Author Archives: biglermyrta910

4 Steps to Starting a Vegetable Garden

Rama H.

on

Butter vs. Margarine – Which is Better?

8 minutes ago

customize your newsletter

causes & news
animal welfare
global warming
environment & wildlife
human rights
women’s rights
news
submit news story
healthy living
food & recipes
health & wellness
healthy home
family life
true beauty
pets
shopping
take action
browse petitions
create a petition
daily action
volunteer
jobfinder
click to donate
community & sharing
people
groups
singles
photos
blogs
polls
ecards
my care2
my account
my groups
my page
my friends
my petitionsite
my messages
join care2
about us
advertise
partnerships
careers
press
contact us
terms of service
privacy
subscription center
help
rss feeds

Copyright © 2013 Care2.com, inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved

healthy living
food
health
love + sex
nature
pets
spirit
home
life
family
green
do good
all recipes
appetizers & snacks
basics
desserts
drinks
eating for health
entrees
green kitchen tips
raw
side dishes
soups & salads
vegan
vegetarian
videos
ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES
AYURVEDA
CONDITIONS
DIET & NUTRITION
FITNESS
GENERAL HEALTH
HEALTHY AGING
Mental Wellness
MEN’S HEALTH
NATURAL REMEDIES
WOMEN’S HEALTH
VIDEOS
dating
friendship
relationships
sex
videos
environment
lawns & gardens
natural pest control
outdoor activities
wildlife
videos
Adoptable Pets
Animal Rights
Behavior & Communication
Cats
Dogs
Everyday Pet Care
Humor & Inspiration
Less Common Pets
Pet Health
Cute Pet Photos
Safety
Wildlife
Remedies and Treatments
Videos
Biorhythms
Deepak Chopra’s Tips
Exercises
Global Healing
Guidance
Inspiration
Peace
Self-Help
Spirituality & Technology
Videos
home
life
family
beauty
green
do good
crafts & designs
news
videos
conscious consumer
blogs
astrology
my favorites
my Care2 main
my account
my butterfly rewards
my click to donate
my eCards
my friends
my groups
my kudos
my messages
my news
my page
my petitionsite
my photos
my sharebook
my subscriptions

Continue reading: 

4 Steps to Starting a Vegetable Garden

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4 Steps to Starting a Vegetable Garden

Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At 9:30 A.M. on August 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market’s servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don’t see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week’s average.

Soon complex computer programs deployed by financial firms swooped in. They bought undervalued stocks as the unusual sales drove their prices down and sold overvalued ones as the purchases drove their prices up. The algorithms were making a killing, and human traders got in on the bounty too.

Within minutes, a wave of urgent email alerts deluged top officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wall Street, NYSE officials scrambled to isolate the source of the bizarre trades. Meanwhile, across the Hudson River, in the Jersey City offices of a midsize financial firm called Knight Capital, panic was setting in. A program that was supposed to have been deactivated had instead gone rogue, blasting out trade orders that were costing Knight nearly $10 million per minute. And no one knew how to shut it down. At this rate, the firm would be insolvent within an hour. Knight’s horrified employees spent an agonizing 45 minutes digging through eight sets of trading and routing software before they found the runaway code and neutralized it.

By then it was shortly after 10 a.m., and officials from the NYSE, other major exchanges, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority were gathering for an emergency conference call. It didn’t end until 4 p.m.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

It’s a good thing that unexpected California frost didn’t freeze out the state’s avocado crop. It’s not just the Golden State that loves nature’s butter. Americans’ appetite for avocados has exploded over the last decade, jumping significantly in 2012 alone, in no small part due to marketing campaigns by foreign avocado growers. This weekend, Americans are expected to eat several tons of avocados on “Guacamole Sunday” while watching the Super Bowl.

Nate Steiner

Twilight Greenaway at the Smithsonian‘s Food Think blog:

Last year, according to the produce industry publication The Packer, about 75 percent of the avocados shipped within the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl came from Mexico. Most of the rest came from Chile. And that translates to a lot of the creamy green fruits. This year Americans will eat almost 79 million pounds of them in the few weeks before the big game — an eight million pound increase over last year and a 100 percent increase since 2003.

None of this has been an accident. The avocado industry started promoting guacamole as a Super Bowl food back in the 1990s, shortly after the NAFTA agreement began allowing floods of avocados from Central and South America to enter the country in winter. By 2008, Mexico had become the largest supplier of avocados to the U.S.

Touchdown for the centralized global food system! Funny end-zone dance for big profits! But a painful loss for local farming. Avocado season hasn’t really begun yet, so the ones you buy for Guacamole Sunday aren’t likely to be super-tasty, even after you let them ripen in a bag for a couple days. If you’re going to give in to the green monster, though, just please don’t do this.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Food

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Originally posted here: 

Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

Here Is a List of Extremists Who Agree With Chuck Hagel on Ending Nukes

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Like pundits in search of an apocryphal Barack Obama skeet-shooting photograph, Capitol Hill conservatives have been scampering for a reason to oppose former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary. Last week, they deemed Hagel too conservative for Obama supporters: He’s an anti-Semite! He’s not cool with the gays! But now that those ad hominems have failed to inspire much chattering beyond the Beltway, Republicans are attacking Hagel from the right: He’s a dirty hippie peacenik who wants to steal our atomic security!

Continue Reading »

See the original post:

Here Is a List of Extremists Who Agree With Chuck Hagel on Ending Nukes

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Here Is a List of Extremists Who Agree With Chuck Hagel on Ending Nukes

America Lost in Afghanistan. What Happens Next?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Kabul, Afghanistan—Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same. Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave. Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat. For more than a decade, US forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war. And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat. For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

Continue Reading »

See more here:  

America Lost in Afghanistan. What Happens Next?

Posted in Citizen, GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on America Lost in Afghanistan. What Happens Next?

How the NRA Undermined Congress’ 2007 Gun Control Push

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Last week, President Obama unveiled sweeping proposals on gun control, including a ban on military-style assault weapons, a reduction of ammunition magazine capacity and stiffer background checks on gun buyers.

National Rifle Association President David Keene quickly accused the Obama administration of being opportunistic. The president is “using our children to pursue an ideological anti-gun agenda,” he said.

The NRA has already begun to lobby on Capitol Hill to counter the administration’s effort.

To get a sense of what the NRA might do, it’s helpful to look at how it scored a victory during the last major federal initiative to tighten gun control.

Continue Reading »

Original article:

How the NRA Undermined Congress’ 2007 Gun Control Push

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on How the NRA Undermined Congress’ 2007 Gun Control Push

When John Kerry Was a Lone Hero in Congress

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Thursday was a big day for Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. The son of a foreign-service officer, he was appearing before the Senate foreign relations committee (which he used to chair) as President Barack Obama’s pick to be secretary of state. Though Kerry failed in 2004 to win the nation’s highest job, becoming the country’s top diplomat is a tremendous accomplishment and marvelous capstone for his decades-long public career, which began when he returned from service in Vietnam a war hero and led the movement against that war.

Over the years, it has been easy for some to poke fun at Kerry for his sometimes stodgy senatorial ways and for his occasional lapses, such as his 2002 vote authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. But those who weren’t around Washington in the 1980s or who have short memories might not realize that Kerry has been one of the more courageous members of the Senate. Back in 2004, when Kerry was running for president and some progressives were grumbling about him, I wrote an article for The Nation reminding folks of the gutsy actions Kerry had taken in the dark days of the Reagan-Bush era, when Republicans in the White House were cozying up to dictators, the CIA was using assets tied to drug smuggling to prosecute its secret wars, and Democrats were nervous about probing international banks with shady ties (that in several instances implicated Democrats). As Kerry reaches the pinnacle of the foreign-policy world, it’s an appropriate time to recall his years of noncombat bravery. Here’s the bulk of that article:

Continue Reading »

Visit link: 

When John Kerry Was a Lone Hero in Congress

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on When John Kerry Was a Lone Hero in Congress

High School Graduation Rates Still Increasing

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few days ago I mentioned that high school graduation rates were up, and suggested that reduced exposure to lead might be part of the reason. Today, the Department of Education announced that the upward trend has continued:

Based on data collected from the states for the Class of 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that 78 percent of students across the country earned a diploma within four years of starting high school. The graduation rate was last at that level in 1974, officials said.

….Notable in 2010 was the rise in the percentage of Hispanic students who graduate on time, with a 10-point jump over the past five years, to 71.4 percent. Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority group, making up more than 50 million people, or about 16.5 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

….Graduation rates improved for every race and ethnicity in 2010, but gaps among racial groups persist. Asian students had the highest graduation rate, with 93 percent of students finishing high school on time. White students followed with an 83 percent graduation rate, American Indians and Alaska Natives with 69.1 percent and African Americans with 66.1 percent.

I know it’s easy to sound Pollyannaish about this stuff, but the evidence of the last few decades suggests that standardized test scores are up; international comparisons are in pretty good shape; and that high school completion rates are up. This doesn’t mean that we can declare victory, or that America’s schools are paragons of educational excellence. There’s plenty of room for improvement.

At the same time, the conventional narrative of steady decline just doesn’t seem to be true. Especially when you consider the size and diversity of America’s primary education system, our results are decent and getting better. The data on this score is clear enough that this really needs to become the new conventional narrative.

View the original here – 

High School Graduation Rates Still Increasing

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , | Comments Off on High School Graduation Rates Still Increasing

Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I’ve been working this case relatively nonstop since the 27th.

Petty Officer First Class David Mosley didn’t sound all that tired when I spoke with him yesterday, but, then, he’s a public affairs specialist, a professional. A few times he stumbled over his words, once or twice forgot specific numbers. On the whole, though, no problems as he walked me through the massive complement of US Coast Guard staff and sea vessels and aircraft deployed to fix Shell’s mistake.

Two weeks from yesterday, the Kulluk, a drilling rig managed by Noble Drilling and owned by Shell, broke free of its tow lines as tug boats struggled in inclement weather to move it away from the Alaskan shore. On Dec. 31, it ran aground within an important bird area on Kodiak Island. A unified command comprised of representatives of Shell, Noble, the Coast Guard, the state of Alaska, and local representatives spent the next week and half determining whether the rig was safe to move and, ultimately, moving it to a nearby harbor. Some 700 people were involved in the effort by the time it had been safely docked.

How many of that 700 were from the Coast Guard? “That’s a very good question,” Mosley told me. He noted that “the command center at Coast Guard Center Anchorage was very much involved in the unified command,” proving the point by listing just the people who came to mind:

Captain Mehler, the federal on-scene coordinator, all the way down to your storekeepers and yeomen and people like myself, public affairs specialists, who were all swept up and involved in this in some way. The people who provided support on Base Kodiak and Air Station Kodiak, moving gear around and making things happen on the base. Maintenance crews with the helicopters, the C-130s. You’ve got the crews that were involved with the Alex Haley. We had stationed the Coast Guard Cutter Hickory and the Coast Guard Cutter Spar, both of which are 225-foot buoy tenders that were activated and would have come out to the scene as needed.

The Alex Haley has a crew of 90, plus 10 officers and a four-person aircrew. The Spar and Hickory each have a complement of about 50 people. He continued:

We brought people in, whether it was our strike teams or other folks that came in from the lower 48, from California and as far away as the Carolinas. We brought in these folks that are specialized in responding to these situations. It was not only a large response locally, it was a far-reaching response.

Those folks from the Carolinas, for example, were media specialists, brought in to help Mosley handle the onslaught of questions about Shell’s latest Arctic mistake during a slow news week. The strike teams are oil spill response experts, on stand by in case the worst case happened. (It didn’t.)

Mosley explained who foots the bill for a scenario like this. There’s a federal fund, the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, that was set up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. The fund is financed by a per-barrel excise tax on imported fuel as well as “cost recovery” from at-fault companies and any civil penalties imposed on a company responsible for a spill. It’s not clear how that money might be applied here; Mosley suggested that would be “hammered out” with Shell.

When it comes to search-and-rescue, Mosley says not to expect money back. “I have yet to see an incident in which we do search and rescue that we look for reimbursement,” he said. “That’s why the taxpayers pay us to do our jobs.” Among the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue efforts in this case? Three round-trip Jayhawk helicopter flights out to the Kulluk, each trip rescuing six members of the rig’s 18-person crew. Bringing people back onto the rig to test its integrity. Overflights to assess damage. The Coast Guard also reached out to the Department of Defense to borrow two Chinook helicopters to transport equipment. All of that? On your tab.

When the unified command first set up shop after the Kulluk‘s grounding, it was in a Shell office in Anchorage. As the number of people involved in the response swelled, the group decamped to a nearby hotel. Among those who made the trip was Shannon Miller, who works for Alaska’s division of spill prevention and response. Probably since its role was more modest, Miller had a better estimate of how many employees of the state of Alaska worked with the command. Twenty-two, she guessed — but that doesn’t include other resources, like the emergency towing package provided by the state.

Alaska has a strategy to get its money back. The costs the state accrues are internally invoiced and calculated, and Shell will be sent a bill for whatever portion of those invoices the state feels is appropriate. (One can assume that this, too, will be “hammered out.”) The process, Miller expects, will take months. There is also an emergency response fund that can allocate money for the incident. The fund collects revenue through a two-cent-per-barrel surcharge on oil produced in the state, as well any as money recovered from companies at fault.

I reached out to Shell in both Houston and Alaska to gauge the company’s willingness to absorb costs incurred by public entities. Neither location made a representative available to answer questions by deadline. See update at bottom. The company did clear up one gauzy point, albeit to other outlets. As we reported earlier this week, Shell was motivated to move the Kulluk when it did to avoid paying tax to Alaska on the rig in the new year. From United Press International:

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he questioned claims made by Shell that Kulluk was towed from its grounding site because of inclement weather.

“Reports that financial considerations rather than safety may have factored into Shell’s considerations, if true, are profoundly troubling,” he said in a letter to Shell Oil President Marvin Odum.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith told Bloomberg News that avoiding a Jan. 1 tax issue in the state was “a consideration” but “not among the main drivers for our decision to begin moving the Kulluk.”

Shell made a bad bet. Hoping in part to avoid an estimated $6 million tax bill, it decided to risk the stormy weather on Dec. 27. The bet didn’t pay off.

Lucky for the company, it wasn’t only betting with its own money. It was gambling yours, too.

Update: Shell’s Curtis Smith provided this statement by email in response to my questions:

We will live up to all of our obligations related to the response and recovery of the Kulluk. Throughout this incident, we have spared nothing in terms of personnel or assets to reach this safe outcome.

More here:

Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

Can fed-up Oregon organic farmers get a GMO ban on the ballot?

Can fed-up Oregon organic farmers get a GMO ban on the ballot?

Petitioners in Southern Oregon’s Jackson County are pushing a measure onto the ballot that would outlaw the farming of genetically modified crops in the region.

Recently Jackson County organic farmers found genetically modified sugar beet crops planted by the Swiss corporation Syngenta AG as close as one-eighth of a mile from their farms. Until last year, any GMO crop planted within four miles of an organic farm would’ve been against Department of Agriculture rules. But since then, it’s been a farming free-for-all.

From the Mail Tribune:

Ashland seed farmer Chuck Burr said he has a personal reason to support a proposed ban on genetically modified organisms in Jackson County.

He had to throw away $4,700 in chard seed after learning it might have been contaminated with pollen from nearby GMO fields.

“I’m up against it here,” said Burr, the owner of the 10-acre Restoration Farm on Old Siskiyou Highway. “I have to make a living, and I have an absolutely constitutional right to engage in commerce.

“And if another company comes in from outside the area and prevents me from doing it, then my rights trump theirs.”

The proposal has enough signatures to make it on the May 2014 primary ballot, but those rights will be central to whether citizens will even be allowed to vote on the measure. Oregon’s right-to-farm law states that “farming and forest practices are critical to the economic welfare of this state,” and that it is “in the interest of the continued welfare of the state for farming and forest practices to be protected from legal actions that may be intended to limit [such practices].”

A ban on genetically modified crop farming would definitely be a limit. But then, giving GM crops free rein is sort of limiting to organic farmers, given the way GM crops have of spreading across property lines. Oregon has more than a year to figure this one out, but I’m guessing the fight will get pretty dirty.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Food

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Link:

Can fed-up Oregon organic farmers get a GMO ban on the ballot?

Posted in Citizen, GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can fed-up Oregon organic farmers get a GMO ban on the ballot?