May 2010
79 posts
Ice cream that makes you feel full could be just the beginning. Nanotechnology promises even saltier-tasting salt, less fattening fat, and to boost the nutritional value of everyday products. Nanofood supplements could even tackle global malnutrition.
YUM!
Washington (CNN) — The World Bank has canceled Haiti’s $36 million debt, the institution announced Friday.
Haiti owed the money to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries. The nation, wracked by a devastating earthquake on January 12, now does not owe any more money to the World Bank.
“Relieving Haiti’s remaining debt is part of our effort to pursue every avenue to help Haiti’s reconstruction efforts,” World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said in a release. “We will continue to work in close cooperation with the Haitian government and our international partners to support the country’s recovery and longer-term development.”
College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the…
When Jerry Ehman wrote that three-letter word, “wow,” he was a professor at Ohio State University volunteering with SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Every few days, a messenger would bike over from “The Big Ear,” Ohio State’s giant radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio, and hand Jerry computer records of sounds coming in from deep space. If something surprising popped up, he was to notify the other SETI folks.
What he saw that day was like an answered prayer.
If I Were An Alien…
Eighteen years earlier, two Cornell physicists, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, had tried to imagine how an intelligent alien civilization might try to signal Earth. We should look, they said, for a radio transmission. Radio waves are cheap to produce, don’t require much energy and travel vast distances across space.
Cocconi and Morrison guessed that the aliens would choose a frequency that would mean something to creatures who know math and chemistry. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Zap a hydrogen atom and it will resonate at a particular rate: 1420 megahertz (MHz). So look, they said, for a signal coming in at 1420 MHz. And look for something loud, something that would catch our attention.
And on Aug. 15, in it came, exactly as predicted.
The Mayor of El Paso, TX, who vetoed a city council resolution calling for a debate on legalization to curb violence in Mexico after it passed unanimously, just bailed out his granddaughter on marijuana charges.
We would never have suspected that you can train snails to do anything. But, if you poke a submerged great pond snail, or Lymnaea stagnalis,with a stick a few times, you can actually teach it to keep a snorkel-like breathing tube closed and instead absorb oxygen only through its skin.
Now, if you’re a neuroscientist, you can use trained snails like these to test how water-soluble chemicals might affect memory. Say, for instance, how does methamphetamine-laced water affect a snail remembering to keep its snorkel shut?
Scientists from Washington State University and the University of Calgary did a bunch of experiments like that and found just a little meth helped the snails learn and hold on to their lessons. Even when researchers tried to confuse the snails by getting them to remember something else, the meth-exposed snails kept the memories firm in their slimy minds.”
“Last week it was revealed that Tax Cannabis 2010 - the ballot measure and brainchild of Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee - was polling at a dangerously marginal 50 percent. But that was without the pledged support of organized labor, which is now on Oaksterdam’s side after 100 employees at the cannabis-centered business - which includes a cannabis dispensary and a plant nursery as well cultivation classes - turned in their union cards and joined Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, school and union officials confirmed Wednesday.
What’s this mean for labor, and for the medical cannabis movement? It means at least in the eyes of union organizers, medical marijuana is legitimate and it’s not going away any time soon (and any cannabis business would, of course, grow exponentially should adult recreational use be approved). UFCW won a major coup by securing the first-of-its-kind arrangement with Oaksterdam, which now can boast of connections and political clout it couldn’t just last week.”
“The stock epithet the French Revolution gave to the financiers who were blamed for disaster was “rich egoists”. Our own plutocrats may not be headed for the tumbrils but the fact that financial catastrophe, with its effect on the “real” economy, came about through obscure transactions designed to do nothing except produce short-term profit aggravates a sense of social betrayal. At this point, damage-control means pillorying the perpetrators: bringing them to book and extracting statements of contrition. This is why the psychological impact of financial regulation is almost as critical as its institutional prophylactics. Those who lobby against it risk jeopardising their own long-term interests. Should governments fail to reassert the integrity of public stewardship, suspicions will emerge that, for all the talk of new beginnings, the perps and new regime are cut from common cloth. Both risk being shredded by popular ire or outbid by more dangerous tribunes of indignation.”
So who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government? The fact that the answer to this question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism and the government against the private sector muddle far more than they clarify.
“Marijuana prohibition continues to be a windfall for drug treatment providers. According to the most recent figures published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly six out of ten (57 percent) persons referred to treatment for marijuana as their ‘primary substance of abuse,’ were referred there by the criminal justice system. By contrast, criminal justice referrals for all drugs accounted for just 37 percent of the overall total of drug treatment admissions in 2008.
“Primary marijuana admissions were less likely than all admissions combined to be self-referred to treatment,” the study found. Specifically, the reported noted that only 15 percent of marijuana treatment admissions were self-referred (a category that includes individual self-referrals, as well as referrals by friends and family). This percentage is less than half the number of self-referrals for alcohol and cocaine, and about one-quarter the number of self-referrals reported for heroin abuse (56 percent).”
“Beach Party” - Air France
“MIAMI — In her 88 years, Florence Siegel has learned how to relax: A glass of red wine. A crisp copy of the New York Times, if she can wrest it from her husband. Some classical music, preferably Bach. And every night like clockwork, she lifts a pipe to her lips and smokes marijuana.
Long a fixture among young people, use of the country’s most popular illicit drug is now growing among the AARP set, as the massive generation of baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s grows older. The number of people age 50 and older reporting marijuana use in the prior year went up from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent from 2002 to 2008, according to surveys from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The rise was most dramatic among 55- to 59-year-olds, whose reported marijuana use more than tripled, from 1.6 percent to 5.1 percent….
Siegel, who uses a cane and has arthritis in her back and legs, said marijuana has helped her sleep better than pills ever did.
Advocates for legalizing marijuana say the growing number of older users could represent an important shift in their decades-long push to change the laws”
“The U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) recently adopted a policy prohibiting VA physicians from recommending medical marijuana to their patients, even if marijuana is the safest and most effective medicine to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other service-related conditions….
Yet seen from the larger perspective of helping veterans adjust to civilian life, the VA’s stance on medical marijuana is counterproductive and harmful. The ban means that—despite their service to our country—veterans who reside in the 14 states that have legalized medical marijuana are denied the same rights as every other resident of these states.
Patient reports and published research indicate that marijuana can be a highly effective treatment for PTSD, a condition afflicting nearly one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And overwhelming scientific evidence has already proven marijuana’s safety and efficacy for treating conditions like chronic pain, which affects many combat-injured veterans.
Marijuana, moreover, carries none of the risks associated with prescription drugs used to treat PTSD, which have been implicated in the tragic overdose deaths of several current conflict veterans….
Disappointingly, however, it seems the VA’s policy is not just about preventing substance abuse among veterans. The VA claims the ban is primarily a response to threats from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to prosecute VA doctors for recommending medical marijuana, or for completing forms necessary for their patients to enroll in a state medical marijuana program—even though to do so would not constitute a criminal offense. Civilian doctors recommending marijuana to their patients have not been arrested or threatened with arrest.”
“Much reporting on opposition to the Obama administration portrays it as a sort of populist uprising. Yet the antics of the socialism-and-death-panels crowd are only part of the story of anti-Obamaism, and arguably the less important part. If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations. How can you do that? Follow the money — donations by corporate political action committees.
Look, for example, at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. And oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.
These are extraordinary numbers given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?
One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.”
“Let one thing be very clear. Two of our most highly valued principles in a capitalist economic system are transparency and accountability, neither of which is present in an underground trading market. As a democratic society, we are complicit in giving billions of dollars a year to criminals to oversee the distribution of marijuana and other drugs.
And that means criminals become the de facto regulators, distributors and enforcers of “unfair business practices” making a nontoxic, nonlethal substance like marijuana potentially fatal to anyone, including children and dogs who might be unintentionally caught in the crossfire of its rogue regulation. The notion of our policy to drive this market underground is to limit its availability and use. Yet despite billions of dollars spent annually in the “war on drugs,” marijuana is as easily available in the United States as it is in Amsterdam — though the marijuana use rates among youths there are only 60 percent of what they are in the United States.
Exactly like alcohol prohibition, our policies have created a juggernaut of violence for an unstoppable consumer demand. We have forced a commodity with a large consumer base (Missouri’s No. 1 cash crop) that half the American population is guilty of having consumed into an informal market where the only regulation is by the bullet. And despite decades of the same just-say-no-or-we-will-bring-our-guns-on-you approach, we have not lowered use rates. Marijuana is widely available — and, specifically, more widely available to teenagers than alcohol — and no one who sells it asks for ID.”
Sensible Washington, a group gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would end marijuana prohibition in Washington state, reported last week that members of West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team (WestNet), a federally-funded drug task force, seized about 200 signatures during a raid on a medical marijuana club.
From Sensible Washington’s site:
“We have made repeated calls to WestNet’s office, but have yet to receive any assurance that the task force’s personnel have secured the signed petitions and that they plan to promptly return them to Sensible Washington.”
As if stealing signatures for a law-abiding ballot initiative doesn’t seem contemptible enough, Seattle Weekly reports that the same group made another raid on a provider’s home, in which they “handcuffed [the family’s] 14-year-old son for two hours and put a gun to his head. They also told the kid to say good-bye to his dad […] because the dispensary owner was going to prison.”
And then it gets worse:
“And as the detectives looked for cash to prove that the dispensary was illegally profiting from pot sales, Casey says, they confiscated $80 that her 9-year-old daughter had received from her family for a straight-A report card. Where did they find it?
In the girl’s Mickey Mouse wallet, according to Casey. She also claims that the cops dumped out all her silverware, busted a hole in the wall, and broke appliances.”
Our friends at FireDogLake have organized a petition demanding that WestNet end these despicable raids and return the signatures. You can check it out here.
“As OpenSecrets Blog has previously reported, the DISCLOSE Act seeks to establish new disclosure and reporting requirements for political ads run by corporations, labor unions, trade associations and so-called 527 groups. In addition, the bill prohibits expenditures by corporations that are more than 20 percent owned by foreign nationals, by government contractors who receive more than $50,000 in contracts and by any entity that received money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) until the money is paid back.”
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The most important thing to know about the 1,500 page financial reform bill passed by the Senate last week — now on he way to being reconciled with the House bill — is that it’s regulatory. It does nothing to change the structure of Wall Street.
The bill omits two critical ideas for changing the structure of Wall Street’s biggest banks so they won’t cause more trouble in the future, and leaves a third idea in limbo. The White House doesn’t support any of them….”
INTERIOR SECRETARY Ken Salazar and President Obama say they will split up the Minerals Management Service to separate the arm that inspects and investigates the oil industry from the arm that last year collected $13 billion in royalties and fees from the industry. Both Obama and Salazar say this will ensure “there is no conflict, real or perceived.’’…
Obviously, nothing was learned because after the report the agency was rocked by a conflict-of-interest scandal in which employees received gifts from and had sex with oil company representatives. Besides saying that the scandal represented a “culture of ethical failure,’’ Devaney also concluded in 2008 that the minerals agency “modified oil sale contracts without clear criteria, and that modifications appeared to inappropriately benefit the oil companies.’’ It said the agency adjusted one of every six bid packages from 2001 to 2006 to the tune of $4.4 million….
The Times reported yesterday that the Texas laboratory that the government is using to analyze the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is also employed by BP. Salazar and Obama have a long way to go to eliminate the reality and perception of conflict of interest.”
“Executives and political action committees from Wall Street banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and related financial sectors have showered Congressional candidates with more than $1.7 billion in the last decade, with much of it going to the financial committees that oversee the industry’s operations.
In return, the financial sector has enjoyed virtually front-door access and what critics say is often favorable treatment from many lawmakers. But that relationship, advantageous to both sides for many years, is now being tested in ways rarely seen, as the nation’s major financial firms seek to call in their political chits to stem regulatory changes they believe will hurt their business.”
“Just as the securitized debt deals Goldman was hawking may be, in Warren Buffett’s words, “financial weapons of mass destruction,” putting the whole economic system at risk of collapse, factory farming carries a parallel risk — of environmental destruction and exploitation of resources, prospects for food security, and animals, all on a mass scale.
Unfortunately, the Senate inquiry into Goldman’s alleged malfeasance is unlikely to question why the company in 2008 decided to acquire ten intensive poultry farms in China’s Hunan and Fujian provinces for $300 million. While Goldman isn’t running the farms itself (that’s outsourced) it retains control over the prices. “So for the record, that’s: U.S. mortgages = bad … Asian livestock = good,” is how the website Business Insider described the deal.
This isn’t the firm’s first foray into this arena. Goldman is also principal owner of Burger King, joining Bain and Texas Pacific in 2002 in a $2.26 billion takeover of the fast food giant. Labor activists have criticized Goldman for the poverty wages earned by full-time Burger King workers, even as the firm continues to pay out billions in bonuses, including during the great recession.”
“The best thing that can be said about the 23,000 people who have been killed during Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s campaign against drug cartels in the last three years is that it proves that the war on drugs will never work.
President Obama calls Calderon Mexico’s Elliott Ness and is receiving him today in an official state visit. Calderon is surely a brave man, and he is right to fight to curb the power of the drug cartels inside Mexico. His predecessor as head of his National Action Party, former presidential candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallo, has gone missing; the suspicion is that a drug cartel has kidnapped him. The cartels have infiltrated much of the police and government and run many border towns through fear.
But Elliott Ness never stopped illegal liquor. The lifting of Prohibition did. Similarly, the only solution to the drug trafficking and violence on both sides of the border is to legalize drugs.”
“The Oakland City Council unanimously endorsed the initiative Tuesday evening, becoming the first in California to do so. Oakland City Councilmember At-Large Rebecca Kaplan said regulating use of cannabis by controlling and taxing dispensaries creates a boon to public safety, public health, and city tax coffers. Oakland permits and taxes four dispensaries, earning $500,000 in tax receipts per year. The Board of Equalization and the Legislative Analyst Office estimates California governments could earn around $1.4 billion per year doing the same….
“California has its public safety priorities wrong,” stated former Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Stephen Downing in a LEAP release. “In 2008, we arrested over 61,000 Californians for misdemeanor cannabis possession. The same year, almost 60,000 violent crimes went unsolved in California. Let’s stop arresting non-violent adult cannabis consumers so police can focus on violent crime.”
“SAGINAW — In response to the new medical marijuana laws, Saginaw County sheriff’s deputies will discontinue their policy of destroying grow equipment when they serve search warrants at the homes of medical marijuana patients or caretakers, Saginaw County Sheriff’s Detective Randy P. Pfau said.
“Instead of destroying property, we’ll take everything in a forfeiture and let a judge make a decision on whether they’re allowed to have that property back or not,” Pfau said.
The second look at the policy is a response by the department to the public concern regarding action taken by deputies and federal Drug Enforcement Agency agents in the basement of the home owned by Edwyn W. Boyke Jr., 64, of Saginaw Township, Pfau said.
Police raided Boyke’s home on April 15, because they say he violated drug laws, and destroyed his grow operations, which Boyke said cost him $7,000.”
(via winnerrobot)
You just keep on producing those winners, Republicans.
Wow, that is actually a pretty funny story. Basically there was a Republican convention held at a middle school, and one classroom had a collage about the U.S. Labor Movement. After the convention was over, the teacher returned to find the poster gone and, in its place, a bumper sticker that said “Working People Vote Republican”. Keep it classy!
“In stepping down, he asked God for forgiveness in a rambling, all-caps public statement. “I SINNED AGAINST GOD, MY WIFE AND MY FAMILY BY HAVING A MUTUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH A PART-TIME MEMBER OF MY STAFF,” he wrote. “MY COMFORT IS THAT GOD IS A GRACIOUS AND FORGIVING GOD TO THOSE WHO SINCERELY SEEK HIS FORGIVENESS AS I DO.”
Forgiveness, however, is not a quality that Souder shares with his Lord. No Republican has been more outspoken in Congress in his moral condemnation of Americans who use illicit drugs. In order to punish such sinning, Souder championed and vigorously defended perhaps the least forgiving law on the federal books: the denial of federal student aid for any student convicted of drug possession, no matter how minor.”
At issue was a single section a third of the way through the massive 1,400-page bill that could force a handful of the nation’s biggest banks to spin off their billion-dollar businesses in trading derivatives.
Dodd offered a clever Washington solution aimed to appease both friends and foes of the provision. His amendment preserves the tough language — but it postpones any action for two years so it can be studied. And it assigns that study to a new council of regulators, headed by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, whose members have serious reservations about such a dramatic measure and may very well kill it in the end.”
“Senate Republicans blocked Democrats from voting on three amendments Tuesday that are strongly opposed by Wall Street. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top-ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, rose to object to a vote on one of the most talked-about amendments, cosponsored by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). Levin-Merkley would ban commercial banks from trading for their own benefit with taxpayer-backed money.
Shelby also objected to an amendment from Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) that would rein in predatory practices of payday lenders and one from Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) that would have banned naked credit default swaps, which were at the heart of the financial crisis. Dorgan’s amendment was expected to fail, but Levin-Merkley had been surging in recent days.
When it looked as if Levin-Merkley had at least 50 votes, the threshold was moved up to 60. Now that it appears within striking distance of 60 votes, the new tactic is to deny it a vote altogether.”
“An NPR News investigation in Ciudad Juarez — ground zero of Calderon’s cartel war — finds strong evidence that Mexico’s drug fight is rigged, according to court testimony, current and former law enforcement officials, and an NPR analysis of cartel arrests.
In that border city, federal forces appear to be favoring one cartel, the Sinaloa (named after the coastal state in northwestern Mexico), which the U.S. Justice Department calls one of the largest organized crime syndicates in the world….
Everywhere in Juarez, people whisper the story about how the Mexican army and federal police are helping Guzman’s gangs of assassins capture the city.”
The Obama Administration’s recently released National Drug Control Strategy encourages states to expand Driving Under the Influence of Drugs laws to include cannabis metabolites (non-impairing substance) as evidence of impaired driving. This would result in mandatory jail time and suspended licenses for marijuana users driving while NOT impaired because metabolites stay in the body for months after marijuana intoxication wears off.
“Retailers won a long-sought victory late Thursday as the Senate approved a measure that would give them more power over the fees they pay to banks each time shoppers swipe a credit or debit card.
The controversial amendment by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) represents one element of a broader overhaul of financial regulations, but it is a piece that ordinary consumers could feel most directly….
Earlier Thursday, senators dealt a blow to the nation’s largest credit-rating agencies, approving tough new rules for the industry and voting to remove the government’s formal endorsement of a handful of firms.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) had taken aim at what he called “staggering conflicts of interest” in the current structure, in which issuers of financial products can shop for the most favorable ratings. Because issuers also pay the ratings agencies for their services, Franken said, the agencies have an incentive to give securities a higher rating than warranted.
“This conflict of interest has cost American investors and pensioners billions and billions of dollars,” Franken said, “because supposedly risk-free investments have failed or been downgraded to junk status.”
Franken’s measure seeks to end the practice of shopping for ratings by creating a clearinghouse regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Financial companies seeking to have a new security rated would be assigned a rating agency by the clearinghouse. Firms could then seek out subsequent ratings on their own, but any discrepancies between the ratings would be made public.”
MEXICO CITY (AP) — After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked. ”In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”
This week President Obama promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment. Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.”
Director Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal last year that he doesn’t like to use the term “war on drugs” because “[w]e’re not at war with people in this country.” Yet 64% of their budget — virtually the same as under the Bush administration and its predecessors — focuses on largely futile interdiction efforts as well as arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating extraordinary numbers of people. Only 36% is earmarked for demand reduction — and even that proportion is inflated because the ONDCP “budget” no longer includes costs such as the $2 billion expended annually to incarcerate people who violate federal drug laws.
“A generation ago, young people vowed never to trust anyone over 30. But as it turns out, those under 30 today are actually more trusting of the government of all age groups, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
“As of now, I trust the government,” says Brittany Tucker, a poli-sci major at Northeastern University in Boston. “I feel like they are trying to do what’s best for us and their constituents.”
“Yet, given that national polls now indicate that an estimated one out of two Americans nationwide support legalization, and that a solid majority of west coast voters and Californians back regulating the retail production and distribution of pot like alcohol, it seems politically counterproductive for the administration to maintain such a ‘flat Earth’ policy. So what could possibly be their reasoning?
It’s actually spelled out here, in the White House’s 2010 Drug Control Strategy:
We have many proven methods for reducing the demand for drugs. Keeping drugs illegal reduces their availability and lessens willingness to use them. That is why this Administration firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other illicit drug. Legalizing drugs would increase accessibility and encourage promotion and acceptance of use. Diagnostic, laboratory, clinical, and epidemiological studies clearly indicate that marijuana use is associated with dependence, respiratory and mental illness, poor motor performance, and cognitive impairment, among other negative effects, and legalization would only exacerbate these problems.”
“PHOENIX – Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district’s ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district’s Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people….
The measure signed Tuesday prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.”
Right now, the biggest battle in bank reform is over a provision introduced by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas that would force the giant Wall Street banks to give up their lucrative derivative trading businesses if they want the government (i.e. taxpayers) to continue insuring their…
