small fish in a big tailing pond

Source Photos: Nina's Soul Food, Remsol

“The Keystone XL controversy may currently be consuming most of the U.S. government’s attention, but it’s not the only environmental crisis-in-the-making coming our way via Canada. A pro-development push north of the border is paving the way for large-scale mining projects located at key watersheds. Downstream in Alaska, commercial fishermen, conservation groups and others who fear for the mines’ potential to damage their homes and livelihoods can do nothing but watch. […]
     [The] KSM [Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell mine] is terrifying based on its size alone, but add it to the number of other large, open-pit mines being fast-tracked toward approval, and the risks multiply. In 2011, Premiere [British Columbia] Christy Clark, who trumpets mining as the province’s ‘comeback industry,’ pledged  to build eight new mines and expand nine others: right now, five projects in total are pending along the Taku, Stikine and Unuk watersheds, all of which are incredibly important, and delicate, salmon habitats.
     The same company behind the Mt. Polley disaster, Imperial Metals, has another major project pending at a main tributary to the Stikine River watershed, ‘one of the largest salmon producers in the Tongass National Forest.’ After Imperial Metals said it had no plans to slow down production in light of what happened at Mt. Polley, indigenous Canadians blockaded the mine in protest.
     'It feels like this big freight train that just continues to come' [Heather] Hardcastle [of Trout Unlimited] told Salon, 'and we’re doing our darndest to defend our rivers and way of life…we’re trying to scramble to keep up.'"
— Lindsay Abrams, Salon
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“Next spring, the sockeye eggs that are now being laid in spawning beds throughout the Fraser River system will hatch and the young fish – by the hundreds of millions – will migrate into lakes to rear.
     And that, at least in one lake, could be a disaster.
     Quesnel Lake, into which 24 million cubic metres of water and mine tailings flushed when the Mount Polley tailings dam burst, is one of the biggest and most important sockeye nurseries in the province [of British Columbia].
     No matter how hard Imperial Metals works to clean up the tailings that escaped, the heavy metals that swept down into Quesnel Lake are still there, settling out on the bottom, where they will slowly be taken up into the food chain.
     In the spring, vast schools of young sockeye – estimated to be up to 60 million in some years – emerge from tributaries, and flood down into Quesnel Lake. There, they spend a year before migrating down the Fraser to the Pacific, returning to spawn as four-year-olds.
     The year in the lake is a crucial period of growth in which the fish must become large enough to survive the rigours of the out-migration. No wonder then, that biologists and First Nations are worried not just about the immediate impact of the spill, but also about the long term.”
— Mark Hume, The Globe and Mail
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CAT got your tongue?

Photo from: pixgood

“If the two sides do not reach a consensus soon, the [Senate Intelligence] committee and its members will be left with only extreme options. One would be to release the heavily redacted version [of the torture report] that the CIA has already agreed to, which would be a capitulation on the part of the committee. The alternative would be for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) or another member of the committee to read the report — or sections that the committee believes should be released — into the Senate record, as then-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) did with the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
     [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein's optimism about the [CIA torture] report's release has been stifled in the past by the tense negotiations. In September Feinsetin said she expected the 500-page document to be public within two to four weeks. Two months later, negotiations are still ongoing — and based on reports of Tuesday night's meeting, not going well.
     Despite a committee vote in April to release the 500-page executive summary of the five-year, 6,000-plus page study, a public version of the document has been hamstrung for months by disputes over aspects of the report that the White House and CIA wish to suppress.”
— Ali Watkins, Huffington Post
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“The international community watched closely this week as representatives from the U.S. government defended its compliance with the Convention Against Torture (CAT) in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture. […]
     Since the U.S. last reported to the committee in 2006, more evidence of violations have been reported by the media or alleged by human rights groups. But the U.S. has done little to demonstrate that it is holding the top officials who gave the orders to torture accountable. Groups like the Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions say that the United States is shielding those responsible, which is in direct violation of its CAT obligations.
     'It’s is at the heart of everything,' Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and a member of Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions said in an interview with Newsweek. Referring to what she called the ‘legal framework the U.S. government built to shield itself from liability’ (a mixture of legal opinions that distort laws governing torture and the use of the Military Commissions Act to retroactively redefine war crimes to impede prosecution), she added that by choosing to immunize those responsible, [the U.S. government] 'legitimizes their actions and the legacy lives on, the precedent is set.’”
— Lauren Walker, Newsweek
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be reasonable

From: Kenston High School

∞ Why men don’t like asking for directions when they’re lost: it’s a macho thing… for good reason.
∞ Taller people are more patient – for a very good reason.
∞ Poor people are fat for a few very good reasons.
∞ Pop music all sounds the same, even samer than it used to… for some very insidious and depressing reasons.
∞ The oldest people alive today are skinny for a very good reason.

“[…] the least we can do for the hungry is less than any of us thought.” — Stephen Colbert

Photo: sofeminine

“Another article reported that between the 1960’s and 2000’s Americans became 24 pounds heavier and one inch taller. An average man currently weighs 194 lbs and an average woman weighs 165 lbs. One third of our children and teenagers are overweight. Five reasons were listed for the general population’s over-weightedness.
     Antibiotics are routinely given to livestock to produce rapid weight gain. Antibiotic residues in meat and milk do the same to people. Other weight-increasing drugs that might figure into population obesity are Ractopamine (marketed as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys) and hormones used by cattle growers such as oestradiol-17 and zeranol, among numerous others. The hormones are banned in European countries.
     Pesticides and endocrine disrupters such as BPA and Triclosan (found in Colgate toothpaste and some dishwashing detergents, of all things), artificial sweeteners or sugar substitutes, and government and industry advertising roundout the “five reasons” we are bigger than ever.”
— Elena Day, The CROZET Gazette
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“More than 50% of people [receiving food aid in the USA] ate food that was past its expiration date or bought food in damaged or dented packages. Those foods are more likely to be marked down, and they can be dangerous, especially if they’re not handled and stored properly.
     The most common practice might also be the greatest problem for Americans—almost 80% said that they bought unhealthy food. Processed junk foods are often cheaper than fresh food, and many low-income areas are considered 'food deserts' because there is little access to affordable, healthy groceries. The alternative is to buy inexpensive, filling food that’s widely available—fast food, chips, and soda, for example. This practice contributes to the high rates of obesity among lower income populations in the country.”
— Sonali Kohli, quartz
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speaking is easy, listening is hard

From: Internet Monk

“In 2010, French entrepreneur Micha Benoliel had a vision: that the world’s billion or so smartphones could be turned into their own network, with each phone acting as a “node” extending the Internet as we know it. He started to raise money for a startup, Open Garden, which would allow phones to communicate directly through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other ubiquitous technologies independent of the Internet and cellular networks. In 2014, as a proof of concept, he built a demo messaging app to take advantage of that network, FireChat.
     What happened next is a classic Internet story: The now 18-year-old leader of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement Joshua Wong called on the protesters to download FireChat to communicate, bypassing overloaded cellular networks and independent of the Internet, should the Chinese government decide to shut it down. In the first 24 hours, 100,000 people in Hong Kong had downloaded and installed the app; by the end of the week, 500,000 accounts had been created (in a city of 7 million).”
— Michael Learmonth, International Business Times
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“Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection. In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege, according to The Cost of Connectivity, a report published Thursday by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. […]
     The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem — the lack of competition in the broadband industry.“It’s just very simple economics,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust and communications and was an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission. “The average market has one or two serious Internet providers, and they set their prices at monopoly or duopoly pricing.”
— Heather, Crooks and Liars
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"[...] but fear itself"

From: Msnowe's Blog

"[…] raised and coddled as future terrorists. And then one day, twenty... thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life." — Louie Gohmert (R-TX), 2010

“The TSA successfully prevented an alleged terrorist from boarding a JetBlue flight out of Florida on Tuesday [May 8, 2012]. Initial reports describe the suspect as having curly brown hair, around 33 inches in height and really into drinking milk from a bottle.
     The 18-month old daughter of two New Jersey-born Americans of Middle Eastern descent was reportedly the reason for sending Transportation Security Administration agents onto an about-to-depart plane in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida this week. The parents of the girl, who wish to remain anonymous, say the entire incident is absurd.
     Riyanna’s mother tells Fort Lauderdale’s WPBF 25 News that she was approached by an airline employee late Tuesday while onboard a JetBlue plane readying for departure. According to her, she was informed that TSA agents were waiting to speak with the family back inside the terminal.
     'And I said, "For what?”' Riyanna’s mother tells the network. 'And he said, "Well, it’s not you or your husband. Your daughter was flagged as no fly.”'"
— Before It’s News
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“Israeli forces stormed a Jerusalem home this week and ordered the arrest of their terror suspect: Hamza Zeidani, a child who is only two-years-old.
     The Occupation forces entered the family home with a warrant for Hamza’s arrest and when they saw that he was a toddler, decided they would sieze his uncle, Mohammad Zeidani instead. […]
     An October 2013 Unicef report, found that during interrogation by Israeli Security Forces, Palestinian children had been 'threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member' in efforts to gain confessions for alleged offenses, most commonly for throwing stones.
     This is the reality of life for Palestinian families across the West Bank and Gaza, as footage and witness testimony reveals in the documentary Stone Cold Justice. When Israeli forces are not conducting the mass kidnap, arrest, and torture of Palestinian children – they are simply killing them on the spot.”
— Kerry-Anne, Addicting Info
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“Owners of a spiritual shop are being subjected to tirades of abuse because they share their name with the extreme jihadi group ISIS .
     Derek Morgan and Lisa Warburton, who opened the Isis Centre, in central Stockport, Greater Manchester, three years ago, have been abused and accused of supporting the group, which has been dubbed the new al-Qaeda. […]
     In 2011 the pair thought calling the business Isis, after the Egyptian goddess of magic and healing, would be harmless but this year the name has taken on a more sinister connotation.”
— Chris Gee, Mirror
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first sleep, second sleep… third sleep

A modification of Salvador Dali's "Sleep" (original via orangee)

“In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
    [...] in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
     Much like the experience of [psychiatrist Thomas] Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
     'It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,' Ekirch says.
     During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but 'after the first sleep,' when 'they have more enjoyment' and 'do it better.'"
— Stephanie Hagarty, BBC News Magazine
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From: AdClassix

“[…] It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
     Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. [...]
     This, despite the fact that a number of recent studies suggest that any deep sleep — whether in an eight-hour block or a 30-minute nap — primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall information more accurately. In a NASA-financed study, for example, a team of researchers led by David F. Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that letting subjects nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.”
– David K. Randall, The New York Times
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