02.29.12

Links – Education Watch, Oil Speculation, MRSA in Europe, Censorship

Posted in Site News at 4:34 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Cablegate

  • Revealed: US plans to charge Assange

    UNITED STATES prosecutors have drawn up secret charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, according to a confidential email obtained from the private US intelligence company Stratfor.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Please sign and promote this petition to, Protect our families’ health by ending the overuse of antibiotics in food producing animals.

    Almost 80% of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are for food animals. Industrial farms routinely feed these drugs to the animals to promote growth and compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. This overuse creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans and cause expensive, hard-to-treat illnesses. …

  • “Pig MRSA” came from humans, evolved via farm drugs

    It is possible that this finding will be viewed as no big deal: After all, since pigs tend to experience other staph strains, MRSA had to come from somewhere. That would be a mistake.

  • Rising Gas Prices: Not Demand Driven

    the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. … Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers.

  • Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies ‘could provide half of global carbon target’

    According to IEA research, 37 governments spent $409bn on artificially lowering the price of fossil fuels in 2010. Critics say the subsidies significantly boost oil and gas consumption and disadvantage renewable energy technologies, which received only $66bn of subsidies in the same year.

  • USDA to Give Monsanto’s New GMO Crops Special ‘Speed Approval’

    With the faster reviews, there will be even less time spent on evaluating the potential dangers. Why? Because Monsanto is losing sales with longer approval terms.

  • Keep Monsanto OUT of Your Veggie Patch

    In 1994, they quietly purchased Seminis for $1.4 billion in cash. Seminis seeds are carried by some of the best-known gardening catalogs, including Burpee, Park Seed, John Scheeper and others. This purchase, plus the purchase of several smaller seed concerns, has given Monsanto an estimated 40%-80% share of the home vegetable seed market.

  • Heartland Panics Over Leak: 71 Year Old Vet, Young Mom Fire Back at Threats

    A number of bloggers have now received threatening but impotent messages from Heartland thugs, including 71 year old Air Force Vet and journalist, and a young activist Mom. See their responses below.

    Heartland claimed that one of the memos is a fake and outrageously demands retractions from anyone who quoted the story, “We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.” Desmogblog, analyzed the documents and found extensive redundancy in them and support for the supposedly fake memo’s authenticity
    .

  • Peter H. Gleick: The Origin of the Heartland Documents

    My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved

    Dr. Gleick’s character was immediately attacked, which basically confirms the orginal accusation. See 1, “There are a lot of people involved with Heartland’s multimillion dollar climate denial machine who want to change the subject to anything else.” as usual, they turn to character assassination.

  • Scientists Who Had Emails Stolen Ask Heartland Institute to End Attack on Climate Science

    Seven leading climate researchers who themselves were the victims of an email theft which was promoted by the Heartland Institute have written an open letter to the organization, calling on it to refrain from spreading inaccurate information about climate science and attacking climate researchers.

• Censorship

  • Facebook Censorship list, 2, 3

    This is a baseline censorship list. PR people are probably sold extra censorship rights.

  • The “Right to Be Forgotten”: A Threat We Dare Not Forget

    To be “forgotten” in the usual sense of the “right to be forgotten”
    proponents would typically end up requiring not only that direct
    references to sites containing “offending” materials be expunged from
    search results, but also links to any sites that so much as
    specifically (or in many cases even generally) discuss, critique,
    analyze, or otherwise mention the materials in question … we should be concentrating on providing more information, more context in case of disputes, not less

    The rich and powerful want their ability to destroy public records. The “forgotten” in the ordinary sense was an artifact of information inefficiency. The information, unless destroyed by the rich and powerful, was always available in libraries and public records, unless destroyed, it just took work to find it and the results were hard to share.

  • The Leaked Stratfor Emails regarding Julian Assange are DISGUSTING

    The USA Government is considering CHARGING Anyone who simply LINKS to these documents with a FEDERAL CRIME!

    Amazing, it’s a Federal crime to link to email from a private spy company? Is it also a crime to link to links of links, verbally at the water cooler?

• Civil Rights

  • ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/angry-about-national-defense-authorization-act

    We’ve just released a new toolkit with resources to help you fight back against the NDAA in your community.

  • ACLU:
    

    Tell Congress: Fix the NDAA

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Judge awards iPhone user $850 in throttling case

    Throttling is more about billing than it is about bandwidth but ATT should not own the spectrum in the first place

• Education Watch

  • America’s dangerously removed elite

    Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education … refuses to live in the district that he governs. Though having no background in education administration, this longtime telecom executive used his connections to get appointed Denver superintendent, and he now acts like a king. From the confines of his distant castle in Boulder, he issues edicts to his low-income fiefdom — decrees demonizing teachers, shutting down neighborhood schools over community objections and promoting privately administered charter schools. Meanwhile, he makes sure his own royal family is insulated in a wealthy district that doesn’t experience his destructive policies.

  • Dissuading Teachers from Teaching Science: Global warming deniers creating K-12 curriculum

    thanks to leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, we know of a insidious new plan to create a whole K-12 curriculum to spread doubt and make teaching about global warming as controversial topic in public school classrooms as the theory of evolution.

  • A must read: Mass hysteria in New York City after test scores are released

    I cannot believe that the ed reform movement has come down to this, releasing teacher evaluations based on test scores and then the New York Post selecting one teacher as the worst teacher in NYC and posting her photo and information on the cover of their rag. Is this what education is supposed to be about?

    A Murdoch Gates partnership is alleged in the linked article.

  • Teacher Evaluation Bill SB 5895 and why it should be opposed vehemently

    Since the pilot program that all the ed-reformers in our state applauded, it has now been instituted in our schools. Then last month NWEA “re-calibrated” all of the test scores that had been taken for the last year and guess what? The administrators within SPS stated to use the term “negative growth” when describing test scores. … if this was New York City today, everyone would be blaming the teachers and starting the witch hunt of who should be placed on the pyre first. … One interesting point in all of this is that the test scores of teachers in charter schools have not been published.

    So the blame game has no end. When the so called reform programs produce worse results just say it’s all the teacher’s fault again.

  • Weekly Update: Smart ALEC, Black Teachers Fired En Masse in Chicago and Chalk Face Radio

  • Parents Across America on corporate interests in education: One year ago

    Happy Birthday, Parents Across America

• Copyrights

  • IPEG-SA Announces Tapeworm Licensing

  • Repo Man director urges fans to “pirate a bunch of my stuff right away”

    It’s so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom. We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It’s complete bullshit.

    Sharing is good but I can not recommend sharing things owned by gangsters.

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