Category: interesting

The wolves are back and the trees are growing. Trees are growing?

For the first time in more than 50 years, young aspen trees are growing again in the northern range of Yellowstone National Park.

A study published in Biological Conservation show a process called “the ecology of fear” is again at work.

Aspen trees are surviving elk browsing for the first time in decades.

“We’ve seen some recovery of willows and cottonwood, but this is the first time we can document significant aspen growth, a tree species in decline all over the West. We’ve waited a long time to see this, but now we’re optimistic that things may be on the right track.” via Gary Jones

The Utah State Forestry Extension study by Bill Ripple found additional benefits of wolves:

Wolves may be beneficial to numerous species of vertebrates and invertebrates such as fish, birds, beaver, and butterflies, as well as many other species of wildlife.

…the numerous benefits to ecosystem processes will include stream channel stabilization, flood plain restoration, and higher water tables.

Tell your bank: The average bank robber avoids friendly service.

“When a bank robber first enters… He wants to come inside the bank and be anonymous, but he can only be anonymous if we in the bank allow him. If we take that away, we strip away the whole foundation of his plan.”

To legitimate customers, being friendly seems welcoming. To most bandits, it induces paranoia that often causes them to back out.

A new FBI robbery prevention program called “Safecatch” trains bank employees how to greet suspicious people, offer them help and ask for identification. Some banks are adding a concierge perhaps trained in behavior detection. [story]

An interesting sidebar
The FBI suggests that banks call 911 and not use the alarm. Alarms typically signal a call center out of state, which first calls the bank to confirm the robbery before notifying police. That five-minute delay is enough time for a bandit to get away.

Private sector alarm services that shunt to our struggling 911 system should compensate our towns and cities.

Life Cycle Analysis carried out at the Heat Transfer and Environmental Engineering labs in Greece show that “the conversion of solar energy to electricity using photovoltaic solar cells is less efficient” than using fossil fuels.

Producing PV materials, operating the systems and end-of-use recycling have a greater impact than using non-renewable energy.

There are several factors to evaluate further. Life Cycle Analysis does show that a large enough area of solar cells would outstrip the net impact of the fossil fuel system. [story]

As well as problems from nutrient leaching and fertilizer run-off, conventional farms lose soil about 90 times faster than new soil is produced.

Drought and over-plowing in the 1930s resulted in dust storms that covered farm machinery.

Each year, 24 billion tons of the world’s soil blows or washes away, largely because of plowing.

Agricultural studies dating back to the early 1940s tabulating erosion from areas as far apart as the Himalayas and the U.S. show annual soil loss on plow-based farms average 1.5 mm of lost soil. Science Magazine reports,

As plows tear into the ground, they loosen the upper 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) of soil, exposing the dirt to rain and wind. Mechanized plows introduced in the 1930s have accelerated the loss.

Conservationists are exploring no-till agriculture. This method leaves fields unturned and allows crop stubble to remain on the surface to protect the soil; farmers plant new crops by making small holes in the layer of plant material.

Today’s plowless farms save our soil. No-till farms lose an average of 0.082 mm of soil each year, an erosion rate close to the natural geologic rate of 0.03 mm per year.

Indigenous soil management resists erosion
Natives of the Americas supplemented their soil with a remarkable method known as Black Earth or Terra Preta. [wiki]

Over a period of thousands of years, the way of life of the Koyapo tribe reveals that their soils, Terra Preta do Indio, were part of the everyday life of the people. [doc file].

Instead of today’s destructive slash and burn followed by plows, pouring carbon dioxide into the air even to produce green bio-fuels, natives covered up piles of logs and agri-waste with dirt and straw. Their footprint of carbon was returned to the soil as charcoal and nutrients using low-heat pyrolysis, heating their green waste and slash without oxygen

This indigenous method of making Dark Earth Soils – as deep as 1-2 meters [pics here] – are highly productive over prolonged periods and resistant to erosion. Philip Coppens wrote a readable article about dark earth here. Plants grow at least three times faster, without modern fertilizer. The natural soil builds a sustainable fertility with high levels of humus organic matter and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium.

The properties of terra preta are amazing. Even thousands of years after creation, the soil remains fertile without need for any added fertilizer. Using terra preta also could reduce pollution from phosphates and nitrates entering groundwater and streams.

These highly productive soils would be beneficial to any farmer, anywhere in the world.

Google Video offers the BBC’s “The Secret of El Dorado” reporting that the people of 1491, the Americas before Columbus, possessed a secret with the power to transform our world and “their secret in the soil could be the solution to solving famine in the third world and other nations once and for all”….

How green is black dirt?
There is a huge potential for agricultural soils to reduce greenhouse gases and increase production at the same time. Before the industrial and green revolutions with the introduction of oil-based or mineral fertilizers, crop residues were a valued resource and returned to the soil as organic fertilizer. Research now shows there are critically needed benefits by directly returning carbon as well.

Biogeochemistry studies at Cornell are showing that carbon, black C, can reduce the greenhouse effect as well as help farmers. Charcoal can rebuild soil, replace nitrogen fertilizer and sequester carbon.

Amending soils around the globe can retain about 10 times more greenhouse gas than produced annually from the burning of fossil fuels.

The difference between terra preta and ordinary soils is immense. A hectare of meter-deep terra preta can contain 250 tonnes of carbon, as opposed to 100 tonnes in unimproved soils from similar parent material. WorldChanging declares that biochar’s capacity to capture carbon sound almost audacious.

Bio-Char is promoting carbon soil amendments and slash-and-char methods around the world showing that dark earth is more effective than fertilizer, compost or manure. Eprida has developed a sustainable closed loop charcoal technology noting that too little carbon in the soil contributes to topsoil loss, reduced soil fertility and lower agricultural yields.

The case for burying charcoal shows that pyrolysis is climate-friendly. Even if this approach would mean burning more coal as a large scale heat source for pyrolysis, it would yield a net reduction in worldwide carbon emissions.

Black-carbon and biofuel
Soil biology improved, added fertilizer reduced, water holding increased, erosion slowed to geologic rates, and alternative fuel? [link]

The Eprida technology uses agricultural waste to produce biofuel as well as high-carbon fertilizer. Converting wood or biomass to char produces far less greenhouse gas. The journal Biomass and Bioenergy reports that biomass in the oxygen-starved process of pyrolysis produces methane, hydrogen, and other products for combustion.

There are several challenges ahead, but it seems that carbon might be manageable after all. Even thousands of years after creation, the dark soil made by indigenous Americans remains fertile without need for any added fertilizer. Producing biofuel and capturing carbon fulfills modern demands as well.

We can look forward to healthy soil, cleaner streams, cleaner groundwater, replacing slash-and-burn with beneficial slash-and-char alternatives, and carbon sequestration.

Preserving
and repairing our soils with charcoal amendments called biochar or agrichar offers a carbon sink to reduce greenhouse gases, new biomass fuels, and provides new models of sustainable higher-yield agriculture.

The infrastructure challenges most nations face are enormous, but developing regions can ‘leapfrog’ into a clean and sustainable future by utilizing the latest technologies..

Across the African continent today, the lack of modern infrastructure holds back agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Without roads and ports, farmers cannot sell goods to distant markets for higher prices. Factories can’t operate without reliable electricity supplies. Travel from city to city and country to country takes days instead of hours, making regional trade difficult.

high-tech distributed power
To provide power, potable water and telecommunications for people living in disadvantaged and remote regions across the vast archipelago, Indonesia is installing fuel cells rather than diesel generators in places such as Sabang in Aceh, Rokan Hulu in Riau, Bitung in North Sulawesi, Nabire in West Papua and Merauke in Papua. Will these names become familiar in the future? These power plants will produce sufficient funds to repay the capital cost in less than three years.

Has the World Bank once in its history considered practical installations that give us pride today?

Building infrastructure was a major focus of development efforts in the 1960s and ’70s, when the World Bank and other institutions lent large sums to developing nations for massive building projects, like the Akosombo Dam in Ghana, which flooded nearly 4 percent of the nation’s land area to create hydroelectric power. Many of these projects had adverse environmental impacts; others put nations deep into debt. And some of the funding was pilfered by corrupt contractors and government and bank officials.

Transport by road is virtually impossible in Congo. The nation, the size of Western Europe, has less than 2,000 kilometers of paved roads. But it has more than 200 airports, most of which are unpaved landing strips at the edge of dense forest. These strips allow hundreds of private airlines, some of which own a single plane, to connect far-flung corners of the nation.

The investment to run one of these incremental airlines is modest — a refurbished Antonov aircraft, two pilots, and a mechanic — and their safety record is abysmal. But this air infrastructure makes trips that would take weeks by water possible in a few hours, and opens up trade between regions of the country that would otherwise be impossible to reach.

xxx

Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That’s $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it.

Ira, who lives in Yokohama, Japan, has 100-megabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service in his home. This costs Ira less than $30 per month. What the heck is up with that? Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and most expensive.

In California, three siblings are centenarians.
Baby sister Genevieve Gully turns 100 in September. Big sister Ruth Newman is on the verge of her 106th birthday. And brother Clarence “Barney” Barnard has them both beaten: He’s about to turn 108.

More than 50,000 people in the United States today are 100 or older, according to the 2000 census. Most often, it runs in the family.

But life span in the USA is going down.

Forty-one nations support a longer life after improving their health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

The United States has been slipping for decades. [AP story]

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University said that “it’s not as simple as saying we don’t have national health insurance”, while Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, says,

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries.”

Sick feels sick no matter what makes you sick because what makes you feel sick is you.

To slow you down, force rest and raise temperature, your brain helps you fight different types of illness by producing fever, loss of appetite, fatigue and general feelings of sickness and aches – all the common symptoms of feeling sick.

There’s a receptor at a single spot in the brain, about the size of a head of a pin….

Trapped in a bowl, the California town of Arvin is the Smoggiest Town in America

Even as air pollution continues to decline across the country, a fifth of the air pollution of the entire San Joaquin Valley hovers in Arvin. The dangerous ozone is formed after fumigation of agricultural pesticides but much more so from tailpipes, factories, power plants and even water heaters in far off California cities. [story]

Arvin has no freeways, no heavy industry, and not much traffic, but difficulty breathing is the number one trouble at the community health center where the doctors have asthma as well.

Perhaps 20 percent of children under the age of 18 suffer from asthma and allergies, but no agency seems to be adequately focused on the health burden nor are informing the residents of the challenges they are facing

A third of Arvin’s 15,000 residents live in poverty; a quarter are unemployed [data]. Ninety percent of its 3,000 households are families earning a farmworkers’ wage around $25,000 per year.

Following EPA policy, when the regional Air Resources Board voted to wait until after 2020 to take action – such as first cleaning all the air in California – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fired the board’s chairman.

At least we should deliver building air cleaners to these people!

Like an unwelcome memory of youthful stupidity, the residential-schools scandal keeps coming back to haunt us.

But what do we really know about how the residential schools came to be? Only that First Nations kids were stuffed into them for generations and once inside were sexually, physically and culturally abused.

Emma Crosby and Margaret Butcher shared an unquestioned assumption that white Christians had the right and duty to tear native families apart, to deprive children of their own cultures, and to impose Victorian sexual values on them.

‘Protecting’ the girls was implicitly to protect them from their own sexuality, if necessary by strapping them, overworking them, and malnourishing them. Margaret Butcher routinely kept track of the girls’ periods, and woe betide the girl suspected of being pregnant. In hindsight, we can see the foundations being laid for decades of sexual abuse.

This arrogation of control over their converts’ lives seems to have blinded the missionaries to the harm they were doing, so they could shrug off the natives’ death and suffering as just the price to be paid for progress.

Mothers of a Native Hell
Methodist Mission on the Canadian northwest coast from the 1870s to the turn of the century.

While food contamination increases, there’s stunning news that more than 40 percent of Canada’s population will suffer from food-borne illnesses this year.

The nation historically has inspected all meat imports and is recently testing all leafy greens after e.coli was found in US imports. There is pressure from citizens to increase inspections because illness linked to foreign food is increasing.

“Produce safety is a relatively new concept and there are still many farms in North America — let alone less-developed countries — that haven’t adopted the systems needed to help prevent problems with food.”

Foreign-grown produce has brought new types of bacteria and food-based illness into Canada in recent years, such as industrial contamination in food from China, a parasite found on soft fruit grown in central South America and salmonella bacteria on bean sprouts and lettuce from the United States.

Under the current system, the primary burden is on food suppliers and retailers to conduct quality and safety tests while the government conducts random checks.

Concern is rising in the US that the food safety system is broken.

Weeks after an already delayed national recall of millions of cans of food, including canned chili sauce contaminated with botulism, the dangerous products have remained on store shelves to sicken a man in Indiana.

The FDA re-issued a press release stating that consumers should notify family members and friends!

The 21st Century food safety challenge is not only in collecting data, where government is excessively focused and unbalanced, but in processing data at speeds that allow people to make decisions and act in every corner of our world.

This:

In a small, still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all-white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students.

The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the “white tree” at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other.

The jury quickly convicted Bell of two felonies — aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16-year-old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy charges.

The Jim Crow edition of the U.S. Penal Code.

William Gibson:

“We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that – we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.”

[link to LunchOverIP]

The issue of whether the toilet seat should be left up or down after use seemingly generates a lot of passion among the parties concerned, however, scientific inquiries into the matter are almost non-existent.

Scientific analysis may not offer sufficient insight or support, or it might.

John Nash’s Game Theory [wiki] seems to be failing policy-centered Republican economics, and both urban and hill-country strategy at the Pentagon, and NHTSA’s gamble on hi-way infrastructure, but game theory can successfully help us ponder whether the toilet seat is either up or down.

A paper at The Science Creative Quarterly, in which, with respect to the name, I am as confused as both they and you, uses game theory to demonstrate that all hope is not lost.

This study will “show conclusively that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down after use decreases welfare and by doing that we hope to convince the reader that social norms are not always welfare enhancing.”

The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Seat Down:
A Game Theoretical Analysis

There is a case for scientifically examining social norms and educating the masses about the fallacy of following social norms blindly. [via blort]

Stated simply at Wiki, you and I are in Nash’s game theory equilibrium if I am making the best decision I can, taking into account your decision, and you are making the best decision you can, taking into account my decision.

But in the case of the toilet seat, there’s a variation in Game Theory called the “Trembling Hand Perfect Equilibrium” [wiki] which takes into account that the players, through a “slip of the hand” or tremble, may choose unintended strategies that in the case of the toilet seat can affect all of mankind and womankind.

The Web is its own universe, and our minds would likely collapse if we tried to perceive its vastness.

Without a meaningful interface and a meaningful filter, we would be utterly lost in information overload. As any artist can tell you, the value of the work lies as much in what is left out as in what is kept in.

The word for what should be kept in and what should be left out is ‘relevance’, and there are nearly as many different approaches to relevance as there are websites. Some people use demographics. Some people use history. Some people use social tagging. Some use contextual recommendations.

VortexDNA’s approach is to use the humanity of the individual.

Did you know that pondering death and burial might help create happy thoughts? The British Psychological Society shows us that thoughts of death turn to joy. It seems that we are so afraid of terror and of our own mortality that we’ve developed a natural tendency to quickly turn to comforting thoughts.

“Death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the automatic system begins to search for happy thoughts,” the researchers said. “Moreover, this occurs immediately and outside of awareness”.

Moving along, happily or not, here are some of the issues and choices ahead that deal with our death and how we will manage our corpse. I hope it’s a lot of fun to read along.

Boil your body? Among other new entries, Resomation Ltd is a British company offering an eco-friendly alternative to cremation that boils bodies into dust. In the process, called resomation, the body is encased in a silk coffin and submerged in water mixed in an alkaline potassium hydroxide, heated to 302 degrees and rapidly reduced to white dust. [story]

A grave concern Around the world, there’s pressure on conventional burial methods from more than its $7,000-15,000 price compared to $600-800 for cremation or for the new process of ‘boiling’. Often unresponsive commercial or church monopolies, conventional cemeteries have severe problems such as the endless maintenance costs, increasing demand for land, and heavy pollution. A pollution-reducing niche is emerging in the $15 billion annual market providing caskets without plastics, foam, vinyl or metal. Regulations are increasing to help eliminate more than 1.5 million tons of reinforced concrete used yearly for unnecessary concrete vaults, to encourage chemical-free clothing, and to limit unnecessary and carcinogenic embalming fluid.

New standards seek to impose limits on the removal of tree cover, limit structures for memorials, visitors and parking, lower water pollution from degrading coffins and vaults, reducing the use of machinery, herbicides, fertilizer and the leaching of embalming fluid. To help free land, grave re-use after 50-100 years is being considered as well as designs that increase grave site congestion or the use of vertical coffins, [youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmVe06wlewY]

Heavy concrete vaults surrounding a casket were originally developed to thwart grave robbers in order to regulate a black market for cadavers. Embalming became necessary before refrigeration was common. Neither practice is necessary today and seldom required by law.

Cremation pollution In case you were wondering, there are over 100 pounds of emissions during cremation including particulates, carbon gases, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, cadmium, mercury, lead and dioxins. New emission and carbon-reducing equipment standards for cremation ovens may be completed by 2010. Plus the human body is about 95% water which must be evaporated into steam at 212 degrees before burning the remainder into ash at 1800 – 2000 degrees using about 400 cubic feet of natural gas over two hours or more. For the 25% of Americans that choose cremation, three to nine pounds of bone and ash fragments remain for disposal such as casting into a concrete marine reef. For $500, a ‘symbolic portion’ of ashes in a lipstick-size canister can be launched into space. At these ticket rates, an entire body might cost $50 million!

Owls and Orchids Princess Diana promoted the idea of woodland burial, an emerging alternative to conventional lawn graves and cremation. Woodland or wildflower cemeteries use biodegradable coffins in graves that will forever mingle with birds, bats, insects, lichens and trees. Requiring much less maintenance, pushing up daisies in woodland cemeteries can be in “vastly more interesting places than many parks, with a wildlife value that possibly exceeds that of many nature preserves.” [eco-cementary wiki]

Biodegradable coffins are arriving in the market. SeatllePI offers a story about the trend featuring a recycled paper coffin, the Ecopod, sold in the US by the Natural Burial Co. [please notice their new URL at http://www.cremationresource.org] The Green Burial Council is a nonprofit that is pioneering new ethical and environmentally sustainable practices, and seeking”to use the burial process as a means of facilitating the acquisition, restoration and stewardship of natural areas” to create a permanent Conservation Burial Ground. There’s a list on their website of “approved providers” expanding to 25 states, plus assistance for home funerals and burial on private land.

NPR has posted a podast by Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Green Burial Portal The Natural Burial Co-operative, Center for Natural Burial is vigorously retrieving data and posting trends about natural burial. A map hack points to operating and proposed natural sites in both the USA and Canada. Their report on conventional burial reveals an important consideration: “The whole operation will take less than a week and cost your heirs and family more than the price of a new car.”

A ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground will contain enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 homes, nearly a thousand tons of casket steel and another twenty thousand tons of concrete for vaults. Across North America enough metal is diverted into coffin and vault production each year to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete is used to build a two-lane highway from Toronto to Montreal… and back again.

Redwoods and Ravens The SF Chronicle has an article about progress in Marin County, California, where there’s a new back-to-nature movement for the dead. One of the pioneers of green burial sites in the US, Tyler Cassity of Forever Fernwood sees gre en graves located wherever appropriate space can be found – under greenbelts, wilderness and parklands – using GPS and the Web to locate graves, check on maintenance and provide a memorial in a digital age.

Update: Promessa in Sweden is offering new options in Corpseware and ecological dying.

The corpse is frozen in liquid nitrogen. The very brittle body is vibrated into powder and buried in a corn-starch casket to safely decompose within 6-12 months.

 MindHacks posted to a social history of death and dying with links to the BBC’s Thinking Allowed.

Not interested in any of these choices?
If legal in your region, you can sell your body to science.
Use the Cadaver Calculator to learn what your carcass is worth.

…and we’ll raise a family of nine!

via longnow:

BusinessWeek: Would you consider a position in business or on Wall Street?
Condoleezza Rice: I don’t know what I’ll do long-term. I’m a terrible long-term planner.

A Resolute Condoleezza Rice, BusinessWeek, 23 July 2007

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General Wesley Clark: So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.”

The very idea of the infinite is intolerable to us. It doesn’t fit the model.

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. There is a fundamental particle that cannot be subdivided. Space is finite. There is no such thing as the square root of negative one — it’s an ‘irrational’ number. We are the crown of creation, the pinnacle of evolution over time, moving inexorably forward, because we are only creature that can understand that time is real, and linear!

Meanwhile, the rest of all-life-on-Earth, including those pesky indigenous tribes that have no words for time, understand that time is a chimera, a construct, a falsity, meaningless outside of the artificial context of other elaborate, fragile civilized human hoaxes.

The ‘moments’ when my life has had most meaning, when I have been most alive, in the real world, connected with all-life-on-Earth, have been those moments when I escaped from time, lived outside of it, became utterly unaware of its absurdity and its constraints. At those moments I was infinite, aware beyond any semantic definition of awareness, so full of love that I became love, and free from everything that has constrained, limited, subdued, deluded, indoctrinated me, made me everybody else. I became naturally myself, and naturally a part.

From Dave Pollard’s how to save the world

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‘The Moment is Infinity’ is a book I created, bound in gilded leather and showed a few people before I lost it. Youth has little regard for itself. Has anyone found it?

During a trip to China, Mike Lin was shocked to find a Coke can with a ring pull-tab.

The ring pull, also known as a rimple, haven’t been used for decades due to sharp edges and litter. A 1975 patented “stay-tab” offered a safe and more environmentally responsible solution now on virtually every aluminum beverage can. “The design is delightfully simple and keeps the tab attached to the can…”

But Coca-Cola is using the pull-tab in China, an “arguably less responsible packaging solution… an obsolete, dangerous and environmentally irresponsible packaging solution… a fraction of a cent cheaper solution….”

Journalism not until now.

Interviews with 50 US war veterans back from Iraq reveal the terrible daily brutality they inflicted on innocent civilians.

Part One: Terrifying house raids; random checkpoint shootings; speeding convoys that wipe out anyone in their path.

Part Two: “It was very graphic,” he said. “A head split open. One of them was of two soldiers in the back of the truck. They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He’s reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and he’s smiling.”

Part Three: Sergeant Mejía recalled an incident in Ramadi in July 2003 when he watched an unarmed man drive with his young son too close to a checkpoint. The father was decapitated in front of the small, terrified boy by a member of Sergeant Mejía’s unit firing a heavy .50-caliber machine gun. By then, Sergeant Mejía noted, “this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.” The next month, Sergeant Mejía returned stateside for a two-week rest and refused to go back, launching a public protest over the treatment of Iraqis. (He was charged with desertion, sentenced to one year in prison and given a bad-conduct discharge.)

A unique investigation by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, with responses from several of the veterans.

REACH is the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals law in Europe.

WorldChanging says it will fundamentally change the game for materials and chemicals.

REACH requires all chemicals sold or used in Europe to be registered. Manufacturers or distributors must supply a chemical’s properties, materials safety data sheets, risk management guidelines, and safety measures for downstream users.

More than 1,500 hazardous chemicals will require permission from the European Commission to use; some chemicals will not be allowed at all.

The government is not burdened with proving a chemical is harmful. It falls to industry to evaluate toxicity.

REACH covers all chemicals, both substances and mixtures, existing and new. It includes not only the chemicals a company makes, but all the chemicals contained in a product the company sells or used used in manufacturing.

REACH governs intentionally released chemicals such as printer ink and non-intentionally released chemicals such as dye in jeans; any amount more than one metric ton per year produced or imported into Europe.

Consumers or groups may request safety and environmental impact data from manufacturers. While there are many loopholes, a landmark database will be open to anyone, but proprietary chemical data may be available only to regulators.

A new lab method can see chemicals in an individual fingerprint — everything from dirt, paint, ink, spilled caffeine to incriminating particles of explosives.

Using infrared spectroscopy, the technique is a ‘chemical photograph’ of traces on a person’s hands. The print is examined at different depths to distinguish between chemicals in a print and those already on a surface

Investigators already gather DNA from prints and identify drugs in sweat.

Now fingerprints reveal where you’ve been and what you’ve eaten.

The first time law enforcement raided Congress was under the Bush Administration.

And they were abusing power.

The court found that the raid violated the Constitution.

Congress operates as a co-equal branch of government without being intimidated by the law enforcement powers of the executive branch.

The unanimous three-judge panel ordered the FBI to give Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson back all privileged legislative files, including copies, taken from his office during the unprecedented raid. [reuters]

63% of U.S. households own a pet; 40% a dog.

73.9 million dogs are owned in the U.S.

Pet spending in 2005 was over $35 billion!

$2.4 billion was spent on grooming.

Towns, cities, counties, and States are making many new laws, often forcing dogs into chain-link compounds, er, dog parks. Convenient control. Dastardly efficient, and wrong.

In Germany, protests have swelled with as many as 12,000 marching against repressive dog laws.

Were owners more able to understand their pets, to select appropriate pets, and to access adequate guidance, governments would be less able to justify repressive rules.

Animal ‘protection’ laws often exceed their goal of protecting animal welfare and extend into managing human behavior as well. These laws belong neither to the ideological “right” nor to the “left,” and rules made to protect animals fall sometimes within a progressive agenda, sometimes within a repressive one.

“We tend to think that the history of animal protection is simply about the relationship of humans to other animals, or that it is coupled to liberalism and other movements of liberation from feudalism to modernity.

But Kathleen Kete at Cabinet Magazine states that what is at stake in the history of animal protection is power… A Beastly Agenda.

“Puritans in England in 1654 issued the Protectorate Ordinance, the first legislation in Europe against cruelty to animals.

The law was passed during the radical stage of the English Civil War as part of the Puritan program to reform “mankind” and establish a godly republic on earth. It was part of a widespread attack on popular recreations – such as dancing round the maypole – which were believed to distract the lower classes from their main duties to be sober and Godfearing.

Reading the Bible led Puritans to the conclusion that humans have a duty to, if not be kind to animals, at least not cause them any unnecessary pain.

“Animals, too, were expelled from the Garden of Eden as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. We are responsible for their state of suffering and therefore have a duty to mitigate their suffering as much as possible.”

Our place within the natural world is often reflected in our relationship with our pets and tainted by unnecessary and repressive rules that stand between animals and humans.