Category Archives: Meyers

Happy Accidents – Morton A. Meyers

by Myrna Posted on August 23, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Happy Accidents

Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century

Morton A. Meyers

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Arcade Publishing

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the twentieth century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In the 1990s, Pfizer had high hopes for a new drug that would boost blood flow to the heart. As they conducted trials on angina sufferers, researchers noted a startling effect: while the drug did not affect blood flow to the heart, it did affect blood flow elsewhere! Now over six million American men have taken Viagra in their lifetime. Winston Churchill once said, “Men occasionally stumble across the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.” Within the scientific community, a certain stigma is attached to chance discovery because it is wrongly seen as pure luck. Happy accidents certainly happen every day, but it takes intelligence, insight, and creativity to recognize a “Eureka, I found what I wasn't looking for!” moment and know what to do next. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!

Source – 

Happy Accidents – Morton A. Meyers

Posted in Casio, Eureka, FF, GE, Meyers, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Happy Accidents – Morton A. Meyers

NYC Building Collapse Was Probably Gas-Related

by Ahmad6486yebta Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Update: The New York Daily News reports that at least two people are missing, as firefighters continue to contain the fire. The injury toll has risen to at least 19, with four people in critical condition.

An apparent gas explosion caused two New York City buildings to collapse on Thursday, injuring at least a dozen people, with at least three in critical condition.

Fire crews first responded to calls of a building collapse at 3:17 p.m. on Second Avenue near Seventh Street in Manhattan. Less than an hour later, about 250 firefighters rushed to the scene as the fire upgraded to a seven-alarm blaze. Two other buildings were damaged in the fire, and at least one of them is at risk of collapsing. Thursday’s blast comes a year after a gas explosion destroyed two buildings in East Harlem and left eight people dead. National Transportation Safety Board investigators later found a crack in the city’s aging gas pipeline near one of the buildings.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a press conference with reporters that preliminary findings suggest the explosion may have been caused by plumbing and gas work. He added that Con Edison inspectors arrived at the site more than an hour before the blast to examine private gas work being done at one of the buildings, but found the work had not passed inspection. No gas leaks were reported before the explosion. A Con Edison spokesperson told the New York Times a few of the buildings on Second Avenue had been “undergoing renovations” since August. The gas and electric utility company planned to shut down gas in the area.

We’ll continue to update as we learn more.

Continue reading:

NYC Building Collapse Was Probably Gas-Related

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, Meyers, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on NYC Building Collapse Was Probably Gas-Related

Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a "Load of Claptrap"

by IngridNHZT Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Last night, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a probable candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, shared his thoughts about climate change with late-night host Seth Meyers (video above). Here’s what he said:

CRUZ: I just came back from New Hampshire where there’s snow and ice everywhere. And my view actually is simple. Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever. It’s why, you remember how it used to be called global warming, and then magically the theory changed to climate change?

MEYERS: Sure.

CRUZ: The reason is it wasn’t warming. But the computer models still say it is, except the satellites show it’s not.

We totally agree with his point that debates about climate “should follow science and should follow data.” Right on! But according to Kevin Trenberth, a leading climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, everything else in Cruz’s quote is “a load of claptrap…absolute bunk.”

How the 2016 contenders will deal with climate change


Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a “Load of Claptrap”


Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment


Jeb Bush on Climate Change: “I’m a Skeptic”


How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World


Jim Webb Wants to Be President. Too Bad He’s Awful on Climate Change.


Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Will Now Supervise the Nation’s Climate Science


Attention GOP Candidates: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming

Trenberth wasn’t alone in his criticism. Several prominent climate scientists contacted by Climate Desk dismissed Cruz’s analysis. “It is disturbing that some of our most prominent elected officials have decided to engage in distortions of and cynical attacks against the science,” said Michael Mann of Penn State.

“Lawmakers have a responsibility to understand the science, and not to embrace ignorance with open arms, as Senator Cruz is doing here,” added Ben Santer, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

So what’s wrong with what Cruz said? For starters, the satellite record does, in fact, show warming. Here’s a view of temperature anomalies (that is, the deviation from the long-term average) reported by Remote Sensing Systems, a NASA-backed private satellite lab. It shows warming of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1980, the beginning of the satellite record:

Remote Sensing Systems

Even still, there are a couple important caveats with satellite temperature data that Cruz would do well to make note of. One, Santer said, is that it has a “huge” degree of uncertainty (compared to land-based thermometers), so it should be approached with caution. That’s because satellites don’t make direct measurements of temperature but instead pick up microwaves from oxygen molecules in the atmosphere that vary with temperature. Fluctuations in a satellite’s orbit and altitude and calibrations to its microwave-sensing equipment can all drastically affect its temperature readings.

More importantly, satellites measure temperatures in the atmosphere, high above the surface. The chart above shows the lower troposphere, about six miles above the surface. This data is an important piece of the climate and weather system, but it’s only one piece. There are plenty of other signs that are far less equivocal, and perhaps even more relevant to those of us who live on the Earth’s surface: Land and ocean surface temperatures are increasing, sea ice is declining, glaciers are shrinking, oceans are rising, the list goes on. In other words, the satellites-vs-computers dichotomy described by Cruz ignores most of the full picture.

For example, here’s the most recent land and ocean-surface temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, showing how temperatures this winter deviated from the long-term average (dating all the way back to 1880). Much of the globe is warmer than average, some parts are the hottest on record, and the overall global temperature was the warmest on record:

NOAA

There’s also a big underlying flaw with Cruz’s cherry-picked timespan of 17 years, which almost any climate scientist would agree is far too short to observe any meaningful trend. 1998, the year Cruz starts with, was itself exceptionally warm thanks to the biggest El Nino event of the 20th century. If that’s your starting place, the warming trend does indeed look weak. But look over a longer time period, and it’s obvious that very warm years are more common now than before.

NOAA

And in any case, even the modest “slow-down” in warming that has occurred since 2000 isn’t inconsistent with what scientists have always expected man-made climate change will look like. Even the earliest climate models predicted the possibility of occasional leveling-off periods in upward-bound global temperature, like a landing on a staircase.

In fact, one reason why many scientists “magically” (as Cruz put it) have begun to prefer the term “climate change” to “global warming” is because they think the latter can misleadingly imply that every year will be incrementally warmer than the last. In reality, climate change is all about odds: Man-made greenhouse gas emissions substantially increase the chances of an exceptionally warm year, but they don’t eliminate the possibility for average or even cold years to happen.

Even accounting for the apparent stability of the last few years, Santer said, “everything tells us that what’s going on isn’t natural.”

As for Cruz’s reference to snowy weather in New Hampshire…give us a break.

See original article here: 

Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a "Load of Claptrap"

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LG, Meyers, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a "Load of Claptrap"

What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

by RafaelaYFPY Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Bill Nye, the bow-tied erstwhile kids’ TV host, onetime dancer with the stars, and tireless champion of evolution and climate science, was never a virulent or wild-eyed critic of genetically modified crops. Back in 2005, he did a pretty nuanced episode of his TV show on it, the takeaway of which was hardly fire-breathing denunciation: “Let’s farm responsibly, let’s require labels on our foods, and let’s carefully test these foods case by case.”

In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, published just last November, Nye reiterated these points. His concern about GMOs centered mainly on unintended consequences of growing them over large expanses—he cited the example of crops engineered to resist herbicides, which have been linked pretty decisively to the decline of monarch butterflies, which rely on abundant milkweeds, which in turn have been largely wiped out in the Midwest by GMO-enabled herbicide use. Nye praised certain GMOs, such as corn engineered to repel certain insects, but concluded that “if you’re asking me, we should stop introducing genes from one species into another,” because “we just can’t know what will happen to other species in that modified species’ ecosystem.”

Now, Nye’s doubts have evidently fallen away like milkweeds under a fine mist of herbicide. In a February interview filmed backstage on Bill Maher’s HBO show (starting about 3:40 in the below video), Nye volunteered that he was working on a revision of the GMO section of Undeniable. He gave no details, just that he “went to Monsanto and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there.” As a result, he added with a grin, “I have revised my outlook, and am very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world!”

Monsanto’s longtime chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, responded to the interview with an approving tweet featuring a photo of Nye at company HQ:

It will be interesting to hear what wonders within Monsanto’s R&D labs turned Nye from a nuanced GMO skeptic to a proud champion.

Original article: 

What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

by JonahYIIko Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber takes on one of the lessons du jour that always crop up after a party gets shellacked at the polls: how do we appeal to demographic group X that voted so heavily against us? In this case, the party is the Democrats, and the demographic group is the infamous white working class, which voted Republican by a 30-point margin last week:

At first blush, the white working class would appear to pose a real dilemma. The set of issues on which the Democratic Party is most coherent these days is social progressivism….But while these issues unite college-educated voters and working-class minority voters, they’ve historically alienated the white working class.

….How to square this circle? Well, it turns out we don’t really have to, since the analysis is outdated. The white working class is increasingly open to social liberalism, or at least not put off by it. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin observed this summer, 54 percent of the white working class born after 1980 think gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, according to data assembled from the 2012 election.

….Long story short, there’s a coalition available to Democrats that knits together working class minorities and college-educated voters and slices heavily into the GOP’s margins among the white working class….The basis of the coalition isn’t a retreat from social progressivism, but making economic populism the party’s centerpiece….The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a “message” that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects, as Harold Meyerson recently pointed out.

I’d like to offer a different interpretation. I don’t have a bunch of poll data readily at hand to back this up, so it’s possible I’m way off base. But I don’t think so, and at the very least I welcome pushback since it might clarify some things that need clarifying.

Here it is: I agree that social liberalism isn’t quite the deal killer it used to be. Scheiber and Teixera are right about that. It’s still an issue—especially gun control, which remains more potent than a lot of liberals like to acknowledge—but it’s fading somewhat in areas like abortion and gay marriage. There are still plenty of Fox-watching members of the WWC who are as socially conservative as ever, but I think it’s safe to say that at the margins social issues are becoming a little less divisive among the WWC than they have been over the past few decades.

But if that’s the case, why does the WWC continue to loathe Democrats so badly? I think the answer is as old as the discussion itself: They hate welfare. There was a hope among some Democrats that Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform would remove this millstone from around Democrats’ necks, and for a few years during the dotcom boom it probably did. The combination of tougher work rules and a booming economy made it a less contentious topic.

But when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That’s just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn’t matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That’s because they’re closer to it. For them, the poor aren’t merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They’re the folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn’t for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that’s responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

This is a big problem because these are all things that benefit the poor but barely touch the working class. Does it matter that the working class barely pays for most of these programs in the first place, since their federal income taxes tend to be pretty low? Nope. They’re still paying taxes, and it seems like they never get anything for it. It’s always someone else.

It’s pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And although it’s bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic1—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn’t vote for Democrats either.

I hate to end this with the usual cliche that I don’t know what to do about it, but I don’t. Helping the poor is one of the great causes of liberalism, and we forfeit our souls if we give up on it. And yet, as a whole bunch of people have acknowledged lately, the Democratic Party simply doesn’t do much for either the working or middle classes these days. Republicans, by contrast, offer both the concrete—tax cuts—and the emotional—an inchoate but still intense rage against a government that seems not to care about them.

So sure: full-throated economic populism? That might work, though everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means. But here’s one thing it better mean: policies that are aimed at the working and middle classes and that actually appeal to them. That is, policies that are simple, concrete, and offer benefits which are clear and compelling.

This is going to require policy wonks to swallow hard. Remember Cash 4 Clunkers? Economically, that was probably a dumb program that accomplished little. But it didn’t do any harm, and people sure loved it. Multiply that by a hundred and you’re on the right track.

1The Democrats’ problem with the white working class is far worse in the South than anywhere else. Nonetheless, I think we’re kidding ourselves if we crunch a bunch of numbers and somehow conclude that it’s not a problem elsewhere. It’s not as big a problem, but in an electorate that continues to be balanced on a tightrope, five or ten percentage points among a sizeable group of people is still a pretty big problem.

Read this article – 

Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, Meyers, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

by CliftonBisdee Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Harold Meyerson writes today about something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision, a feature of most trade agreements since the Reagan administration. Basically, it means that if, say, a Mexican company objects to a regulation in Texas, it can sue Texas. But not in a US court. Instead the case is heard in a special extra-governmental tribunal:

The mockery that the ISDS procedure can make of a nation’s laws can be illustrated by a series of cases. In Germany in 2009, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, seeking to build a coal-fired power plant near Hamburg, used ISDS to sue the government for conditioning its approval of the plant on Vattenfall taking measures to protect the Elbe River from its waste products. To avoid paying penalties to the company under ISDS (the company had asked for $1.9 billion in damages), the state eventually lifted its conditions.

Three years later, Vattenfall sued Germany for its post-Fukushima decision to phase out nuclear power plants; the case is advancing through the ISDS process. German companies that owned nuclear power plants had no such recourse.

After Australia passed a law requiring tobacco products to be sold in packaging featuring prominent health warnings, a Philip Morris subsidiary sued the government in Australian court and lost. It also sued the government through the ISDS, where the case is still pending. The health ministry in next-door New Zealand cited the prospect of a Philip Morris victory in ISDS as the reason it was holding up such warnings on cigarette packages in its own country.

Meyerson wants to know why Democratic presidents continue to support ISDS, but I’m more interested in why the tea party crowd hasn’t yelled itself hoarse over this. After all, this is a tailor-made example of giving up US sovereignty to an unaccountable international organization, something that normally prompts them to start waving around pocket copies of the Constitution and going on Hannity to complain that President Obama is trying to sabotage America. Agenda 21, anyone?

So why not this time? I guess it’s because ISDS is normally used by big corporations to challenge environmental laws. So which do you hate more? The EPA or an unaccountable international organization? Decisions, decisions….

See more here:  

Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation

by ShaylaAlfred Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The battle over Texas textbooks is raging once again. On Tuesday, hundreds of citizens turned out for the first public hearing on the controversial social-science materials now under review as part of the state’s contentious once-in-a-decade textbook adoption process. During the all-day proceedings, activists and historians pointed out numerous factual errors and complained that the books promoted tea party ideology while mocking affirmative action and downplaying the science linking human activity to climate change. “They are full of biases that are either outside the established mainstream scholarship, or just plain wrong,” Jacqueline Jones, who chairs the history department at the University of Texas-Austin, said from the podium. “It can lead to a great deal of confusion in the reader.”

Other speakers raised concerns about the treatment of religion, especially the tendency of some books to play up the role of Christianity in our nation’s founding. Kathleen Wellman, a professor of history Southern Methodist University, noted with dismay that a popular civics text was filled with references to Moses and claimed that the biblical prophet had inspired American democracy. If the draft texts are adopted as is, she argued, Texas children could grow up “believing that Moses was the first American.” Conservatives, meanwhile, complained that the books gave too much space to liberal figures such as Hillary Clinton.

It’s a high-stakes debate. Because Texas has one of the nation’s largest public school systems and some of the most rigid textbook requirements, publishers have traditionally tailored textbooks they sell nationwide to the Lone Star market.

Continue Reading »

See original article here: 

Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, Holmes, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation

Meyers Lavender Liquid Hand Soap Refill(33 OZ)

by Myrna Posted on August 4, 2014

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in Meyers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meyers Lavender Liquid Hand Soap Refill(33 OZ)