Tag Archives: southern

California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

by BillBelgrave Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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

In normal years, California residents get about 30 percent of their drinking water from underground aquifers. And in droughts like the current one—with sources like snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains virtually non-existent—groundwater supplies two-thirds of our most populous state’s water needs. So it’s sobering news that about 20 percent of the groundwater that Californians rely on to keep their taps flowing carries high concentrations of contaminants like arsenic, uranium, and nitrate.

That’s the conclusion of a ten-year US Geological Survey study of 11,000 public-water wells across the state. The researchers tested the wells for a variety of contaminants, looking for levels above thresholds set by the Environmental Protection Agency and/or the California State Water Resources Board.

Interestingly, naturally occurring trace elements like arsenic, manganese, and uranium turned up at high levels much more commonly agriculture-related chemicals like nitrate.

In the ag-heavy San Joaquin Valley (the Central Valley’s Southern half), for example, you might expect plenty of nitrate in the water, because of heavy reliance on nitrogen fertilizers. Over the limit of 10 parts per million in water, nitrate can impede the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and has been linked to elevated rates of birth defects and cancers of the ovaries and thyroid. But while 4.9 percent of wells in the San Joaquin turned up over legal nitrate thresholds, arsenic (over legal limits in 11.2 percent of wells) and uranium (7.4 percent)—neither of which are used in farming—were more common.

But in the case of uranium—which heightens the risk of kidney trouble and cancer when consumed in water over long periods—agriculture isn’t off the hook. Kenneth Belitz, the study’s lead author and chief of the USGS’s National Water Quality Assessment Program, explains that before irrigation, the arid San Joaquin landscape supported very little vegetation, and the naturally occurring uranium in the landscape was relatively stable. But as farms sprouted up, irrigation water reacted with carbon dioxide from now-abundant plant roots to “mobilize” the uranium, pushing it downward at the rate of 5 to ten feet per year and eventually into the water table.

Conversely, some of the regions with highest nitrate levels are former ag areas that are now suburban, Belitz says: northern California’s Livermore Valley and southern California’s Santa Ana basin. That’s because nitrates, too, move through the soil strata at a rate of five to ten feet per year, and take years to accumulate in underground aquifers.

And that means that today’s ag-centric areas, including the San Joaquin Valley, could be slowly building up nitrate levels year by year that could lead to much higher nitrate levels in well water in coming decades, Belitz says.

For California residents and policymakers, the reports adds another distressing data point to the current water crisis. The fossil record and climate models suggests that precipitation levels will likely drop significantly compared to 20th century norms going forward, according to UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram—meaning an ever-growing reliance on groundwater for both farms and residents. Meanwhile, NASA research shows that this increasingly important resource is being drawn down at a much faster pace than it’s being replenished. And this latest USGS study suggests that the state’s precious, vanishing groundwater supply is widely contaminated. It’s enough to make you want to open a bottle of the state’s famous wine.

More – 

California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Sprout, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

by cazarehotel Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Here’s the latest from Pluto, a hi-res image of the Sputnik Plain, which should be enough to get Republicans seething. From NASA:

In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

….Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.

So, um, mud drying or lava lamps. Take your pick. Cool picture, though.

See the original article here – 

More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

Making Republicans Mad Is All Part of the Plan to Pass the Iran Deal

by ThereseAmbrose Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Why is President Obama talking so much about the Iran nuclear deal? It’s not as if he’s likely to convince many Republicans to support it, after all. Jonathan Bernstein says the answer lies in the unusual way Congress is being forced to vote on the deal: the agreement takes effect unless Congress votes to disapprove it. Obama can veto any resolution of disapproval, and it only takes one-third of Congress to sustain that veto. In other words, all Obama needs are Democratic votes. And the best way to get those votes is to take advantage of the power of polarization:

By speaking out in favor of something, and doing it repeatedly, presidents tend to polarize public opinion along party lines. If he needed bipartisan support, the best strategy would be to keep his mouth shut.

But Obama doesn’t need any Republican help. He just needs Democrats to stick together, and not base their votes on interest-group attachments or, for that matter, on their personal views.

While Obama thinks the Iran agreement should win on its actual merits — otherwise he wouldn’t have agreed to it! — not everyone sees it the same way. He can try to give swing voters in the House and Senate substantive reasons to support it. But this wouldn’t be as efficient as simply getting the Democrats to act as partisans.

As Bernstein says in his teaser sentence, “A strategy that makes Republicans mad will unite Democrats.” So Obama is talking and talking and talking, and conservative media is getting madder and madder and madder. That tends to unite liberals, even those who are strong supporters of Israel and might otherwise be reluctant to support a deal that Israel opposes.

Republicans are cooperating beautifully, aren’t they? Obama must be very pleased.

More:  

Making Republicans Mad Is All Part of the Plan to Pass the Iran Deal

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Making Republicans Mad Is All Part of the Plan to Pass the Iran Deal

Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

by Reinaldo96Q Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Bees are having a really hard time right now. For about a decade, they’ve been dying off at an unprecedented rate—up to 30 percent per year, with a total loss of domesticated honeybee hives in the United States worth an estimated $2 billion.

At first, no one knew why. But as my colleague Tom Philpott has reported extensively, in the last few years scientists have accumulated a compelling pile of evidence pointing to a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These chemicals are widely used in commercial agriculture but can have lethal effects on bees. Other pesticides are also adding to the toll. So are invasive parasites and a general decline in the quality of bees’ diets.

Clearly, that combination of factors poses a pretty serious problem for anyone who likes to eat, since bees—both the domesticated kind and their wild bumblebee cousins, both of which are in decline—are the main pollinators of many major fruit and nut crops. The problem is so severe that this spring President Barack Obama unveiled the first-ever national strategy for improving the health of bees and other key pollinators.

Now, it appears that lurking in the background behind the ag-industry-related problems is an even more insidious threat: climate change. According to new research published in the journal Science, dozens of bumblebee species began losing habitat as early as the 1970s—well before neonicotinoids were as widespread as they are today. Since then, largely as a result of global warming, bees have lost nearly 200 miles off the southern end of their historic wild range in both the US and in Europe, a trend that is continuing at a rate of about five miles every year.

As temperatures increase (the US is about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer today, on average, than in 1900), many plant and animal species in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting their range north. But by analyzing a vast archive of bee distribution records reaching back more than a century, ecologists at the University of Ottawa showed that bees are not joining that trend. Instead of shifting north like many other species, the bees’ range is only compressing in from the south, leaving less and less available habitat. That finding is illustrated in the chart below (and explained in more detail in the video at the bottom of this post, produced by Science).

Kerr et al, Science 2015

In a call with reporters, lead scientist Jeremy Kerr stressed that although pesticide use is a critical cause of bee mortality at local levels, it doesn’t explain the continent-wide habitat shrinkage that stands out in the bee data. But temperature trends do.

“They are in serious and immediate risk from human-caused climate change,” Kerr said. “The impacts are large and they are underway.”

The question of why bees aren’t pushing northward is a bit trickier, and it isn’t resolved in this paper. But Kerr said he suspects the answer could be the relatively long time it takes for bees to reach a critical mass of population that can be sustained in new places.

Original article: 

Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

California Should Allow Physician-Aided Suicide

by emevoqtig Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Greece has pressed the self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next. Here in California, we are debating whether to create a self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next.

(Did you like that segue? Huh? Did you?)

In California’s case, the self-destruct button comes in the form of SB 128, and it is both more personal and more literal than Greece’s:

The measure, which would allow terminally ill people to end their lives with a doctor’s help, passed the Senate last month on essentially a party-line vote, 23-15 — Democrats for, Republicans against.

Because the bill whips up emotion about morality based on religious beliefs and raises questions concerning medical ethics, it makes many legislators uncomfortable politically and personally.

The proposal is slated for its first Assembly hearing Tuesday in the Health Committee. But sponsors say it’s short two to five votes. Ten are needed to clear the 19-member panel.

A handful of Southern California Democrats, mostly Latinos under pressure from the Catholic Church, are withholding support.

Great. Yet another reason for me to be revolted by the Catholic Church. If they believe that suicide is a sin, that’s fine. They should forbid suicide among Catholics. But I’m not Catholic, and it’s no sin for me. So go mind your own business, folks, and represent the will of all Californians, who overwhelmingly support bringing our state into the 21st century. There is no excuse for forcing terminal patients to endure excruciating pain for months if they don’t want to. It’s time to put the Dark Ages behind us.

Read this article:  

California Should Allow Physician-Aided Suicide

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California Should Allow Physician-Aided Suicide

The Rise of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained

by JestineChristia Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The US law enforcement community regards homegrown violent extremists, not radicalized Islamists, as the most severe threat from political violence in the country, according to a new study from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Released late last week, the report comes amid renewed focus on the problem ever since a 21-year-old avowed white supremacist carried out a mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. There is a growing body of research highlighting the threat from right-wing extremists, but who or what exactly does that term encompass, and how big really is the problem? Mother Jones examined various reports and contacted experts to find out more.

What are “far-right” or “right-wing” extremists?
While there is no uniform definition, these terms loosely encompass individuals or groups associated with white supremacist, antigovernment, sovereign citizen, patriot, militia, or other ideologies that target specific religious, ethnic or other minority groups. (Meanwhile, how to determine which violent attacks constitute an act of terrorism has been a subject of renewed debate.)

The available data on violent attacks perpetrated by right-wing extremists ranges widely, explains Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a national security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. Researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security, New America Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, University of Maryland, and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have all compiled data on right-wing extremist violence using varying criteria over different periods of time, most of them going back to the mid 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing riveted attention on the problem. (The exception is the University of Maryland’s data, which dates to 1970, during a surge in violent far-left extremism.)

The various studies have all led to the same general conclusion: The threat from homegrown right-wing extremists has grown in recent years. “Since 2007, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots originating in the far-right of American politics,” Arie Perliger, the director of terrorism studies at the Combating Terrorism Center, wrote in a 2012 report.

How often do right wing violent extremists attack?
The University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database registered 65 attacks on American soil associated with right-wing ideologies since 9/11, versus 24 attacks by jihadist extremists. The New America Foundation, meanwhile, tallied 48 deaths from attacks by non-jihadist extremists over the same time period—including the Charleston shooting—compared with 26 deaths from attacks by jihadist extremists, including the one at Fort Hood in 2009, in which 13 were killed.

Courtesy of the New York Times

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which compiles data on “all violent attacks that were perpetrated by groups or individuals affiliated with far-right associations,” counted an average of 337 annual attacks by right-wing extremists in the decade after 9/11, including a total of 254 fatalities, or an annual average of about 18 deaths.

Arie Perliger, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

Daryl Johnson, a former DHS domestic terrorism intelligence analyst who now heads the consulting firm DT Analytics, says that attacks from far-right extremists “increased dramatically” after 2008. Johnson, who began tracking domestic terrorism while at DHS, estimates that there is currently an average of one plot or attack every 40 to 45 days. “We are in a heightened period right now,” he says.

Johnson’s view is supported by a 2012 report from Perliger at the Combating Terrorism Center: “Since 2007, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots originating in the far-right of American politics,” it notes.

How organized are these extremists?
As former Mother Jones staffer Adam Serwer reported in August 2012 when a neo-Nazi carried out a massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the number of American extremist groups has also risen overall in recent years:

How is law enforcement responding?
About three quarters of the 382 state and local law enforcement agencies surveyed by the Triangle Center listed anti-government extremism as a top threat in their jurisdiction, compared with 39 percent that listed violence connected with Al Qaeda or related groups.

In 2014, the Anti-Defamation League documented an upswing in far-right attacks against law enforcement:

Anti-Defamation League

But those numbers should be put into perspective, the report’s authors Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer note, since terrorism of all kinds represents a small fraction of total violent crime in the United States. The number of homicides in the US since 9/11 totaled more than 215,000.

And because the data on right-wing violence varies so much, “it’s hard to get a true understanding of the threat,” German says, adding that the FBI—whose number one priority is to protect the United States from a terrorist attack—does not publish data on domestic terrorism. “Instead, we rely on these private groups that are doing a public service by compiling and publishing information,” he says. The FBI does collect and publish limited data on hate crimes, which it defines as criminal offenses “against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.” But German as well as researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center point out that data relies on voluntary reporting and thus undercounts those numbers.

So what is the government doing about it?
The federal and local governments had ramped up efforts to combat domestic terrorism of all kinds in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. A few months following the 9/11 attacks, FBI official Dale Watson testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that “Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat.” But Johnson, German, and others assert that federal counterterrorism programs since 9/11 have focused overwhelmingly on the perceived threat from Islamic extremism. That includes the Obama administration’s “countering violent extremism” strategy, which “revolves around impeding the radicalization of violent jihadists,” according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report.

The attack in Charleston underscored “the failure of the federal government to keep closer tabs” on right-wing extremists, argues Gerald Horne, a historian and civil rights activist at the University of Houston.

But the focus may soon increase. In February, CNN reported that US Homeland Security circulated an intelligence assessment that focused on the domestic terror threat posed by right-wing extremists. Kurzman and Schanzer also point to a handout from a training program sponsored by the US Department of Justice, cautioning that the threat from antigovernment extremism “is real.”

Who and where are the perpetrators of far-right extremist attacks?
According to Perliger’s research at West Point, 54 percent of such attacks since 1990—in which the perpetrators were caught or identified—were carried out by a single individual. About 75 percent of all perpetrators identified were 29 years old or younger.

Perliger also notes that attacks have moved beyond states in the South—the birthplace of groups such as the KKK and the site of major attacks during the 1960s—to places including California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. “The existence of significant minority groups in the different states appears linked with the level of far-right violence they experience,” Perliger says. In a recent editorial, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Morris Dees and J. Richard Cohen argued that far-right extremism is gaining ground beyond state boundaries: “Unlike those of the civil rights era, whose main goal was to maintain Jim Crow in the American South, today’s white supremacists don’t see borders; they see a white tribe under attack by people of color across the globe…The days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.”

What factors might explain the latest rise in this kind of extremism?
Experts suggest that several factors may have played into it. Researchers commonly attribute the spike in right-wing attacks, around 2008, to the election of an African-American president. Around the time of Obama’s election, Johnson notes how the white supremacist web forum Stormfront had less than 100,000 registered users. “Today, it is over 300,000,” he says. Scholars have also debated the role that the 2008 financial crisis, a heightening debate over immigration, and other socioeconomic changes may have had. The Combating Terrorism Center’s Perliger points out that past spikes in far-right attacks also corresponded with the passing of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and firearm restrictions during the 1990s.

Was the Charleston shooting a hate crime or an act of terrorism?
It had the marks of both, according to Horne, German, and others. FBI Director James Comey came under fire for saying the Charleston shooting did not appear to be an act of terrorism based on the available evidence. German adds that Roof’s racist comments about black people, his photos with flags invoking racist ideologies, and the fact that he killed a state senator, make clear that his attack on the church was both targeted and political.

Could the Charleston shooting have been prevented?
Violent attacks by extremists are difficult to predict, but both the government and researchers could be doing a better job of working to understand them, German says. “You have to understand both how the movement works and what parts are dangerous and what parts aren’t, as well as understanding how the particular terrorist activity starts,” he explains, adding that most research on terrorist attacks has fixated on their ideological roots, rather than on their methodologies. “That’s where you’ll see terrorism studies completely lacking, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been thrown into terrorism research. They’re not studying the right things.”

See more here:  

The Rise of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Rise of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained

This Cartoon Is Going to Become Iconic

by FredricCorones Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this cartoon to its Facebook page. The credit reads CagleCartoons.com but I can’t actually find it on there. I’ll update with proper credit when I figure it out. Safe to say, this is amazing.

(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)0; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

There it is.

Posted by

Originally posted here: 

This Cartoon Is Going to Become Iconic

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Cartoon Is Going to Become Iconic

Waiters Now Have Yet Another Gripe to Contend With

by LaurelBos Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Roberto Ferdman writes today about the “most annoying restaurant trend happening today.” But when I got around to reading it, I was a little surprised by how it ended:

Without my permission, restaurants have abandoned, or simply overlooked, a classic tenet of service etiquette….Rather than clear plates once everyone at the table has finished the meal, which has long been the custom, servers instead hover over diners, fingers twitching, until the very instant someone puts down a fork. Like vultures, they then promptly snatch up the silverware — along with everything else in front of the customer. If you’re lucky, they might ask permission before stealing your plate.

….It’s possible that there’s an economic impetus behind it. “The price of land is going up, which pushes up the value of each table,” said Tyler Cowen. “That makes moving people along more important.”

….But maybe waiters are clearing individual plates because they believe that’s what customers want. I have heard as much from servers and restaurateurs.

No excuse, however, should suffice. Publicly, restaurants might argue that they are trying to avoid clutter; privately, they might encourage waiters to speed tables along; but what it amounts to is an uncomfortable dining experience.

Wait. What? “No excuse should suffice”? If Ferdman dislikes this trend, that’s fine. But if, in fact, most diners prefer having their places cleared when they’ve finished eating, that sure seems like a more than sufficient reason for this classic tenet of service etiquette to hit the bricks. It’s not as if it came down on a tablet from Mount Sinai, after all. Surely the most basic tenet of service etiquette is to make customers as comfortable and satisfied as possible. If, in the 21st century, it turns out that this requires waiters to remove place settings quickly, then that’s what they should do, even if a small minority dislikes it.

Now personally, I think the most annoying restaurant trend happening today is that all the restaurants I like have gone out of business. It’s eerie as hell. Almost literally, every restaurant that Marian and I used to eat at regularly has closed, to be replaced by some horrible trendy chain outlet. Our favorite Chinese place is gone. And our favorite Mexican place. Our favorite pizza place. Our favorite Italian place. Our second-favorite pizza place. And probably a few others I’ve forgotten about. There are basically only two of our favorites left, and they don’t seem like they’re about to go out of business, but who knows?

It’s my own fault, of course, for living in Irvine, where the Irvine Company owns all the land and basically prices out of business anything except profitable chain stores. It’s surely no coincidence that of the two restaurants still standing, one is outside Irvine and the other is about a hundred yards from the city limit. I made my bed, now I have to lie in it.

POSTSCRIPT: Back on the original topic, Ferdman’s piece has gotten me curious about something. I don’t go to a lot of high-end restaurants, but I do go to a few now and again. And unless my memory is playing tricks on me (always a possibility), it’s always been the custom to remove plates when diners are finished, not all at once when everyone is finished. Is this a Southern California thing? Is it a matter of how high-end the restaurant is? I eat at expensive places on occasion, but virtually never at the kind of truly pricey places where you have to wait a month for a reservation. Help me out here. Why is it that removing place settings individually strikes me as normal, not a crime against proper etiquette?

View post:

Waiters Now Have Yet Another Gripe to Contend With

Posted in alo, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Waiters Now Have Yet Another Gripe to Contend With

The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

by ErickRittenhous Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The manifesto and photos apparently posted to the web by alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof, first unearthed on Twitter by @EMQuangel and @HenryKrinkIe Saturday morning, are full of references to white supremacist groups and terminology. Here are some of the key terms, explained:

1488

The numbers 1488 can be seen scrawled in the sand in photos from the downloadable trove. The 14 is short for “14 words” and denotes an expression used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, 88 is an abbreviation for the “Heil Hitler” salute.

Council of Conservative Citizens

The manifesto refers to the council as a source of research into “black on White crime.” The council is a conservative group with white supremacist leanings, considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to be part of the “neo-confederate movement.” It was founded by members of Citizens’ Councils of America, also known as White Citizens Councils, a confederation of segregationist groups active until the 1970s. In more recent years, the Council of Conservative Citizens has made the news when it was revealed that former US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had given speeches to the group. It was also extremely active in the demonstrations to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over the state capitol of South Carolina between 1993 and 2000.

Northwest Front

The manifesto makes reference to the “Northwest Front.” According to its site, “The Northwest Front is a political organization of Aryan men and women who recognize that an independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest is the only possibility for the survival of the White race on this continent.” It was founded by Harold Covington, who joined the American Nazi Party while in the US army before moving to South Africa and then Rhodesia, which deported him in 1976, after he sent threatening letters to a Jewish congregation. He bounced around various hate groups both in the North Carolina and the UK, before founding Northwest Front.

References to South Africa and Rhodesia

A photo of Dylann Roof from the website “The Last Rhodesian.”

In several of the photos, Roof can be seen wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, just as in the photo that was widely published after the attack. Former Mother Jones editor Nick Baumann has this excellent summary of what these references mean, over at the Huffington Post:

Rhodesia was an apartheid state in East Africa that was majority black but ruled by white, mostly British-descended people from 1965 until 1979. It grew out of the former British colony of South Rhodesia, which had some degree of self-rule (under the British colonial umbrella) from 1923 until 1965, when the colony’s overwhelmingly white government, fearing having to share power with blacks, declared independence to preserve white supremacy.

“The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders to sustain civilization in a primitive country,” Ian Smith, the country’s white leader, declared at the time.

“The Rhodesian flag is important in terms of symbolism, for Rhodesia subscribed to white supremacy,” Blessing-Miles Tendi, a lecturer in African history and politics at Oxford, explained in an email. “A minority, racist, colonial white settler state subjugated a majority black population in the then Rhodesia for approximately a century.”

The manifesto also references South Africa, “and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years.” It continues: “if anyone thinks that think will eventually just change for the better, consider how in South Africa they have affirmative action for the black population that makes up 80 percent of the population.”

Link: 

The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

The Big Source of Pollution That No One Talks About

by LakeshaManson Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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

When most of us think about air pollution, we imagine smog emanating from cars, trucks, and power plants. But oceangoing ships are also a major source of pollution around the world, and according to a new study, they’re emitting toxic chemicals that can cause major health problems.

A team of German researchers from the University of Rostock has found that emissions from ships can be even more dangerous than emissions from cars and trucks, causing damage to cells in our bodies that can lead to serious diseases like lung cancer, heart problems, and diabetes. In a study published by the Public Library of Science earlier this month, the researchers said ship engines that burn heavy fuel oil, the cheapest and most common kind of ship fuel, emit heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and carcinogenic fine particles.

These substances have been connected with inflammation, the body’s natural response to pathogens that, over time, can lead to a wide range of chronic diseases. Exposure to pollution from heavy fuel oil can also encourage oxidative stress, a state in which the body is not able to fully counteract or detoxify the harmful presence of free radicals, and which can lead to everything from neurodegenerative diseases to cancer and gene mutations. Unfortunately, this cheap, dirty fuel is not the only culprit: The researchers also found that even the burning of diesel fuel, generally seen as a cleaner source of power, emits toxins that can change basic cellular functions in the body like energy and protein metabolism.

Exposure to shipping pollution takes a huge toll globally. In 2007, one study estimated that 60,000 deaths every year are related to particulate matter emissions from marine shipping, with most deaths occurring near coastlines in Europe, East Asia, and South Asia. Still, the United States isn’t exactly winning medals for clean ports, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. In a 2004 report, the environmental advocacy group lamented that marine ports were among the country’s most poorly regulated sources of pollution, with the Port of Los Angeles emitting far more smog-forming pollutants than all the power plants in the Southern California region combined.

Since then, ports have taken some steps to curb emissions, in part by allowing ships to plug in to onshore power sources, rather than idling their engines. But overall, pollution regulations in the United States have focused more strongly on cleaning up our roads. The German researchers suggested that it may be time to re-evaluate our strategy. “Due to the substantial contribution of ship emissions to global pollution, ship emissions are the next logical target for improving air quality worldwide, particularly in coastal regions and harbour cities,” they wrote.

Read original article – 

The Big Source of Pollution That No One Talks About

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Big Source of Pollution That No One Talks About