Highlighting: The Patriot Daily News Clearing House Diary Archive

I've seen several of this blogger's great posts, but I only clicked through his/her profile on Daily Kos just now on a whim. And, good lord. He/She is not only prolific, but full of some kickass info!


Here are some of my favorite articles from he/she...


Creating Drinking Water from Air...At least 36 states will face water shortages in the next 5 years as supplies decrease due to drought, rising temperatures, population and inefficient management. Tensions created by mandatory conservation restrictions have turned neighbors against each other by reporting to the water police suspected illegal watering based on a lawn that was simply too green.

For a change, there is some good environmental news. Companies and individuals have developed technologies to capture water vapors in our air to create drinking water... or, as in this picture, a water maker that collects dew. You need to read this. YOU NEED TO READ THIS. At least to see the pictures of what inventors have been coming up wit to deal with the water crisis that is about to knock us flat. GO. READ. NOW.



In Navajo Nation v. US Forest Service (2007) (pdf file), the 9th Circuit held that a proposed project to use treated sewage effluent on the San Francisco Peaks violated the religious rights of 13 Indian Tribes under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This victory is exciting because it is the first case to apply RFRA to protect sacred sites of Native Americans. Environmental laws have not stopped the degradation of natural resources interconnected with traditional religious and ceremonial practices. Our government and corporations have desecrated tribal lands generally with impunity. Well, the times may be A-Changin' as this case develops progeny. Basically the Fed. Government wanted to allow a ski resort to use treated sewage effluent for snow-making, so that they could stop their reliance on real snow. The Native Americans objected strongly to the idea that their sacred mtns be contaminated by sewage. And for once, this country's justice system, in the person of the 9th Circuit Court, agreed with them. Really cool diary with some very interesting info on what the hell is "reclaimed water", among other terms that are casually thrown about. And pictures!


Ontario, following the lead of Quebec, is considering legislation to ban the sale and use of "cosmetic" pesticides applied to lawns and gardens to kill pests and weeds...

The pesticide industry suggested a ban was not necessary in Ontario, citing as "evidence" the claim that "no U.S. state has a ban in place." While the pesticide industry has worked overtime to prevent states from enacting bans, it has not been very successful: State laws restrict the sites of pesticide applications, such as banning pesticides from schools and playgrounds, and local communities have enacted similar regulations requiring notice before pesticide use at homes. The success of pesticide bans is due to citizens working at the local levels of government, starting with partial bans whose scope is later expanded, and moving up the ladder of government to the state level.

The new Ontario pesticide ban was triggered by the realization of the risk pesticides present to our environment, the public's health, and our children's health. This law would ban 80 chemicals and 300 products which "pose a potential health risk." According to their government, the new ban is about "the right of kids to play in the grass ... without compromising their health."


Why is pesticide banning so momentous and urgent? Well...


Some of the pollutants, chemicals and pesticides that have been released into our environment are now in our air, soil, water, food...and our bodies. Studies have linked pesticides to serious illnesses, which may not become symptomatic for years. While everyone is at risk from exposure to these pesticides, a governmental report has identified who is particularly vulnerable to the health risks. This all reminds me of the film, Dead Man Walking: The "title comes from the traditional call in the U.S.A. ..."walking, dead man walking here!" from a prison guard as a condemned prisoner is led into the execution chamber." .
In short, we are poisoning ourselves in the name of big profits, and since our governments seem to be too corruption-riddles to consider the greater good of the society, we the people need to arise and step forward.



Air Pollution Killing the Fragrance of Flowers...Air pollution from our power plants and cars is
destroying the fragrance of flowers. This may sound like a silly, liberal "tree-hugging" complaint about the evils of air pollution. But, think about the ecological impact: Our lovely little bees use the scent of flowers like a roadmap to the source in order to pollinate flowers for our bouquets as well as our flowering plants for our food supply.


Bush's deadly clinate change bullshit...Bushie's primary concern is what he calls the "Regulatory Train Wreck." As stated by Bush, he appears fed up with those damn pesky judges who insist on following the mandates of our laws:

As we approach this challenge, we face a growing problem here at home. Some courts are taking laws written more than 30 years ago to primarily address local and regional environmental effects, and applying them to global climate change. The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change. For example, under a Supreme Court decision last year, the Clean Air Act could be applied to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

In Bush's strict constructionist view, if these federal laws did not use the words "climate change" or "global warming," then the laws were not intended to address these issues. However, all these laws focus on environmental impacts, without specifically naming each environmental impact that could possibly ever occur. Moreover, air quality is the focus of CAA, and is an environmental impact regularly required to be reviewed under NEPA. Bush uses this view to argue that our environmental laws need to be reformed, just like he recently succeeded in "clarifying" the Clean Water Act (CWA) by changing the structure of the law to legalize the disastrous environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining that previously were not legal under the CWA.

The problem is that Bush is losing in the courts and so he wants to change the laws. One reason Bush is losing in the courts is because his actions and policies are contrary to existing laws. Another reason is that we now have a new legal practice area called "climate change." The primary laws governing this practice, coincidentally, are the 3 laws Bush wants to change: The Clean Air Act (CAA), The Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Environmental groups, states and citizens have filed lawsuits under these laws and won in the courts. Can we get Pres. Bush the hell out of here? Like, RIGHT FUCKING NOW BEFORE HE KILLS US ALL!!!!


ANd if you still don't get WHY Climate Change is going knock us for six, see...

CDC says that Climate Chnage will have significant, adverse Health Impacts on Elderly and Children...Today, a top government health official announced that climate change will have a "significant impact" on health, particularly the elderly and children, in the "next few decades."

Howard Frumkin, a senior official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave a detailed summary on the likely health impacts of global warming at a congressional hearing. But he refrained from giving an opinion on whether carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, should be regulated as a danger to public health.

Frumkin presented some details about the type of public health impacts from climate change. This was important testimony of our government admitting that global warming is not a myth, that the impacts will include much more than warmer temperatures, and that the time frame of impacts happening is the "next few decades." However, this information would have been released a year ago if the WH had not censored the testimony that was presented at that time. Ah, teh goddamn White House suppression of vital info again. We the people my ass. Looks like gov't is more bought by corporations, for the corporations, instead.

And Al Gore says that we as citizens need to take them on...


Crisis of Citizenship impedes envronmental concerns...Last month Al Gore discussed how our democracy crisis is impeding our efforts to address the climate crisis. As Gandhi said, "We must become the change we want to see" in the world. Gore stated that we can not solve the climate crisis until we solve the crisis of citizenship and democracy. The outcome we desire for global warming or any environmental issue is not going to be achieved by our beliefs unless it is accompanied by new behavior of citizen involvement at both the personal and political levels. Behavioral changes are good, like conservation, but Gore stated that it is more important to change the laws. Changing laws requires acknowledging an urgency of the environmental crises we face...

What we can do to move toward establishing that sense of urgency needed to trigger active citizenship which then triggers solving environmental issues is to understand the facts and analyze the issues. Once we agree upon the facts and analysis, then we must take action to change our political culture. This happened in Australia, which faced such a devastating drought that the people unified in a campaign to "lift the sense of urgency for the people about global warming and drought." The campaign included participation by newspaper, TV, radio and the internet, and it created the sense of urgency that led to a changed government with a new prime minister whose first action was to change position on global warming by ratifying Kyoto. Gore warned that we can not wait until we face water shortages like the drought in Australia.

Come on people. If Austrailia did it, what the hell are we in the USA waiting on?


Want more? Dig through his/her archives: Patriot Daily News Clearing House

The Iraq War has cost us upwards of 3 TRILLION DOLLARS so far. See what YOU can spend it on

Go spend YOUR 3 trillion dollars here

Dear Hillary Clinton.

1. There are working class minorities.

2. There are hard-working working class minorities.

3. There are American hard-working class minorities.

4. The majority of the American working class minority population are hard-working.



Now, I can understand the perspective of an HRC supporter. She’s worked hard. She’s come back from adversity time and time again. She has good policy. She is composed in the face of direct and blatant attacks on her womanhood, character, and appearance since 1992.

And for some people, they can see a lot of themselves in Hillary. They can see themselves striving for what some would say impossible. They cheerfully say “Pick Flick” referring to the movie Election, able to relate to working hard to have some one swoop in from the shadows and take it from you. For many women, Hillary is the hope they have in smashing the ultimate glass ceiling.

Fine. More power to you. If you want to support HRC, go ahead. As I mentioned in the last post, if you’re going to be a supporter represent.

But here’s where I’m coming from.

Young, black, female voter. Grew up poor, not dirt poor, but below the poverty line for 16 out of the first twenty years. I don’t need to play at poverty, I remember it well. I’ve been in the workforce since the age of twelve, illegally, age fourteen, legally, and working full time at age seventeen. And while many women have stories about how they were dealt with differently because of their gender, that was not one of my struggles.

I dealt with discrimination based on my blackness and based on my age. Being the youngest person in your office means that people look at your age first and your lack of experience rather than the results you produce. I thought this would get better the more I worked and the harder I worked, but that is not the case. I’ve had situations where I have met and exceeded every performance goal and not received a full raise. When pressed for an answer as to why I was not awarded the full amount, the responses always mentioned that “everyone has room for improvement” and included some kind of crack about happy hour being cheap at my age or how I didn’t have to pay for daycare or anything.


In short, Ms.-born-into-the-middle-class-and-never-seen-anything-else-than-opulence-since-your-husband-won-the-Presidency,SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

UPDATE:This is what she said.
Ms. Clinton claims that: "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

And as the diary point out, she is citing an out-of-date AP-Yahoo poll done in May 3rd. And what happened in NC and Indiana confounded most polls, as teh chart at the link shows.

More polling breakdown of which demographics voted for Obama

We're here, we're sexual, get used to it!

From Colorlines Magazine

AS BEFITTING AN ARTICLE about schools, here’s a pop quiz taken from the sex education website Teenwire.org: In 1937,
studies claimed that nine out of 10 children caught masturbating were: a) severely punished; b) told they would go insane or blind; c) threatened with having their penises cut off or their vaginas sewn closed; or d) all of the above.

The answer? d) all of the above.

Now, before you start laughing at the absurdity of life in the 1930s, consider this contemporary statement from the “guardyourself” website of the abstinence-only organization Women’s Clinic of Kansas City/Life Guard, which has received almost a million dollars in federal funds for sex education: “Being able to have sex does not make you any different from a rat in a warehouse. They have sex too. Is that what you want to compare yourself with?”

For the last decade, schools around the country have been badgered and bribed into pumping these sorts of ideas into students’ heads through abstinence-only programs—that is, those relatively few schools that teach sex education in the first place. Beginning under former-president Bill Clinton and escalating under President George W. Bush, more than $1.5 billion in federal and state money has been poured into abstinence-only
education. These programs, by law, have as their “exclusive purpose” teaching about the benefits of abstaining from sexual activity; prohibit schools from talking about contraceptives and condoms; and define healthy sexuality as “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage.”

Over the past year, this surging abstinence-only education movement has finally shown signs of retreat. Numerous studies have proven it to be ineffective, even harmful, and a growing list of states have turned down federal money when it comes with abstinence strings attached. But as abstinence fades, the increasingly pressing question is this: What will rise in its place? Sex education in public schools has never been a resource priority and has rarely been described as forward thinking. So will the half-hearted sex education that preceded abstinence return in coming years? Will there be anything at all? Or are this country’s policymakers prepared to embrace a comprehensive sex education that goes beyond fear tactics and acknowledges that sexuality is a normal part of life, even for teenagers?

Schools’ failure to help students understand and embrace their sexuality has particular consequence for kids of color, who represent vast majorities in many public schools around the country. Sex and race have always formed a volatile brew in America. Racist stereotypes of hypersexual men and women compete with restrictive mores, coming from both inside and outside of communities of color, to circumscribe sexual expression. Too many young people are left to sort through this maelstrom with little or no guidance, and too many don’t find their way. Blacks and Latinos account for 83 percent of teen HIV infections. Similar disparities exist with nearly every other type of sexually transmitted infection—Black girls are more than four times as likely to get gonorrhea as their peers, and syphilis is skyrocketing among Black teenage boys and slowly climbing among Latino boys. Late last year, federal health monitors announced that teen pregnancy went up in 2006 for the first time in 15 years. The largest spikes were found among Black and Native American girls.

“In essence, our country has viewed youth as hormonally driven accidents waiting to happen, so we give them sex ed that censors information,” frets James Wagoner, head of the Washington, D.C. group Advocates for Youth. “We adults tell them not to have sex until they’re married, and never mind that none of us ever followed that advice.”

Whatever adults are prepared to do, a growing number of teenagers and sex educators are taking matters into their own hands, logging on to the Internet and rabble-rousing in their classrooms to elbow out space for a more honest conversation about sex. They’re fed up with adults’ 1930s sensibilities about their sex lives, and they’ve gone in search of their own resources.

Read on

Screaming "WTFBBQ???????!!!!!!!"

Via Alas, a Blog

Last week, Michelle Jimenez Reyes, mother of a Travis Elementary School student in San Antonio’s inner-city schools, discovered that her daughter’s school library was closed – with eight weeks to go before the end of the schoolyear.

It was only the latest shocker since the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) announced they were shuttering six inner-city schools – citing decreasing enrollment. The city of San Antonio is one of the largest cities in Texas, and with over a million residents, is not losing population. It’s building new schools – in the farthest reaches of its spidery suburbs as its citizens move out in search of jobs and cheap housing, leaving behind the oldest and most valuable inner-city housing stock remaining in Texas.

...


The story of thousands of schoolchildren without a library and books should be front-page news. Since when did sending inner-city children to bigger schools become a positive educational step in a city concerned with high dropout rates? The story of established neighborhood schools – with acceptable school rankings – closing their doors for lack of enrollment should be a reason for investigative stories by the media. The community should be outraged, right?

Not in San Antonio. Who’s going to tell this story? Here, one Hearst chain newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News is blitzing its ads on the front page as it seeks even more profits. Corporations, according to Jimenez Reyes, are the real power behind the closing of the six schools in a balance-the-budget bottom-line mentality as the developers seek prime inner-city real estate.

Accordingly, the newspaper’s editorial legitimized the SAISD’s budget-tightening decision as a positive move toward staunching the city’s high dropout rate.

On the other side of the street, the alternative paper, the San Antonio Current stuffed with sex ads, doesn’t have the time to follow the story.

...

Michelle De LaRosa, reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, interviewed the Travis Elementary School parents after the library’s closing. According to Reyes Jimenez, she took notes but didn’t ask questions. She seemed unresponsive, and she told the parents she wasn’t sure she could do a story. When the parents around her brought up the SAEN’s corporate interests, she got defensive.

“What do you want me to do? I also work for a corporation.”


WHAT!!!!!!


WTFBBQ!?!?!?


*SCREAMS*

WHEN THE FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKKKK WILL WE REALISE THAT RUNNING ESSENTIAL SERVICES LIKE CORPORATIONS WILL FUCK THE POOR OVER SO BAD THAT THE USA WILL BE A THIRD COUNTRY IN NO TIME FLAT?!?!?!?!? ACTUALLY, WILL WE FUCKING CARE!!!!!

Deregulation!!! Media consolidation!! Profits over people!! Oh DAMN, DAMN, DAMN THE REPUBLICANS AND THEIR DEMOCRATIC ENABLERS, DAMMIT!!