg says. "The honey was still there. There's young brood (eggs) still in the hive. Bees just don't do that."

On that November night last year in the Florida field where he wintered his bees, Hackenberg found 400 hives empty. Another 30 hives were "disappearing, dwindling or whatever you want to call it," and their bees were "full of a fungus nobody's ever seen before."

The discovery by Hackenberg, 58, a beekeeper from Lewisburg, Pa., was the first buzz about a plague that now afflicts 27 states, from the East Coast to the West. Beekeepers report losses of 30% to 90% of their honeybee hives, according to a Congressional Research Service study in March. Some report total losses.

...snip....

Busy bees

The $15-billion-a-year honeybee industry is about more than honey: The nimble insects pollinate 90% to 100% of at least 19 kinds of fruits, vegetables and nuts nationwide, from almonds and apples to onions and broccoli.

"Basically, everything fun and nutritious on your table - fruits, nuts, berries, everything but the grains - require bee pollinators," Hackett says.

Beekeepers, who travel nationwide supplying pollinators to farmers, have been losing honeybees for a long time, mostly a result of suburbs snapping up habitat and the invasion in the 1980s of two foreign parasitic mite species. As a result, bee colonies have declined 60% since 1947, from an estimated 5.9 million to 2.4 million, says entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois.

Each year, in fact, the bee industry supplies at least 1 million queens and packages of bees to replace lost hives, according to a 2006 National Research Council report. And sudden losses of hives have been reported since the 1800s.

But colony collapse disorder differs from past outbreaks:

•Instead of dying in place, the bees abandon the hives, leaving behind the queen and young bees.

•Remaining bees eat sparsely and suffer the symptoms - high levels of bacteria, viruses and fungi in the guts - seen by Hackenberg.

•Collapses can occur within two days, Hackett says.

•Parasites wait unusually long to invade abandoned hives.

Daniel Weaver, head of the 1,500-member American Beekeeping Federation, estimates that about 600,000 of 2 million hives (a more conservative number than other estimates) nationwide have been lost.

...snip...

A colony collapse disorder working group based at Pennsylvania State University has become a central clearinghouse for all the suspected causes, which include:

•An overload of parasites, such as bloodsucking varroa mites, that have ravaged bees. The parasites reportedly spread to Hawaii only last week.

•Pesticide contamination. Hotly debated suspicion centers on whether "neonicotinoid" insecticides interfere with the foraging behavior of bees, leading them to abandon their hives.

•Fungal diseases such as Nosema ceranae, which is blamed for big bee losses in Spain. It was spotted by University of California-San Francisco researchers who were examining sample dead bees last week.

•The rigors of traveling in trucks from crop to crop.

Read the whole thing

WA State Clean Energy Rep.

Here's the introduction to an interview with Jay Inslee by David Roberts of Grist.

Full Article

Rep. Jay Inslee's two central passions, clean energy and global warming, received scant attention during his last eight years in Congress. Now, after a power shift on Capitol Hill, he's at the center of high-profile efforts to attack climate change and promote a new energy economy -- not to mention get his colleagues up to speed on the issues.

The Democrat from Washington state's first district, which encompasses suburbs north and west of Seattle, holds spots on two House committees that will play key roles in debates over how to tackle the climate crisis: the Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), and the new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, created this year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Happily, he's prepared. Inslee has focused on energy issues since the early 1970s and amassed a wonk's expertise. This fall, he will release a book called Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy, about the challenges and opportunities facing America as it navigates the twin crises of global warming and peak oil.

I caught up with Inslee at a Seattle café, where he enthusiastically dove into the weeds of energy and climate policy, all the while cautioning the environmental community to be realistic and understand that Congress is at the beginning of a long journey on these issues.

It is illegal to have a different opinion...

...than your own President.

Evidently this is the case, or that is what is being determined right now in court. But this is what is being argued in a case brought by two people who were ejected from a public appearance of the Prez because of an anti-war sticker on their bumper. No, they didn't heckle, according to the story, but since it was clear that they had a different opinion from the Commander-in-Chief they were booted.

It should be an inalienable right to disagree with anyone, particularly elected officials that represent us. George Orwell says 'i told you so'...

Link to Full Article

Stewart and Colbert Viewers Get the Facts Straight

Pew Survey Finds Most Knowledgeable Americans Watch 'Daily Show' and 'Colbert'-- and Visit Newspaper Sites

..and several years of war, many many Americans and Iraqis dead, and billions and billions spent and wasted or lost...and less than 1/3 of those polled could name one of the largest populations of Iraqi citizens? makes me want to shake my head at the level of ignorance. It also begs the question, are most people in the world this way? is it only a small percentage of the people that care to be informed about what is happening in the world? in their own country? in their own state or city? and why is that?

Full Article

A new survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.

Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

Told that Shia was one group of Muslims struggling in Iraq, only 32% of the total sample could name "Sunni" as the other key group.

J.R.R. Tolkien's New Book

...newly resurrected by his son Christopher, here is the new book coming out April 17th that follows the figure of Turin.

Watch the Online Preview with Art by Alan Lee

Full Article

You'd think the horns of the Valar had been sounded and the island of Numenor had risen from the Western Sea.

If that sentence means anything to you at all, you may already know that on April 17 the first book in 30 years to be published under the name JRR Tolkien is released worldwide. The Children of Hurin, started in 1918 but abandoned, has been 'reconstructed' by the writer's son Christopher.

The story promises to be darker than anything seen in Tolkien's other books, including scenes of incest and suicide. While his other work was influenced by English medieval literature, Hurin is more indebted to the Finnish national epic Kalevala

Bees Vs. Mobile Phones?

An eery quote by Einstein is in this article...in which he states that the disappearance of bees marks only 4 more years of life for us all...

Link to Article

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

Some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.

German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."

The case against handsets

Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.

Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.

Pleiades: The Seven Sisters

Brought to you by HUBBLE...

that thing rocks...

Yangtze River Beyond Repair?

Well, this shows little faith in the ability of Nature, or the planet, to heal itself. Now, in our lifetimes? well that could be very well stretching it. Until then, this is the reality on the ground...

Full Article

China's massive Yangtze river, a lifeline for tens of millions of people, is seriously polluted and the damage is almost irreversible, a state-run newspaper said Monday.

More than 370 miles of the river are in critical condition and almost 30 percent of its major tributaries are seriously polluted, the China Daily said, citing a report by the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

..snip..

"The impact of human activities on the Yangtze water ecology is largely irreversible," Yang Guishan, a researcher at the institute, was quoted as saying.

..snip...

The Yangtze accounts for 35 percent of China's total fresh water resources, the report said.

..snip..

The Yangtze is about 3,860 miles long and runs from the Tibetan plateau to the sea near Shanghai, passing through some of China's major cities, such as Chongqing and Nanjing.

Bumble Bees Dissappearing from Britain

Just as recently reported in the US, where honey bees are dissappearing from 22 States and threatening a breakdown in the ancient cycle of nature's pollination of fruits and vegetables, so too is this danger being realized in other parts of the world.

Full Article

Britain's bumblebee population is under threat in a crisis that could wipe out entire species and have a devastating knock-on effect on agriculture, scientists say.

The furry yellow-and-black creatures, essential for pollination, are being killed off by pesticides and agricultural intensification, which have cut back on hedgerows and removed their source of food.

"There just aren't enough flowers around," Professor Dave Goulson, the director of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust at the University of Stirling in Scotland, said on Monday.

"If we knock out an important group like bumblebees, it can have a huge knock-on impact on other things, such as the pollination of important crops and flowers."

Britain once had around 25 native species of bumblebee, but three of those have been wiped out in the past 50 years and 10 more are now "severely threatened," Goulson said.

"There are two that are teetering on the edge of extinction and could be gone in five to 10 years quite easily," he said.

The loss of species could lead to sweeping changes in Britain's countryside, with many rare plants disappearing and the production of crops such as raspberries, oil-seed rape, runner beans and broad beans sharply curtailed.

Contaminated Food Imports

The recent death of many American pets underlines a time for a wake up call. But not for pet food, but for all food that is imported into the country. Only a tiny percentage of the imported food into the US is inspected, and out of that a significant amount is found to have hazardous toxins and contaminants. So what are we consuming that we don't know about?

Full Article

Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected — yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption.

Frozen catfish from China, beans from Belgium, jalapenos from Peru, blackberries from Guatemala, baked goods from Canada, India and the Philippines — the list of tainted food detained at the border by the Food and Drug Administration stretches on.

Add to that the contaminated Chinese wheat gluten that poisoned cats and dogs nationwide and led to a massive pet food recall, and you've got a real international pickle. Does the United States have the wherewithal to ensure the food it imports is safe?

Food safety experts say no.

With only a minuscule percentage of shipments inspected, they say the nation is vulnerable to harm from abroad, where rules and regulations governing food production are often more lax than they are at home.

..snip..

Last month alone, FDA detained nearly 850 shipments of grains, fish, vegetables, nuts, spice, oils and other imported foods for issues ranging from filth to unsafe food coloring to contamination with pesticides to salmonella.

And that's with just 1.3 percent of the imports inspected. As for the other 98.7 percent, it's not inspected, much less detained, and goes to feed the nation's growing appetite for imported foods.

Each year, the average American eats about 260 pounds of imported foods, including processed, ready-to-eat products and single ingredients. Imports account for about 13 percent of the annual diet.

"Never before in history have we had the sort of system that we have now, meaning a globalization of the food supply," said Robert Brackett, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

..snip..

Consider this list of Chinese products detained by the FDA just in the last month: frozen catfish tainted with illegal veterinary drugs, fresh ginger polluted with pesticides, melon seeds contaminated with a cancer-causing toxin and filthy dried dates.

But even foods expected to be safe can harbor unexpected perils. Take wheat gluten: Grains and grain byproducts like it are rarely eaten raw and generally pose few health risks, since cooking kills bacteria and other pathogens.

Even so, the FDA can't say for sure whether the ingredient used in the pet foods was inspected after it arrived from China. And if the wheat gluten was, officials said, it wouldn't have been tested for melamine. Even though the chemical isn't allowed in food for pets or people, in any quantity, it previously wasn't believed toxic.

The Bear Whisperer...

...or, how one man has used food training to cross boundaries with the wild bears of Alaska. Another Treadwell? It must be an exhilarating experience, being with animals and particularly wild animals, is and can be a magical experience. The hard questions are when and how can it become a dangerous thing for the animals? we take for granted it is already dangerous for the man and that he excepts that danger as part of it. But when is it a true disservice to the wild?

Full Article

Fifty miles northwest of Anchorage, the roadless hills and swamps of the Yentna River Valley have for years hidden the secret of bear man Charlie Vandergaw.

Far from the bear-viewing spectacle of Katmai National Park — and farther still from the hype that made a celebrity of the late Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist who lived among the park's grizzly bears for more than a dozen seasons before he and his girlfriend were killed and partially eaten by a bear in 2003 — Vandergaw has quietly transformed himself into what Treadwell only dreamed of being: a true bear whisperer.

What goes on each summer at the retired Anchorage science teacher's remote homestead is so far from the ordinary as to be almost unbelievable. Visitors tell of him petting black and brown bears, playing with grizzly cubs while sows stand by, sitting on bears and teaching them tricks.

His own photographs show even more. They capture him easing to within feet of breeding grizzlies and nursing an injured brown bear.

Enemy of the State...?

Granted, this is one person's account of an event...and how a person got onto a 'List'...but this is still a messed up example of how all these new security measures are being used.

What does it take to be labeled a potential 'Terrorist Threat'... evidently all it takes is to either speak your mind, or be vocal for PEACE. Peace being a good antithesis of Terror this makes perfect sense.

From the political blog Balkinization:

Another Enemy of the People?

Mark Graber

I am posting the below with the permission of Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.

"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."

"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."

"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they=re going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical."

"I confess to having been furious that any American citizen would be singled out for governmental harassment because he or she criticized any elected official, Democrat or Republican. That harassment is, in and of itself, a flagrant violation not only of the First Amendment but also of our entire scheme of constitutional government. This effort to punish a critic states my lecture's argument far more eloquently and forcefully than I ever could. Further, that an administration headed by two men who had "had other priorities" than to risk their own lives when their turn to fight for their country came up, should brand as a threat to the United States a person who did not run away but stood up and fought for his country and was wounded in battle, goes beyond the outrageous. Although less lethal, it is of the same evil ilk as punishing Ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticizing Bush's false claims by "outing" his wife, Valerie Plaime, thereby putting at risk her life as well as the lives of many people with whom she had had contact as an agent of the CIA. ..."

"I have a personal stake here, but so do all Americans who take their political system seriously. Thus I hope you and your colleagues will take some positive action to bring the Administration's conduct to the attention of a far larger, and more influential, audience than I could hope to reach. "

Posted 11:17 AM by Mark Graber [link]

Katrina VandenHeuvel on the Colbert Report

Katrina VandenHeuvel doesn't mince words, and didn't on last night's Colbert Report, particularly when talking about the Iraq war "The Most colossal foreign policy disaster this country has ever experienced" and standing behind The Nation's coverage of and opposition to it from the get-go "We never lost our head — while too much of the media gave head....we need watchdogs, not lapdogs".

Solomon Island Raised by Tsunami Earthquake

The island of Ranongga has been raised by over 10 feet by last week's earthquake. Now, pristine coral reefs are sitting out of the water and dying. A way of life is in peril as fish and the diving industry that sustains the Solomon Islands is in serious jeopardy.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, all around the ring of fire there is intense activity. How will this increase is activity affect us all? It makes you wonder what will be next...

Full Article

The seismic jolt that unleashed the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying some of the world's most pristine coral reefs.

In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the 8.0 magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).

Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide.

Corals that used to form an underwater wonderland of iridescent blues, greens and reds now bleach under the sun, transforming into a barren moonscape surrounding the island.

The stench of rotting fish and other marine life stranded on the reefs when the seas receded is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral is dry and crunches underfoot.

Dazed villagers stand on the shoreline, still coming to terms with the cataclysmic shift that changed the geography of their island forever, pushing the shoreline out to sea by up to 70 metres.

Aid agencies have yet to reach Ranongga after the quake and tsunami that killed at least 34 people in the Pacific archipelago but an AFP reporter and photographer on a chartered boat witnessed the destruction first hand.

At Pienuna, on Ranongga's east coast, locals said much of their harbour had disappeared, leaving only a narrow inlet lined by jagged exposed coral reefs either side.

Villager Harison Gago said there were huge earthquake fissures which had almost split the island in half, gesturing with his hands that some of the cracks were 50 centimetres (20 inches) wide.

Further north at Niu Barae, fisherman Hendrik Kegala had just finished exploring the new underwater landscape of the island with a snorkel when contacted by the AFP team.

He said a huge submerged chasm had opened up, running at least 500 metres (550 yards) parallel to the coast.

Rove Superhighway of Backdoor WH Access?

It appears that the RNC set up a second system for communication for key WH officials to use in order to avoid anything getting on the record and to avoid the laws which are meant to guarantee access to what our President is doing. Shocking? or not noteworthy? Well, when the likes of Abramoff are the people getting access to the WH through the system you have to wonder what else has been going on...

Full Article

Snippits below..

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.

Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove's once-vaunted White House operation.

Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on bribery charges and is now in prison for fraud.

Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove's office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House.

The prospect that such communication might become public has further jangled the nerves of an already rattled Bush White House.

Some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration's far-flung political activities than has previously been available.

"There is concern about what may be in these e-mails," said one GOP activist who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, last week formally requested access to broad categories of RNC-White House e-mails.

...snip...

Waxman told RNC Chairman Mike Duncan in a letter that such exchanges "indicated that in some instances White House officials were using nongovernment accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of communications" that could be reviewed by congressional committees or released under the Presidential Records Act.

..snip..

Levine, the former Bush press aide, said he saw senior White House colleagues, including Rove and his top staff, moving fluidly between the two computer systems, which often sat on officials' desks along with their government computers.

But Levine said he found the two computers with their separate purposes and log-in procedures confusing and inefficient. So he quietly slid his RNC laptop into a desk drawer, deciding to use the telephone rather than e-mail to communicate anything that was not considered official government business.

"In retrospect," he said last week, "I was lucky."