Tag Archives: radio

More Audio Surfaces From Dan Page, the St. Louis County Police Officer Suspended After Racist Remarks

by JulianaHaigler Posted on August 24, 2014

Mother Jones

More controversial audio has surfaced from Dan Page, the St. Louis County Police officer who pushed CNN’s Don Lemon in Ferguson on Aug. 18, and was put on administrative leave after video surfaced of him talking about being “a killer,” calling President Obama “undocumented,” and disparaging Muslims.

The additional audio, found and highlighted on Aug. 23 by left-wing advocacy and research group Political Research Associates, goes deeper into his beliefs that the US is in danger of being folded into a one-world government after a series of orchestrated events, and that “99.9 percent” of sexual assault in the military is “bogus.” The audio comes from interviews Page did in July with Rick Wiles on the TruNews radio show, an end-times and right-wing conspiracy-theory forum, and in May with The John Moore Radio Show.

A sample:

On the Department of Homeland Security’s definition of a terrorist:

“If you follow DHS’s, that’s Department of Homeland Security, definition of a terrorist, and now this is their definition, this not mine. It is a Caucasian male 18-65, one who supports the second amendment, one who believes in the second coming of Jesus Christ, one that is against illegal immigration and is against homosexuality and has a definition of traditional marriage. That is their definition of a terrorist.”

On a planned chain of events leading to a military takeover of the US:

“I’ve heard talk from very, very high sources that there is a timeline starting in 2015 … you have to be very watchful of created, orchestrated events within the United States … so there’s going action taken, I suspect within the continental United States and abroad, that’s going to create such havoc worldwide that people are going to demand some form of protection from the federal government. That’s what I suspect is coming. And this thing on the border right now with the illegals I think might be part of that.”

On sexual assault in the military:

“You’ve got Sen. Claire McCaskill right now beating the podium about assaults in the military and probably 99.9 percent of these things are bogus. One only need to look at a woman in a way that she feels uncomfortable and that’s considered sexual assault in the military.”

Rachel Tabachnick, the PRA fellow who pointed out this radio interview, notes that Page says the crisis with unaccompanied children and the wider scenario includes nuclear suitcase bombs, a planned North American Union, and, of course, further “demonization of Caucasian Christians.”

“Page expresses his belief that the flood of immigrant children is a clandestine operation with the purpose of programming American citizens for the eventual rounding up and imprisonment of their own children,” Tabachnick wrote.

Listen to the full audio from TruNews here:

Listen to the full audio from the John Moore Radio Show here:

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More Audio Surfaces From Dan Page, the St. Louis County Police Officer Suspended After Racist Remarks

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

by MargherBearden Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Early August 1966, Christian groups, primarily in the Southern United States took to the streets to burn the sin out of their beloved Beatles records in response to John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

Birmingham disc jockeys Tommy Charles, left, and Doug Layton of Radio Station WAQY, rip and break materials representing the British pop group The Beatles, in Birmingham, Ala., Aug. 8, 1966. The broadcasters started a “Ban The Beatles” campaign. AP

Like all good moments of mass hysteria, getting a little context helps put things in perspective.

The quote originally appeared in March 1966, in part of an interview with Lennon published in the London Evening Standard. The interviewer, Maureen Cleave, commented that Lennon was at the time reading about religion. Here is the full, original quote from Lennon:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In late July, five months after its original publication, a U.S. teen mag called Datebook republished the interview with Lennon. Turning to the tried and true method of generating scandal to gin up sales, Datebook put the “We’re more popular than Jesus” part of the quote on the cover. Woo-boy. Two Birmingham DJs picked up on the quote, vowing to never play the Beatles and on August 8th, started a “Ban the Beatles” campaign. Christian groups across the South rose up to protest the Beatles who, as it happened, were just about embark on what would be their last U.S. tour. Beatles records were burned, crushed, broken. Never a group to miss out on a good bonfire, the Ku Klux Klan got involved.

South Carolina Grand Dragon, Bob Scoggin of the Klu Klux Klan tosses Beatle records into the flames of a burning cross, in Chester, South Carolina, Aug. 11, 1966. The “Beatle Bonfire” was staged to take exception to a statement attributed to John Lennon, when he was quoted as saying that his group was more popular than Jesus. AP

On August 12, 1966 the Beatles set out on tour, meeting protests and stupid questions about the quote all along the way. It would be the last tour the Beatles would ever do in the United States, ending on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Young churchfolk from Sunnyvale on the San Francisco peninsula protest against the Beatles and John Lennon’s remark that The Beatles are “more popular than Jesus” outside Candlestick Park where the Beatles are holding a concert in San Francisco, Ca., Aug. 29, 1966. The picketers were seen by many of the teenagers but missed by the entertainers, who arrived and departed from a different direction. Some 25,000 fans went through the gates for The Beatles’ final U.S. performance on their tour. AP

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

by RemonaNecaise Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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We’re hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we’ll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What’s more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody’s weather—but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.

Or as climate expert Michael Mann of Penn State helpfully explained by email: “Global temperature variations can be thought of as waves on a rising tide. The rising tide is global warming, which has raised global temperatures nearly a degree C (1.5 F) over the past century. The waves are the shorter-term natural fluctuations related to phenomena like El Niño (or its flip-side, La Niña), which warm (or cool) the globe, respectively, by 0.1-0.2C.”

Here’s a figure, from the World Meteorological Organization, showing global temperature anomalies since 1950, with years that began with an El Niño event already active highlighted in red. As you can see, these are some of the warmest years:

Global temperature anomalies from 1950-2013, with years beginning with El Niño conditions in red, and years beginning with La Niña conditions in blue. Note: some years may have had El Niño conditions develop mid-year, and so would not be colored. World Meteorological Organization.

What’s more, even before the recent news about the likely development of El Niño conditions, climate experts saw a chance for 2014 to be a record temperature year, simply because temperatures continue to tick upwards. “I would have said likely top 5 if asked at the beginning of this year,” says Gavin Schmidt, the newly named director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the leading scientific agencies that tracks global temperatures and ranks them by year. “And the incipient/potential El Niño strengthens that.”

“We saw record global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and again in 2010 when ongoing global warming was positively reinforced by El Niño events,” adds Mann. “There is a good chance we will see a global temperature record this year or next if a substantial El Niño event takes hold.”

That’s bad news for climate skeptics. After all, by now we’ve all heard the claim that global warming has “stopped” or is “slowing down.”

As we’ve explained before, this misleading assertion relies heavily on the fact that the year 1998 was a very, very warm year, due to a strong El Niño event. If you cherry-pick the beginning of your time series, and start with a very hot year, you can make it look as though global temperatures aren’t rising so fast. But the reality is that, as the World Meteorological Organization notes, “each of the last three decades has been warmer than the previous one, culminating with 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record.”

But as soon as the globe sets another temperature record, the global warming “slowdown” talking point becomes a lot less compelling. At that point, climate skeptics will have a few options: Either they can finally accept the overwhelming body of evidence that global warming is real, or they can come up with a new cherry-picked counter argument. Want to guess which one they’ll choose?

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

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13 Conservatives Who Think Benghazi Is Obama’s Watergate

by EmiliaKeaton Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about Benghazi, and House Speaker John Boehner created a select committee to mount yet another investigation of the 2012 attack on the US facility in Libya. It’s the latest effort by House Republicans to squeeze a scandal out of the tragedy. While the GOP’s relentless Benghazi crusade continues, there has been an outpouring of rhetorical excesses, with some conservatives going as far as likening the Obama administration’s response to the attack to the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal.

Appearing Sunday on CNN, Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter who joined with Bob Woodward to break the Watergate story, said there’s no comparison: “This is not Watergate, or anything resembling Watergate. Watergate was a massive criminal conspiracy led by a criminal president of the United States for almost the whole of his administration. We’re talking total apples and oranges here.” He added, “This is about an ideological scorched-earth politics that prevails in Washington.”â&#128;&#139;

Frank Rich at New York magazine wrote last year that Republicans are pushing the Watergate analogy because they believe Benghazi could be a “gateway both to the president’s impeachment and to a GOP victory over Hillary in 2016.” But they’re running into a problem, Rich noted, namely that “no one to the left of Sean Hannity seriously believes that the Obama White House was trying to cover up a terrorist attack.” The Huffington Post observes that Benghazi is hardly the first Obama administration affair that has driven Republicans to reference Watergate. They’ve wielded this analogy to decry Fast and Furious, the Solyndra controversy, the so-called IRS scandal, and the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of Freedom of Information Act requests. And Republicans have dredged up the Watergate metaphor repeatedly since 2012.

Here are 13 conservatives who have compared Benghazi to Watergate, in chronological order:

1. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.): “I think this is an issue—Benghazi-gate is the right term for this. This is very, very serious, probably more serious than Watergate.” —Fox News, October 1, 2012â&#128;&#139;

2. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.):

3. Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh: “What we’re watching here today is the equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein helping Nixon cover up Watergate. The mainstream media is Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate is Benghazi.â&#128;&#139;” The Rush Limbaugh Show, October 24, 2012

â&#128;&#139;4. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “You know what, somebody the other day said to me that this is as bad as Watergate. Well, nobody died in Watergate. But this is either a massive cover-up or an incompetence that is not acceptable service to the American people.” —CBS’s Face the Nation, October 28, 2012â&#128;&#139;

5. Fox News contributor Bill O’Reilly: “Richard Nixon denied he had anything to do with a low-level political break-in. If the press had not been aggressive, Nixon would have gotten away with it. And certainly the break-in at the Watergate Hotel was not nearly as important as failing to define a terrorist attack that killed four Americans. President Obama…should have given us the facts weeks ago. He chose not to.” —Fox News, November 15, 2012â&#128;&#139;

6. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa): “I believe that it’s a lot bigger than Watergate, and if you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you’re going to get in the zone where Benghazi is.” —The Washington Times, December 12, 2012â&#128;&#139;

7. Former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee: “This is not minor. It wasn’t minor when Richard Nixon lied to the American people and worked with those in his administration to cover up what really happened in Watergate. But, I remind you—as bad as Watergate was, because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die.” —The Mike Huckabee Show, May 6, 2013

8. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.): “I want to keep pushing because the bond that has been broken between those who serve us in harm’s way and the government they serve is huge—and to me every bit as damaging as Watergate.” —The Mike Huckabee Show, May 6, 2013

9. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas):

10. Former Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan: “The break in at Watergate was a stupid burglary, political burglary, nobody got killed. This is a horrible atrocity. Killing an American ambassador; killing another diplomat; two Navy SEALs; destroying and burning that compound. Driving us out of a part of a country we have liberated. But you are right, the real thing here is the cover-up.” —Fox News, May 9, 2013â&#128;&#139;

11. Rep. Louie Gohmert, (R-Texas): “This administration is engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up, and once we get to the bottom, people in this administration need to know once they’ve been part of doing this kind of cover-up, they just need to know that people went to prison for participating in the cover-up.” —WND Radio, August 3, 2013â&#128;&#139;

12. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.): “I will say this to my dying day, I know people don’t realize it now, but that’s going to go down in history as the greatest cover-up. And I’m talking about compared to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate, and the rest of them. This was a cover-up in order for people right before the election to think that there was no longer a problem with terrorism in the Middle East.” —KFAQ, February 3, 2014

13. Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The email is to me the equivalent of what was discovered with the Nixon tapes.” —Fox News, May 1, 2014

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13 Conservatives Who Think Benghazi Is Obama’s Watergate

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Baseball Player Takes 2 Days of Paternity Leave. Sports Radio Goes Ballistic.

by bfys19 Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy has been getting all sorts of flak on sports radio today for missing last night’s game against the Washington Nationals. Why? Because yesterday was his second (and final) day of paternity leave, which is apparently one too many.

Murphy got word late on Sunday night that his wife was in labor, and rushed to Florida to be with her. He was there for the birth of their first child the next day, Monday, which also happened to be Opening Day. The Mets had Tuesday off, and Murphy decided to stay with his wife Wednesday before flying back in time for today’s game, also against the Nationals, which he played in. Murphy told ESPN that he and his wife decided together that it would be best for him to stay the extra day. “Having me there helped a lot, and vice versa, to take some of the load off,” he said. “It felt, for us, like the right decision to make.”

For a number of sports commentators, however, Murphy’s decision seemed ludicrous. New York-based radio host Mike Francesa kicked off the outrage yesterday afternoon, devoting his entire WFAN show to asking, exasperatedly, why on earth a man would need to take off more than the few hours during which his child is actually born. “For a baseball player, you take a day. All right. Back in the lineup the next day. What are you doing? What would you be doing? I guarantee you’re not sitting there holding you’re wife’s hand.”

“You’re a major league baseball player. You can hire a nurse to take care of the baby if your wife needs help,” he said. “I don’t see why you need…What are you gonna do? Are you gonna sit there and look at your wife in the hospital bed for two days? What are you gonna do?

Repeating this question at least five more times over the course of a 20-minute segment, Francesa also continued to confuse maternity and paternity leave. Noting that it’s possible for the lucky few to stagger their paternity leave rather than using it in one chunk, Francesa was dumbfounded: “What do you do? You work the next day, then you take off three months, to do what? Have a party? ‘The baby was born…But I took maternity leave three months later.’ For what? To take pictures? I mean, what would you possibly be doing? That makes no sense. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.” (The full clip is above.)

Hosts of WFAN’s “Boomer & Carton” spent their morning show today piling on to the criticism. “To me, and this is just my sensibility: 24 hours,” Craig Carton said. “You stay there, baby’s good, you have a good support system for the mom and the baby. You get your ass back to your team and you play baseball.”

Cohost and former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason thought even 24 hours was too much time: “Quite frankly, I would’ve said, ‘C-section before the season starts. I need to be at Opening Day.'”

The Mike and Mike show on ESPN Radio also devoted tons of airtime to scrutinizing the nondrama. Cohost Mike Golic, a former NFL defensive lineman, weighed in: “If you wanna be there for the birth of your child, I have zero problem with it. That said, when the baby is born…The baby was born on Monday. And he didn’t play in a game on Wednesday? This is just me, I would have been back playing.”

Notably, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the players association allows for three days of paternity leave. That’s better than most jobs—only about 13 percent of workplaces offer paternity leave at all, and the United States is one of four countries in the world that doesn’t mandate leave for new moms and dads.

For his part, Murphy seems to be shrugging off the criticism: “We had a really cool occasion yesterday morning, about 3 o’clock. We had our first panic session,” Murphy told ESPN. “It was just the three of us at 3 o’clock in the morning, all freaking out. He was the only one screaming. I wanted to. I wanted to scream and cry, but I don’t think that’s publicly acceptable, so I let him do it.”

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Baseball Player Takes 2 Days of Paternity Leave. Sports Radio Goes Ballistic.

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The Story Behind That Radio Station Heroically Playing Nelly’s "Hot in Herre" For Three Days Straight

by ElissaBarfield Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Latino Mix 105.7, a Univision-owned radio station in San Francisco, captured the hearts and lazy imagination of the internet. “There once was a film called Life is Beautiful about Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre‘ being looped on a radio station for 24 straight hours and now that movie has come to life,” gushed Gawker. (Life is Beautiful is actually a movie about the Holocaust and the enduring love of family.) In the widely covered stunt, the station started playing “Hot in Herre” sic around 3 p.m. PST on Friday and then just… kept going. The song wasn’t taken off repeat until Monday evening, shortly after 5 p.m. PST. “San Francisco radio station Latino Mix FM 105.7 has been doing its best to torture Bay Area listeners,” the San Jose Mercury News reported on Monday.

“Hot in Herre” (click here for lyrics) was a smash-hit song for St. Louis rapper Nelly in 2002. It was described as “the perfect summer jam” by People. It’s a song so inextricably tied to the early Bush era that you can read about US Marines singing it as they moved into combat in Iraq. (This moment, from journalist Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, was recreated in the HBO miniseries of the same name.) The song was featured in a 2012 Super Bowl ad starring Elton John as a tyrannical but violently overthrown king.

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The Story Behind That Radio Station Heroically Playing Nelly’s "Hot in Herre" For Three Days Straight

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Disney radio will stop shilling for frackers

by AshleaMelina844 Posted on January 13, 2014

Disney radio will stop shilling for frackers

By

chuck holton

A Radio Disney station in Ohio recently teamed up with the state’s oil and gas industry on an “educational program” promoting resource extraction — from Never Land to Gasland, you might say. The partnership made many parents and environmentalists unhappy.

From Al Jazeera:

The program, called Rocking in Ohio, went on a 26-stop tour of elementary schools and science centers across the state last month. It involves interactive demonstrations of how oil and gas pipelines work, and is led by three staffers from Radio Disney’s Cleveland branch. It is entirely funded by the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP), which gets its money from oil and gas companies.

The Wooster Daily Record described the tour’s stop at the Wayne County fairgrounds last year:

Radio Disney of Cleveland and its road crew promoted the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, with games pitting all ages of children vs. their peers and even families vs. families and dads trying to beat other dads in a variety of challenges. All the challenges, except perhaps the dads’ dance competition, related back to the science behind oil and gas production and their value as natural resources. …

One of the challenges was “literally creating our own pipeline,” [said Jag, the Radio Disney master of ceremonies], using balls and tubing to demonstrate “how we get oil and gas to your home.”

As contestants shot balls through the “pipeline” to end up in colored pails at the other end, Jag encouraged the audience, “Cheer these guys on like crazy.”

“I don’t think it’s doing the children or the state of Ohio any good,” Robert Shields of the Sierra Club’s Ohio chapter told Al Jazeera. “Kids’ ability to reason is not yet quite established, so it feels to me that they’re getting some kind of propaganda.”

After concerned citizens started protesting and circulating petitions, Disney backed out. Here’s the latest from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The Cleveland-based Radio Disney station will no longer participate in an educational program sponsored by Ohio’s oil and gas industry, after protests by environmental activists snowballed in recent weeks.

The Rocking in Ohio program raised eyebrows and outrage among parents and environmental advocates who say the program activities constituted propaganda.

A Disney spokesman provided the following statement to Northeast Ohio Media Group: “The sole intent of the collaboration between Radio Disney and the nonprofit Rocking in Ohio educational initiative was to foster kids’ interest in science and technology. Having been inadvertently drawn into a debate that has no connection with this goal, Radio Disney has decided to withdraw from the few remaining installments of the program.”

But that’s not the end of the roadshow. Rhonda Reda, director of the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, said the controversy was “blown out of proportion” and the program will continue without Radio Disney.


Source
Making education fun: Kids’ day at the Wayne County Fair features Radio Disney, Ohio Oil and Gas energy education program, The Daily Record
Network made 26 stops across Ohio with industry-funded group to promote oil and gas to students, Al Jazeera
Cleveland Radio Disney station ends partnership with oil and gas industry-funded kids’ program, The Plain Dealer

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Ambient Weather WR-111B Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Digital Radio, Flashlight, Cell Phone Charger with NOAA Certified Weather Alert & Cables

by Myrna Posted on August 9, 2013

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Ambient Weather WR-111B Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Digital Radio, Flashlight, Cell Phone Charger with NOAA Certified Weather Alert & Cables

by Myrna Posted on July 31, 2013

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Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 12, 2013

Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Even as bees drop dead around the world after sucking down pesticide-laced nectar, pesticide makers are touting their investments in bee research.

Nearly a third of commercial honeybee colonies in U.S. were wiped out last year, for a complicated array of reasons, scientists say: disease, stress, poor nutrition, mite infestations, and — yes — pesticides. Neonicotinoid pesticides seem to be particularly damaging to bees, so much so that the European Union is moving to ban them (but the U.S. is not).

Now the two main manufacturers of neonicotinoids, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, are promoting their commitments to bee health, as is agro-giant Monsanto. From a feature story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Monsanto Co., which two years ago bought an Israeli bee research company, hosts an industry conference on bee health at its headquarters in Creve Coeur this month. Bayer CropScience is building a 5,500-square-foot “bee health center” in North Carolina, and with fellow chemical giant, Syngenta, has developed a “comprehensive action plan” for bee health.

“The beekeeping industry has always crawled on its hands and knees to USDA and universities, begging for help,” said Jerry Hayes, a bee industry veteran recently hired by Monsanto to run its bee research efforts. “Now we have this very large company involved that knows how important bees are to agriculture.”

With a very large company involved, the bees are as good as saved, right?

Not surprisingly, the industry is downplaying the role of insecticides in bee deaths.

For example, Iain Kelly of Bayer CropScience does a suspiciously incomplete job of explaining the scary plight of bees during an interview with North Carolina Public Radio about the company’s new bee research center:

Kelly … says other insects and diseases are invading much of the bee’s natural habitat.

“They have real problems now with pests and pathogens, including viruses and fungal diseases,” Kelly says.

“We’ve lost a lot of the natural foliage for them as well, which is a big concern to beekeepers.”

Yeah, we know, this is a multi-faceted problem. But what about the pesticides? More on that from the Post-Dispatch:

Published last year, a study by Purdue University found that dead bees that had foraged in and around corn fields contained high levels of neonicotinoid compounds. The study was prompted by massive bee die-offs that happened in the spring, when corn planters were spewing neonicotinoid-containing dust.

“I know, definitively, that there’s a relationship between treated seed and spring die-offs,” said Christian Krupke, the study’s lead author. “It (neonicotinoids) blows out behind the planter and gets in the air, it lands on dandelions. It lands on the bees, even.”

While Krupke says there’s no direct link between neonicotinoids and Colony Collapse Disorder, he said, “anything that’s a stressor to bees is a concern now. We know they’re weaker because of it.”

The industry, however, flatly denies any link between bee health and the neonicotinoids it produces.

“There’s no scientific evidence linking neonics with bee health — period,” said Dave Fischer, director of environmental toxicity and risk assessment at Bayer CropScience.

Perhaps pesticide makers are hoping their happy PR buzz will distract us from the missing buzz of these critical pollinators.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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