Food, Culture, Baseball and Dub

Belz Mein Shtetele Belz (My Home Town) - Yiddish Song To Herb Alpert Instrumental

2019-10-28T10:50:00.001-05:00

Evolution of a song -

Neus Català, Freedom Fighter

2019-10-28T10:12:00.002-05:00

From the Washington Post -

Obituaries

Neus Català, fighter against fascism in Spain and France, dies at 103

By Phil Davison

April 26, 2019 at 5:08 p.m. EDT

To the end of her 103 years, the Catalonian anti-fascist activist Neus Català, believed to have been one of the last Spanish survivors of the Holocaust, was proud that, in her words, “I never once wept or got on my knees in front of a Nazi.”

She was a Catholic-born communist who fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazis during World War II. As a young woman, before and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, she had fought for the republican side against the nationalists led by Gen. Francisco Franco.

During that conflict, she did not carry a weapon but supported the republican soldiers fighting Franco’s ultimately successful nationalists. In France, she was armed. “We women were not assistants,” she later wrote in a memoir, “we were fighters.”

Fleeing Spain for neighboring France in 1939, she joined the French resistance when Hitler’s forces invaded in May 1940. Working with her new husband, Albert Roger, a Frenchman, she carried weapons, falsified documents or messages under a headscarf or under a basket of vegetables on her bicycle, charming her way through Nazi checkpoints.

After a French collaborator betrayed her, she was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943 and deported to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, while her husband was sent to Bergen-Belsen, also in Germany.

From Ravensbrück, Ms. Català was moved to another concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Bavaria, near the Czechoslovakian border, where she was part of a forced labor group quarrying granite as well as making parts for fighter planes and ammunition.

Ms. Català persuaded her fellow female workers to boycott or disrupt weapons production, and they became known by their Nazi guards as “the Lazy Kommando.”

“We boycotted everything we could in the manufacture of weapons,” she recalled in 2013 to the magazine of the General Union of Workers, a Spanish trade union. “We used sabotage to produce about 10 million faulty bullets and thousands of unusable artillery shells. We threw everything into the production line — flies, cockroaches, oil, our own spit. The Nazis called us ‘Snow White and the Seven Mechanics’ because they constantly had to come to fix our machines.”

Approximately 30,000 prisoners died in Flossenbürg from malnutrition, overwork, executions, or during the death marches forced on them by the Nazis as the Allies approached. Roger died within days of liberation in 1945.

When Ms. Català was freed around the same time, she was critically ill. “We were just skulls with eyes,” she told the trade union magazine. “I was a bag of bones.” Yet she survived for almost 75 more years, dying April 13 in a nursing home in the Spanish village of Els Guiamets, her daughter Margarita Català announced. She did not provide a specific medical cause.

Neus Català Pallejà was born in Els Guiamets in Catalonia, where the northeastern corner of Spain meets the Pyrenees on the border with France, on Oct. 6, 1915.

Her father was a farmer, growing olives and grapes while serving as the village’s only barber. He was helped, in the fields and the barber shop, by his wife. By 14, Neus (pronounced Nay-oos) was working in the fields, and her first struggle was to demand equal pay for women during the grape harvest. She succeeded.

She joined a Catalonian communist youth group in the 1930s and, after the Spanish Civil War erupted, moved to the Catalan capital, Barcelona, to study and qualify as a nurse in 1937. Amid the bloodshed, she found herself running an orphanage for children of war victims.

When Franco’s nationalists moved into Barcelona in 1939, she fled on foot with 182 orphans across the snow-covered Pyrenees into France. There, she secured shelter and safety for the children, often in foster homes, while she settled in the village of Carsac.

Having met her future husband, also of communist leanings, she joined him in the French resistance against the Nazis. After their liberation, she recalled seeing and waving to her husband when their two trains stopped at the same station. She never saw him again.

After learning that her first husband had died, she got married in 1947 to Félix Sancho, a Spaniard. They settled near Paris and had two children, Lluis and Margarita, both of whom survive.

Ms. Català returned to Catalonia in the 1970s after Sancho died. She continued to fight, not with arms but with words, against the dictatorship of Franco, who had banned the use of the Catalan language in public. After his death in 1975, Spain eased toward democracy. Ms. Català continued to fight for the independence of Catalonia from Spain.

She dedicated the rest of her life to the memory of women who died in the concentration camps, especially Ravensbrück, many of them Jews. She was named Catalan person of the year in 2006, and the provincial government of Catalonia dedicated the year 2015 to her to honor her 100th birthday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/neus-catala-fighter-against-fascism-in-spain-and-france-dies-at-103/2019/04/26/5bbe36c2-6623-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html

Lutein and Age-related Macular Degeneration

2019-10-24T17:20:00.003-05:00

My mother had age-related macular degeneration and my doctor recommended that I start taking lutein - as one gets older, the efficiency of processing it from food goes down apparently.

From the Washington Post September 23, 2019 -

Lutein supplements are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know about this nutrient.

By Daphne Miller

September 23, 2019 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

My tiny front-yard garden is usually a place for mindless scavenging: With the sun overhead and my knees in the soil, I enjoy ferreting among the plants, collecting anything ripe and edible. But on a recent September day, I decided to hunt specifically for xanthophylls — yellowish pigments found in nature — after realizing how important they are to our health. And I saw them everywhere.

They were the bright yellow in the calendula flowers, the ocher streaks in the tomato skins, the yellow-green of the sorrel and kale, and the topaz of the turning maple leaves. They were the darker green of the delicate lamb’s quarters and serrated dandelion greens. And because nature is thrifty and likes to make the most of any useful substance, they were also the burnt umber in the wings of a passing butterfly. And yes, they are in us as well.

Xanthophylls are antioxidants in the carotenoid family, and lutein and zeaxanthin (or L/Z, as they are often denoted) are the main xanthophylls found in food. We can’t synthesize xanthophylls, or any carotenoids for that matter, so we get them by eating plants that make them or animals — such as chicken and fish — that also eat plants. Despite their availability in nature, I am seeing lutein and zeaxanthin supplements sold everywhere.

It appears that L/Z are the nutrition boost du jour; their market share is growing and is expected to reach $396 million in 2024. An entire shelf in my local drugstore is dedicated to lutein-containing supplements, and I’m now spotting L/Z on eyedrops and in face creams, dairy products, sports drinks, fruit juices and baby formula. Some egg producers, whose products already have lutein naturally, are fortifying their eggs with the stuff.

Why such hunger for L/Z, particularly lutein? After all, they are just two of the 30-plus carotenoids that are found in the human body, with other notable ones being lycopene and beta carotene, an antioxidant we convert to vitamin A.

“Lutein is a major workhorse molecule,” said Billy Hammond, a neuroscientist at the University of Georgia who studies the role of these compounds in eye and brain health. Other carotenoids are found in our kidneys, livers skin, immune system, fat cells and so on, but lutein and zeaxanthin are the main carotenoids in our macula (the vision center of the eye) and brain.

Without these colorful compounds, we would be stumbling in the dark, blinded by light, and terrible drivers. We would also be missing every fly we tried to swat (or baseball, for that matter) and our balance would be shaky. There is also strong evidence that lutein and zeaxanthin protect against age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the United States and most industrialized countries. Neuroscientists are discovering that we need an adequate stockpile of xanthophylls to reason, learn new things and ward off dementia. Two newly published studies suggest that low blood levels of L/Z can be a harbinger of frailty — the inability to bounce back from an illness — in older adults.

Perhaps one of the reasons that we are hearing so much about L/Z is because there is a noninvasive way to measure them. While most nutrients from foods or supplements are challenging to trace once they enter the cavern of the human body, lutein and zeaxanthin are 100 times more concentrated in the macula than elsewhere, and their density can be studied using a fancy desktop ophthalmoscope. This measurement, called Macular Pigment Ocular Density (MPOD) correlates well with blood levels of the compounds and with the amount we ingest. Conveniently, MPOD also correlates with objective tests of eye and brain function such as how fast we process visual stimuli.

“We have found that most people are in a deficiency state and would get a big benefit from just getting to normal,” Hammond said. His research shows that even young, healthy athletes can improve their eye and brain performance when they boost their levels of L/Z, and he estimates that this benefit only increases as we age.

John Erdman, a nutrition scientist at the University of Illinois who has spent much of his career studying carotenoids, agrees with Hammond. In a recent article in the European Journal of Nutrition, he and his colleagues argue that the sum of the evidence in favor of lutein is so strong that the Institute of Medicine, the group that sets the Daily Recommended Intake of other nutrients, should include lutein on the list. “Establishing dietary guidance for lutein would encourage people to eat lutein-containing foods and raise public awareness about the potential health benefits,” he said, adding that other compounds with much less evidence of benefit, such as fluoride, have made the list.

So, ideally how much L/Z do we need? Do we really need to shop the nutraceutical aisles or buy fortified eggs to get it?

Both Hammond and Erdman estimate, based on the available research, that we need about 12 mg of lutein and 2 mg of zeaxanthin a day, and yet the average American adult gets about one-tenth that amount. As for how to increase our lutein intake, “Food is always the better choice,” Hammond said. Supplements, on the other hand, are better for research, he said, because study subjects can’t differentiate them from placebos and the researchers know exactly how much of a given substance they are administering. (Hammond’s research is partially funded by nutraceutical companies.)

Though food’s complexity makes it tougher to measure any effect on our health, that complexity makes food a better choice for adding lutein to your diet. Consider spinach, a lutein-packed food. Roughly three cups of raw leaves gives you your daily dose of lutein, but because carotenoids are fat soluble, mixing that spinach with an olive oil dressing will greatly increase your absorption of the compound.

Cooking also makes the carotenoid more bioavailable. Many traditional recipes from around the globe are lutein and zeaxanthin bombs, including saag, a tasty North Indian dish of simmered spinach mixed with yogurt; the Middle Eastern side dish of roast carrots tossed in za’atar spices and olive oil; and the Mesoamerican classic combo of tomato salsa, cilantro, avocado, and corn tortillas or tortilla chips. To check out how much lutein and zeaxanthin is in your dinner, you can use a calculator when you search “food composition database” on the Agriculture Department website.

In the quest for xanthophyll-rich meal, the cultivar (or specific genetic traits) of any fruit or vegetable can add yet another level of complexity. Take your classic supermarket Cavendish banana. It has negligible amounts of lutein, but researchers have found that the Hung Tu, a lesser-known banana indigenous to Papua New Guinea, has 30 times as much of this carotenoid. Eggs are generally a good source of lutein and zeaxanthin, but the amounts of these compounds vary depending on the breed of hen, what she gets in her diet (marigolds are good) and how she spends her day. One study suggests that pastured hens deposit more lutein and zeaxanthin into their egg yolks. Note to the egg-whites-only crowd: You will be missing out on these bioactive compounds.

There are some instances when supplemental lutein and zeaxanthin is in order. The Age-Related Eye Disease studies, two large multicenter trials, make a convincing case for taking L/Z early if you are diagnosed with macular degeneration, because they might prevent progression to more serious disease. Older people might also need a supplement boost because they are less likely to absorb L/Z through the intestinal lining. Some studies show that people who are inactive, overweight or have diabetes generally have lower blood levels of lutein and zeaxanthin. Of course, these are observational studies, so it’s not clear which is the chicken and which is the lutein-enriched egg.

“The bottom line,” Hammond said, “is that most people just don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables.”

I told him about the xanthophyll inventory I had made in my own garden — how it seemed to be everywhere. “Yes,” he said, “my work is always reminding me that we are one with nature, that we integrate plants into our own biology. Sadly, we are making parking lots of our bodies, just like we are doing with the forests.”

Daphne Miller is a family physician and author of “Farmacology” and “The Jungle Effect.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/lutein-supplements-are-everywhere-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-nutrient/2019/09/20/fb2e2fdc-daef-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html

Something In Your Tea? More plastification......

2019-10-03T17:34:00.000-05:00

Who woulda thought? The first time I saw these kind of tea bags, I said this is bogus. I avoid them - now science figures it out......

Yet another example of capitalism "at it's best" - so called innovation that is actually a step backwards - socialized risk, private profit.

These tea bags release billions of plastic particles into your brew, study shows

Kayla Epstein

September 27, 2019 at 2:07 p.m. EDT

A couple of years ago, Nathalie Tufenkji stopped by a Montreal cafe on her way to work and ordered a cup of tea. She sat down with her mug, enjoying its warmth, before she noticed something strange: Her tea bag appeared to be made of plastic.

“I thought, ‘That’s not a very good idea, putting plastic into boiling water,’ ” she told The Washington Post.

Tufenkji was worried that the plastic bags could leach particles into the beverage that she and her fellow customers were consuming, and as a professor of chemical engineering at McGill University, she was well positioned to investigate. She dispatched her student Laura Hernandez to purchase tea bags from stores in the area and bring them back to the lab.

It turns out Tufenkji’s hunch was right. The bags were releasing plastic particles into the brewed tea. Billions and billions of them.

Hernandez, Tufenkji and their fellow researchers at McGill University tested four kinds of plastic tea bags in boiling water, and found that a single bag would release more than 11 billion microplastic and 3 billion nanoplastic particles. You would not be able to see the contamination with your own eyes; the researchers had to use an electron microscope. But it’s there.

Their findings were published in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology this month.

The four brands of tea they tested came from regular grocery stores in Montreal. After emptying and cleaning the tea bags of any trace of tea leaves, they submerged them in water heated to 203 degrees Fahrenheit, and then they left the bags to steep for five minutes.

The researchers then examined the water for leftover particles, placing drops on a slide and examining them under an electron microscope. There, they could see particles of varying sizes, some a little larger, some frighteningly small. Further testing of additional samples revealed their structures and confirmed that the material was made of the same plastic materials as PET, a kind of polyester, and nylon. It was clear, Tufenkji said, that the plastic was coming from the tea bags themselves, not the tea.

Though Tufenkji declined to name the brands they used for fear of singling out one company over others, she said that some frequent tea drinkers could be repeatedly dosing themselves with billions of particles of plastic as they drank the beverage day after day. Some of the particles, she noted, would be small enough to potentially infiltrate human cells.

Some manufacturers sell tea in plastic bags rather than loose or in paper bags, even as the public becomes increasingly aware of how plastic is clogging our bodies of water, as well as our bodies. While the health implications of consuming plastic are unknown, people around the world are inadvertently eating quite a lot of it.

Earlier this year, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature estimated that on average, a person might ingest 5 grams of plastic a week, the equivalent size of a credit card. Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia compiled dozens of studies on the presence of plastic in water, as well as in food such as shellfish and even beer. Studies are underway to establish how plastic consumption can affect human health, according to WWF’s study.

While the McGill study did not explore the human health effects of consuming this plastic, when some of the particles were given to water fleas, they began acting erratically and developed some deformities, Tufenkji said.

“We just wanted to make the public aware of this,” she said. “We want consumers to know that this is made of plastic so they can have the choice about whether this is really what they want to purchase.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/09/27/these-tea-bags-release-billions-plastic-particles-into-your-brew-study-shows/

Sound And Words Matter - Word, Sound, Power

2017-09-26T19:08:00.000-05:00

From my Mom's notes - Washington Post, June 3, 2010 -

BOOK WORLD

David Crystal's 'A Little Book of Language,' reviewed by Michael Dirda

By Michael Dirda

Thursday, June 3, 2010

A LITTLE BOOK OF LANGUAGE
By David Crystal

Yale Univ. 260 pp. $25
Five years ago, Yale published Ernst Gombrich's "A Little History of the World". Its text, intended for children, was originally written in German during the 1930s, but Gombrich -- one of the greatest art historians of our time -- slightly revised its 40 chapters for the English edition. He died in 2001, at age 92, and, alas, never saw the finished book.

"A Little History of the World" proved to be phenomenally successful, and not just among young people. Like the "Harry Potter" novels and the "Twilight" series, the book was read by many adults, who rightly admired its beautifully crafted and concise overview of humankind's past.

Recognizing a winning concept, Yale has now followed Gombrich's history with "A Little Book Of Language", by the eminent and prolific linguist David Crystal. Best known for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and "The Stories Of English", Crystal here writes for the true beginner, but does so with his usual clarity and authority, as he ranges from ancient etymologies to modern text-messaging. The chapters -- again 40 of them -- are made doubly engaging by Jean-Manuel Duvivier's frolicsome, highly stylized black-and-white illustrations.

Crystal begins at the beginning, with baby talk. He notes, for instance, that a newborn can already recognize its mother's voice. In one experiment, scientists "put a teat into the baby's mouth and wire it up to a counter. The baby sucks away at a steady rate. When it hears the dog, man, and woman sounds, the sucking speeds up a bit and then slows down. But when it hears the mother's voice it sucks like crazy! It recognizes her!" That gosh-wow tone is, I suspect, one of the few signs that "A Little Book of Language" is directed primarily toward young readers. While Crystal sometimes quotes Shakespeare and Dickens, he refers just as often to J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett. One chapter describes Grimm's Law -- the way that Latin "pater" becomes German "Vater" and English "father" -- but never mentions Jakob Grimm (of fairytale fame), who first noted this pattern. Indeed, apart from passing references to the slang expert Eric Partridge and to Sir William Jones -- who promulgated the idea that many European languages, as well as Sanskrit, derive from ancient Indo-European -- this book resolutely focuses on the most basic elements of linguistic study. There's nothing in the least academic or pretentious about it.

Two early chapters examine just how our throats and mouths make sounds; other sections take up the reasons for grammar and explain some of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling. There are plenty of no-nonsense definitions throughout: Sentences "help us to make sense of words." That, emphasizes Crystal, "is what sentences are for." Vivid anecdotes clarify important points: "The day I kill three buffaloes and draw them as three dead animals on my cave wall, I'm being an artist. But the day I kill three buffaloes and invent a sign for them (such as {$181}={$181}) and mark up on my cave-wall '{$181}={$181} 111,' then I'm being a writer."

Factoids abound throughout this latest "little book": There are, for instance, around 6,000 languages in the world. However, without some effort toward preservation, roughly half of them will die out in the next 100 years. Did you know that nearly three-quarters of the human race grows up learning two or more languages? Today, "in half the primary schools in Inner London, over half of the pupils do not speak English as a mother tongue." Because there are competing sign-systems for the deaf, when the play "Children of a Lesser God" -- about a teacher and his deaf student -- was staged in London, "British deaf people couldn't understand the signs, and they had to employ an interpreter to translate from American into British Sign Language."

In other chapters, Crystal tells us about the origin of geographical place names and our own personal names. "The word 'nickname,' " we learn, "first began to be used in the Middle Ages, where it was originally an 'an eke name.' 'Eke' (pronounced 'eek') meant 'also.' A nickname was an extra name, showing a special relationship." There are several excellent pages on how to use a dictionary (though Crystal refrains from making any particular lexical recommendations). Later sections on computer slang and texting duly remind the censorious that people have always used abbreviations and playful neologisms. Many adults, Crystal writes, will remember the meaning of the apparent gobbledygook of "YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME." Read properly, this means "too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me." He also discusses puns -- "You shouldn't write with a broken pencil because it's pointless" -- and palindromes ("Madam, I'm Adam") and other word games.
Words may be used for play or poetry or persuasion, and Crystal reminds us that one important reason for studying language "is to make ourselves aware of the way people often try to manipulate our thoughts and feelings by the way they speak and write." Hence, the very same action may be described as "Terrorists Move South" or "Freedom Fighters Move South." In its closing chapters, "A Little Book of Language" proceeds to focus on linguistics itself, a discipline whose students don't necessarily try to learn lots of languages but instead aim to discover just how those languages work.
At the end of his book, Crystal lists six causes that are important to him and that he hopes will become important to his readers:
1) The preservation of dying languages.
2) The appreciation of minority languages, those spoken only by small groups of people.
3) The pleasure of learning at least smatterings of languages other than English.
4) A greater appreciation of the variety -- the dialects and accents -- within one's own native tongue.
5) The importance of knowing many styles of English, from the most formal to the slangiest.
6) The need to help people who, for whatever reason, have difficulty in learning to speak or write.

Like Gombrich's "A Little History of the World," Crystal's "A Little Book of Language" may be for children (of all ages, as the saying goes), yet it's by no means childish or juvenile. In other words, buy it for your son or daughter, but read it yourself.

Solar On Water

2015-10-26T12:32:00.000-05:00

I think this could work well on small ponds.

Solar Panels Floating on Water Will Power Japan's Homes

More solar power plants are being built on water, but is this such a good idea?

By Bryan Lufkin, for National Geographic

PUBLISHED January 16, 2015

Nowadays, bodies of water aren't necessarily something to build around—they're something to build on. They sport not just landfills and man-made beaches but also, in a nascent global trend, massive solar power plants.

Clean energy companies are turning to lakes, wetlands, ponds, and canals as building grounds for sunlight-slurping photovoltaic panels. So far, floating solar structures have been announced in, among other countries, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Italy.

The biggest floating plant, in terms of output, will soon be placed atop the reservoir of Japan's Yamakura Dam in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. When completed in March 2016, it will cover 180,000 square meters, hold 50,000 photovoltaic solar panels, and power nearly 5,000 households. It will also offset nearly 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. (Since the EPA estimates a typical car releases 4.7 tons of CO2 annually, that's about 1,700 cars' worth of emissions.)

The Yamakura Dam project is a collaboration by Kyocera (a Kyoto-headquartered electronics manufacturer), Ciel et Terre (a French company that designs, finances, and operates photovoltaic installations), and Century Tokyo Leasing Corporation.

So, why build solar panels on water instead of just building them on land? Placing the panels on a lake or reservoir frees up surrounding land for agricultural use, conservation, or other development. With these benefits, though, come challenges. (See related story: "How Green Are Those Solar Panels, Really?")

Solar Enters New Territory

"Overall, this is a very interesting idea. If successful, it will bring a huge impact," says Yang Yang, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes in photovoltaic solar panels. "However, I do have concerns of its safety against storms and other natural disasters, not to mention corrosion."

Unlike a solar installation on the ground or mounted on a rooftop, floating solar energy plants present relatively new difficulties. For one thing, everything needs to be waterproofed, including the panels and wiring. Plus, a giant, artificial contraption can't just be dropped into a local water supply without certain precautions, such as adherence to regulations on water quality—a relevant concern, particularly if the structure starts to weather away.

"That is one reason we chose Ciel et Terre's floating platforms, which are 100 percent recyclable and made of high-density polyethylene that can withstand ultraviolet rays and corrosion," says Ichiro Ikeda, general manager of Kyocera's solar energy marketing division.

Another obstacle? Japan's omnipresent threat of natural disasters. In addition to typhoons, the country is a global hot spot for earthquakes, landslides, and tidal waves.

To make sure the platforms could withstand the whims of Mother Nature, Ciel et Terre's research and development team brought in the big guns: a wind tunnel at Onera, the French aerospace lab. The company's patented Hydrelio system—those polyethylene "frames" that cradle the solar panels—was subjected to very high wind conditions that matched hurricane speeds. The system resisted winds of up to 118 miles per hour.

Why Japan Could Be the Perfect Spot

Given its weather, why build floating solar panels in the storm-filled, Ring of Fire-hugging Land of the Rising Sun? The reason: Many nations could benefit from floating solar power. And Japan is their poster child.

The largely mountainous archipelago of Japan suffers from a lack of usable land, meaning there's less room for anything to be built, let alone a large-scale solar plant. However, the nation is rich in reservoirs, since it has a sprawling rice industry to irrigate, so more solar energy companies in Japan are favoring liquid over land for construction sites. Suddenly, inaccessible terrain becomes accessible.

Kyocera's Ikeda says available land in Japan is especially hard to come by these days, as the number of ground-based solar plants in the country has skyrocketed in the past few years. (See related story: "Japan Solar Energy Soars, But Grid Needs to Catch Up.")

But, he added, "the country has many reservoirs for agricultural and flood-control purposes. There is great potential in carrying out solar power generation on these water surfaces."

In Japan's case, Ciel et Terre says that the region's frequent seismic fits aren't cause for concern, either. In fact, they illustrate another benefit that floating solar panels have over their terrestrial counterparts, the company says.

"Earthquakes have no impacts on the floating photovoltaic system, which has no foundation and an adequate anchoring system that ensures its stability," says Eva Pauly, international business manager at Ciel et Terre. "That's a big advantage in a country like Japan."

Solar's Potential Ecological Impact

Floating solar panel manufacturers hope their creations replace more controversial energy sources.

"Japan needs new, independent, renewable energy sources after the Fukushima disaster," says Pauly. "The country needs more independent sources of electricity after shutting down the nuclear power and relying heavily on imported liquid gas."

This up-and-coming aquatic alternative impacts organisms living in the water, though. The structure stymies sunlight penetration, slowly making the water cooler and darker. This can halt algae growth, for example, which Ciel et Terre project manager Lise Mesnager says "could be either positive or negative." If there's too much algae in the water, the shadow-casting floating panels might be beneficial; if the water harbors endangered species, they could harm them.

"It is really important for the operator to have a good idea of what kind of species can be found in the water body," Mesnager says.

Since companies must follow local environmental rules, these solar plants are usually in the center of the water, away from banks rich with flora and fauna. Plus, companies might prefer building in man-made reservoirs instead of natural ones, as the chances of harming the area's biodiversity are smaller.

Could the Future Include Salt Water?

More than three-quarters of our planet is ocean, which might present alternative energy companies a blank canvas on which to dot more buoyant energy farms. But moving floating panels to the open sea is still in the future. Kyocera's Ikeda says it would bring up a whole new realm of issues, from waves to changing water levels, which could lead to damage and disrupted operations.

Ciel et Terre is experimenting with salt water-friendly systems in Thailand, but ocean-based plants might be impractical, as offshore installations are costly, and it's more logical to produce electricity closer to where it'll be used.

For now, companies are aiming to build floating energy sources that conserve limited space, are cheaper than solar panels on terra firma, and are, above all, efficient. Ciel et Terre says that since its frames keep Kyocera's solar panels cool, the floating plant could generate up to 20 percent more energy than a typical ground system does.

The Yamakura Dam project might be the world's biggest floating solar plant, but it wasn't the first-and it almost certainly won't be the last.

The story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2015/01/150116-floating-solar-power-japan-yamakura/#

War On Drugs Backfires

2015-10-26T11:51:00.001-05:00

One of the best articles I have read on the War On Drugs -

How the war on drugs creates violence

By Danielle Allen October 16

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

To argue for legalization of marijuana and decriminalization of other drugs does not, at first blush, appear to put one on the side of the angels, especially given the accelerating heroin epidemic. But legalization and decriminalization are what we need if we want to make headway against mass incarceration, high homicide rates in urban black communities and poor educational outcomes in urban schools. If we view drug use as a public health problem, not a crime, we can fight drugs without producing the other sorts of social damage we see all around us.

Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion. In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense.

Yet despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the world’s leading imprisoner.

The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are gang- and drug-related homicides.

But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi . As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption. Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense.

Major urban centers of the drug trade are just such environments, plagued by low clearance rates for homicide. In Detroit, in the years approaching the city’s bankruptcy, the homicide clearance rate verged on single digits. In Chicago, in 2009, police cleared only 30 percent of homicide cases, many of them without charges. In one Los Angeles Police Department bureau, clearance rates in the 60s mask the low rate of cases ending in arrest and prosecution. And clearance rates are lowest when victims are black and brown, as Jill Leovy explains in her new book, “Ghettoside.” In contrast, in the 1960s, in the United States, the average clearance rate for homicide was above 90 percent, according to NPR.

Why have homicide clearance rates fallen so low in these cities? According to criminologist Charles Wellford, drug-related homicides are harder to investigate, possibly because they are more likely to be stranger-to-stranger incidents and possibly because the drug business generates witness-suppression systems. Additionally, stop-and-frisk tactics have eroded trust in police and further diminished the willingness of witnesses to testify. And, recently, justified anger over police violence has further reduced the capacity of the police to function well in investigating homicides.

Finally, an overloaded judicial system may well put prosecutors in a position where they wish to pursue only open-and-shut cases that will generate plea deals. According to a retired police officer interviewed by NPR, Vernon Geberth , police nowadays have a higher bar to get over in trying to clear a case because prosecutors want only those easier cases.

And what is the No. 1 source of this prosecutorial overload? According to federal judicial caseload statistics, in U.S. district courts in 2013, 32 percent of defendant filings were for drug-related cases, making this the biggest category of filings. State judicial systems, too, have been significantly strained for financial resources and personnel by drug-related casework. Add to this picture the fact that plenty of violent offenders in our nation’s prisons started out as nonviolent drug offenders, and you have a complete picture of just how much the drug war itself has been a generator of violence.

The drug war is a perfect example of the breakdown of the rule of law and the knock-on effects of such a breakdown. Our drug laws are fundamentally unenforceable, and this distorts the judicial system, including by producing prosecutorial overload, which is a driver of low homicide clearance rates, which beget a culture of increasing violence, which puts more fathers of young children behind bars or under the ground, makes it harder for children in poor, urban areas to walk to school safely, and forces on those children a choice between the culture of the schools, inside the rule of law, and the culture of the streets, outside the rule of law. Since Plato, we have known that the power of schools to develop the minds of the young depends on an alignment of the worlds inside and outside the school. The culture of violence in urban areas, begotten by the war on drugs and a reflection of the failure of the rule of law, is the opposite of a healthy context for learning.

Why is it so hard for us to see how profoundly a $100 billion illegal market in anything, even in popcorn or “My Little Pony” toys, would distort a society? Can there be any other reason for our failure to see this than that black and brown people bear the brunt of these distortions? If we care for the safety and happiness of the whole of our society, as we must, then it is time to legalize marijuana, decriminalize other drugs and recast drug use as a public health problem, not a crime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs-creates-violence/2015/10/16/6de57a76-72b7-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html

Legal Ganga In Jamaica - Soon come, sort of

2015-03-06T09:40:00.001-05:00

Cracks in the machine. Not complaining but two ounces is not enough.

Jamaica poised to relax cannabis laws

Several restrictions on ‘ganja’ use could go up in smoke as island’s politicians back bill to establish licensing authority

The Jamaican cabinet has approved a bill that would decriminalise possession of small amounts of cannabis and pave the way for a legal medical marijuana industry, the justice minister has said.
Mark Golding said he expected to introduce the legislation in the Senate this week. Debate could start this month in the country where the drug, known popularly as “ganja”, has long been culturally entrenched but illegal.
The bill would establish a cannabis licensing authority to deal with the regulations needed to cultivate, sell and distribute the herb for medical, scientific and therapeutic purposes. “We need to position ourselves to take advantage of the significant economic opportunities offered by this emerging industry,” he said.
It would make possession of 2 ounces (56g) or less an offence that would not result in a criminal record. Cultivation of five or fewer plants on any premises would be permitted. Rastafarians, who use marijuana as a sacrament, could also legally use it for religious purposes for the first time in Jamaica, where the spiritual movement was founded in the 1930s.
For decades, debate has raged on the Caribbean island over laws governing marijuana use. But now, with several countries and US states relaxing their laws on the herb, Jamaica is advancing reform plans.
Golding said the government would not soften its stance on drug trafficking and it intended to use a proportion of revenues from its licensing authority to support a public education campaign to discourage pot-smoking by young people and mitigate public health consequences.
The director of the national Cannabis Commercial and Medicinal Research Taskforce said he expected the bill to be passed soon in parliament, where Portia Simpson Miller’s governing party holds a 2-1 majority. “This development is long overdue,” Delano Seiveright said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/22/jamaica-considers-cannabis-legalisation

A cannabis farmer in Nine Mile, Jamaica. Photograph: David Mcfadden/AP

Science Wakes Up To Positive Aspects Of Psychedelic Mushrooms

2015-03-06T09:37:00.001-05:00

Give science time - you never know when science will recognize the positive aspects of something that has been in use by people for centuries, even millennia.

From The Washington Post -

Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

By Rachel Feltman July 3, 2014

Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.
In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms, after "trips" that can be a bit scary and unpleasant, report feeling more optimistic, less self-centered, and even happier for months after the fact.
But why do these trips change the way people see the world? According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.
The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which gives "shrooms" their psychedelic punch. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, scientists have only recently begun to examine the brain activity of those using the compound, and this is the first study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes.
After injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep, according to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.
“You’re seeing these areas getting louder, and more active,” he said. “It’s like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers.”
In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.
Conversely, the subjects of the study had decreased activity in other parts of the brain—areas associated with high level cognition. “These are the most recent parts of our brain, in an evolutionary sense,” Carhart-Harris said. “And we see them getting quieter and less organized.”
This dampening of one area and amplification of another could explain the “mind-broadening” sensation of psychedelic drugs, he said. Unlike most recreational drugs, psychotropic mushrooms and LSD don’t provide a pleasant, hedonistic reward when they’re consumed. Instead, users take them very occasionally, chasing the strange neurological effects instead of any sort of high.
“Except for some naïve users who go looking for a good time…which, by the way, is not how it plays out,” Carhart-Harris said, “you see people taking them to experience some kind of mental exploration, and to try to understand themselves.”
Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.
It’s still not clear why such effects can have more profound long-term effects on the brain than our nightly dreams. But Carhart-Harris hopes to see more of these compounds in modern medicine. “The way we treat psychological illnesses now is to dampen things,” he said. “We dampen anxiety, dampen ones emotional range in the hope of curing depression, taking the sting out of what one feels.”
But some patients seem to benefit from having their emotions “unlocked” instead. “It would really suit the style of psychotherapy where we engage in a patient’s history and hang-ups,” Carhart-Harris said. “Instead of putting a bandage over the exposed wound, we’d be essentially loosening their minds—promoting a permanent change in outlook.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/07/03/psychedelic-drugs-put-your-brain-in-a-waking-dream-study-finds/?hpid=z6

From Yahoo.com -

How Tripping On Mushrooms Changes The Brain

.By Erin Brodwin October 29, 2014 4:45 PM

Lightworkerpeace/Wikimedia Commons Psilocybe Pelliculosa mushrooms, one of the more than 200 psilocybin-containing species.

Tripping on magic mushrooms may actually free the mind, a new study says. The compounds in the (illegal) mushrooms change the way the brain works.

New research suggests that psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, sprouts new links across previously disconnected brain regions, temporarily altering the brain's entire organizational framework.

These new connections are likely what allow users to experience things like seeing sounds or hearing colors. And they could also be responsible for giving magic mushrooms some of their antidepressant qualities.

When researchers compared the brains of people who had received IV injections of psilocybin with those of people given a placebo, they found that the drug changed how information was carried across the brain. (Subjects received 2 milligrams of psilocybin; the dose and concentration of the chemical in actual mushrooms — which are eaten, not injected — varies.) Typically, brain activity follows specific neural networks. But in the people given psilocybin injections, cross-brain activity seemed more erratic, as if freed from its normal framework.

When the researchers looked more closely, however, they noticed that the sparks of activity across the brains of their drugged volunteers wasn't as chaotic as it seemed.

Instead, the activity formed distinct patterns, or cycles.
"The brain does not simply become a random system after psilocybin injection," the researchers wrote, "but instead retains some organizational features, albeit different from the normal state."

Picture the information in your brain being shared across an interconnected and heavily-trafficked system of highways. In that example, psilocybin isn't removing the highways. Instead, it's simply building new ones.

These new connections allow parts of the brain that don't usually talk to one another to communicate. People who use magic mushrooms and see the number 52 as glowing bright blue and red, then, don't see it that way because the drugs have made them crazy. Instead, they associate the number with colors because the brain region that detects and interprets color has been chatting it up with the brain region that processes numbers.

This new insight into what psilocybin does to the brain could help explain years of earlier findings on psilocybin's psychological effects, including how magic mushrooms seem to curb symptoms of depression.

In a 2012 study, Imperial College London neuroscientist David Nutt found that in people drugged with psilocybin, brain chatter across traditional areas of the brain was muted, including in a region thought to play a role in maintaining our sense of self. In depressed people, Nutt believes, the connections between brain circuits in this sense-of-self region are too strong. "People who get into depressive thinking, their brains are overconnected," Nutt told Psychology Today. Negative thoughts and feelings of self-criticism become obsessive and overwhelming.

Loosening those connections and creating new ones, Nutt thinks, could provide intense relief.

Johns Hopkins psychologists came to similar findings when they induced out of body experiences in a small group of volunteers dosed with psilocybin. Immediately following their sessions, participants said they felt more open, more imaginative, and more appreciative of beauty. When the researchers followed up with the volunteers a year later, nearly two-thirds said the experience had been one of the most important in their lives; close to half continued to score higher on a personality test of openness than they had before taking the drug.

Nick Fernandez, a former cancer patient and psychology graduate student who took psilocybin as part of a New York University study, experienced those same feelings of freedom and positivity.

"For the first time in my life, I felt like there was... a force greater than myself," Fernandez told Aeon Magazine. "Something inside me snapped and I experienced a... shift that made me realize all my anxieties, defenses, and insecurities weren't something to worry about."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tripping-mushrooms-changes-brain-204500998.html

Asset Forfeiture Is A Police Scam

2015-01-15T10:18:00.001-05:00

When the people who ran the program tell you the program is defective......... maybe believe them! The Washington Post ran a series on how asset seizing is abused by police. This is an editorial after the series ran by two men who helped run the Federal asset seizure program. The idea that they call this "forfeiture" is ludicrous - it is seizure not any forfeiture. What kind of forfeiture is it when a gun is held to your head?
To add insult to injury, police departments actually budget in advance based on expected seizures. In other words, if they don't keep pace on seizures, some police programs and/or purchases would have to be cut. Sounds like pretty good motivation to seize whatever you can.

Government self-interest corrupted a crime-fighting tool into an evil

By John Yoder and Brad Cates September 18, 2014

John Yoder was director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office from 1983 to 1985. Brad Cates was the director of the office from 1985 to 1989.

Last week, The Post published a series of in-depth articles about the abuses spawned by the law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture. As two people who were heavily involved in the creation of the asset forfeiture initiative at the Justice Department in the 1980s, we find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.

Asset forfeiture was conceived as a way to cut into the profit motive that fueled rampant drug trafficking by cartels and other criminal enterprises, in order to fight the social evils of drug dealing and abuse. Over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.

The idea seemed so simple: Seize the ill-gotten gains of big-time drug dealers and remove the financial incentive for their criminality. After all, if a kingpin could earn $20 million and stash it away somewhere, even a decade in prison would have its rewards. Make that money disappear, and the calculus changes.

Then, in 1986, the concept was expanded to include not only cash earned illegally but also purchases or investments made with that money, creating a whole scheme of new crimes that could be prosecuted as “money laundering.” The property eligible for seizure was further expanded to include “instrumentalities” in the trafficking of drugs, such as cars or even jewelry. Eventually, more than 200 crimes beyond drugs came to be included in the forfeiture scheme.

This all may have been fine in theory, but in the real world it went badly astray. First, many states adopted their own forfeiture laws, creating programs with less monitoring than those at the federal level. Second, state law enforcement agencies and prosecutors started using the property — and finally even to provide basic funding for their departments.

Even at the outset, the use of seized property was an issue. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, for example, might see a suspected dealer in a car they wanted for undercover work and seize it. But if the car had an outstanding loan, the DEA could not keep it without paying the lien. This led to distorted enforcement decisions, with agents choosing whom to pursue based on irrelevant factors such as whether the target owed money on his car.

As time went on and states got into the forfeiture game, the uses became more personally rewarding for law enforcement. Maintaining an undercover identity was often no longer even part of the justification for seizures.

Law enforcement agents and prosecutors began using seized cash and property to fund their operations, supplanting general tax revenue, and this led to the most extreme abuses: law enforcement efforts based upon what cash and property they could seize to fund themselves, rather than on an even-handed effort to enforce the law.

Many Americans are familiar with old-time speed traps, which became so notorious that most state legislatures reformed their systems to require local police and courts to deposit traffic fines into the state treasury to avoid the appearance of biased justice. Today, the old speed traps have all too often been replaced by forfeiture traps, where local police stop cars and seize cash and property to pay for local law enforcement efforts. This is a complete corruption of the process, and it unsurprisingly has led to widespread abuses.

The Asset Forfeiture Reform Act was enacted in 2000 to rein in abuses, but virtually nothing has changed. This is because civil forfeiture is fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness. It is unreformable.

In America, it is often said that it is better that nine guilty people go free than one innocent person be wrongly convicted. But our forfeiture laws turn our traditional concept of guilt upside down. Civil forfeiture laws presume someone’s personal property to be tainted, placing the burden of proving it “innocent” on the owner. What of the Fourth Amendment requirement that a warrant to seize or search requires the showing of probable cause of a specific violation?

Defendants should be charged with the crimes they commit. Charge someone with drug dealing if it can be proved, but don’t invent a second offense of “money laundering” to use as a backup or a pretext to seize cash. Valid, time-tested methods exist to allow law enforcement to seize contraband, profits and instrumentalities via legitimate criminal prosecution.

Civil asset forfeiture and money-laundering laws are gross perversions of the status of government amid a free citizenry. The individual is the font of sovereignty in our constitutional republic, and it is unacceptable that a citizen should have to “prove” anything to the government. If the government has probable cause of a violation of law, then let a warrant be issued. And if the government has proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt, let that guilt be proclaimed by 12 peers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/abolish-the-civil-asset-forfeiture-program-we-helped-create/2014/09/18/72f089ac-3d02-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html?hpid=z7

Lebanese Politician Calls For Legal Marijuana

2015-01-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

Of note is the report that Walid Jumblatt, a veteran Lebanese politician is now calling for legal marijuana.

Lebanese Marijuana Farmers Record Bumper Crop, As Syrian Civil War Occupies Authorities

A marijuana farmer in Lebanon's Bekaa valley.

Getty Images

Marijuana farmers in Lebanon claim that with authorities distracted by the fallout from the civil war in neighboring Syria, they have been able to reap bumper harvests of the drug.

Previously, the Lebanese army would burn fields of the drug grown to be exported and sold on the streets of Europe, but with the unrest in Syria causing thousands to flee into Lebanon leaving the army's hands full, farmers have been free to cultivate the crop.

"This year we had a good year," Ali Nasri Shamas, a local marijuana kingpin told the Telegraph.

He said that farmers had stockpiled weapons, and would defend their crop from authorities.

"We are selling hashish, and if anyone from the government tries to come close to it, we'll kill them."

Swaths of agricultural land in the country which were once used to cultivate beet crops have been turned over to marijuana production, with Shamas buying the produce of small-scale farmers, as well as employing his own growers, and processing the crop in a secret plant in the Bekaa valley.

Shamas said that after being made into hashish, it is exported to nearby countries, including Egypt and Syria, with the war having loosened Syrian border controls. But some is sold to European suppliers, including retailers in Amsterdam, where the drug is legal, and the U.K.

He said that there was now such an abundant supply of the drug that prices had fallen, and that farmers would pocket $1,200 two years ago, but now taking only a quarter of that: $350.

However, he said that his main farmers still stood to make around half a million dollars a year.

Lebanon became a hub for the production of drugs during its 1975-1990 civil war, and Shamas said that subsequent political corruption and failed attempts to replace marijuana with other crops had left the region impoverished.

This week, Walid Jumblatt, a prominent politician from the country's Druze minority, called for the cultivation of the drug to be legalized.

"It's time to allow hash to be grown and to overturn arrest warrants against people sought for doing so," the veteran politician wrote in Arabic on his Twitter account, reports AFP.

http://www.ibtimes.com/lebanese-marijuana-farmers-record-bumper-crop-syrian-civil-war-occupies-authorities-1764156

Accountability: Does It Apply To The Police?

2015-01-15T08:55:00.000-05:00

Police often think what is good for them is not for everyone else. Ever take pictures of the police? They don't like it is my general impression based on police response when I have taken pictures of police doing or not doing their job.

Store owner installs surveillance cameras to spy on police

A Miami convenience store owner is fed up with his employees and customers being allegedly harassed by police. So he installs surveillance video to get evidence against the local cops.

by Chris Matyszczyk

November 22, 2014 8:18 PM PST

Surveillance is for our own good.
By having everything that we are doing monitored, we can be sure that we (who have nothing to hide) will be safe.
At least, that's the logic many authorities offer us, as they spy, pry, and vilify anyone who might feel suspicious.
What happens, though, when you suspect the authorities of behaving suspiciously? Is it all right to spy on them?
Miami Gardens, Fla., convenience store owner Alex Saleh decided he'd try. He'd become vexed at what he saw as police harassment of his employees and even his customers.
So he installed surveillance cameras, with the specific intention of watching the detectives.
He'd become frustrated, you see, about the possibly not coincidental number of times that his employee, Earl Sampson, had been stopped and questioned by police officers -- 258 times over a four-year period does seem a little like overkill. These included 100 searches and 56 jailings. As for convictions, well, they were only for marijuana possession.
Saleh told the Miami Herald it seemed odd that Sampson had been arrested 62 times for trespassing, when the vast majority of offenses were outside the very same Quickstop.
That would be the Quickstop where Sampson worked.
In all, Saleh installed 15 surveillance cameras. Some might find a certain poetry in the fact that he felt the need for them, when he says his store has never been robbed.
The videos make for numbing viewing. In one, a store employee takes out the trash, only to be arrested for trespassing. Others appear to show searches without warrants and police stopping customers without any obvious reason.
Miami Gardens is neither an easy, nor a safe place. But the police's reluctance to so far comment on these videos and the Herald's reporting suggest that some questions might need to be answered.
Clearly, there is a history between Saleh and the police. He filed an internal affairs report against some officers. He claims they retaliated by being more aggressive.

But he's owned the store for 17 years. The fact that he has to install cameras in an attempt to prove what he feels is racial profiling, excessive aggression, and intimidation might be a portent of what is to come, as technology becomes ever more involved in everyday life.
If police officers are to be outfitted with cameras , will citizens feel the need to have Google Glass or its equivalent, just to ensure they have their own filmic version of an encounter with authorities?
Some police officers have aggressively shown how uncomfortable they are with ordinary citizens filming them in the line of duty.
In one case this year, police in Bakersfield, Calif., were accused of erasing cell phone video of an incident in which a man died.
In another incident in San Diego, an officer being filmed making an arrest declared that the Samsung Galaxy in question was a weapon .
Even if we're all filming each other, there will still be questions surrounding editing and other forms of manipulation.
In the search for justice, there's always that nagging question: Whose?

http://www.cnet.com/news/store-owner-installs-surveillance-cameras-to-spy-on-police/#ftag=YHF65cbda0

Wendell Berry - Dose of Reality

2015-01-02T15:45:00.001-05:00

I have been reading Wendell Berry since the late 1970's. More people need to listen to him. A poet and a farmer - or a farmer and a poet.
From The Guardian -

Wendell Berry: 'for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a joke'

Influence of local food effort is tiny but industrial agriculture is blasting ahead at a great rate, says author, farmer and activist

Roger Cohn for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
Thursday 6 March 2014

Author Wendell Berry at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. Photograph: Ed Reinke/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wendell Berry wrote about and practiced “sustainable agriculture” long before the term was widely used. His 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, in which he argued against industrial agriculture and for small-scale, local-based farming, had a strong influence on the environmental and local food movements in the US.

Berry has long balanced the diverse roles of writer, activist, teacher, and farmer. At age 79, he still lives on the farm near Port Royal, Kentucky, where he grew up, and uses traditional methods to work the land there. And he still speaks eloquently about the importance of local communities and of caring for the land, while warning of the destructive potential of industrialization and technology.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn, Berry talked about his Kentucky farm and why he has remained there, why he would risk arrest to protest mountaintop removal mining, why the sustainable agriculture movement faces an uphill battle, and why strong rural communities are important. “A deep familiarity between a local community and a local landscape is a dear thing, just in human terms,” Berry said. “It’s also, down the line, money in the bank, because it helps you to preserve the working capital of the place.”

Yale Environment 360: You’ve been writing about and practicing what is now known as sustainable agriculture since before that term was widely used. In recent years, there’s been a movement among some people toward sustainable agriculture. Do you feel sustainable agriculture is gaining ground in a significant way that could slow the growth of industrial agriculture, or is it more of a boutique type of thing?
Wendell Berry: Well, we are a young country. By the time settlement reached Kentucky it was 1775, and the industrial revolution was already underway. So we’ve been 238 years in Kentucky, we Old World people. And what we have done there in that time has not been sustainable. In fact, it has been the opposite. There’s less now of everything in the way of natural gifts, less of everything than what was there when we came. Sometimes we have radically reduced the original gift. And so for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a joke, because we haven’t sustained anything very long — and a lot of things we haven’t sustained at all.

The acreage that is now under the influence of the local food effort or the sustainable agriculture effort is at present tiny, and industrial agriculture is blasting ahead at a great rate. For instance, in the last two years, the high price of corn and soybeans has driven that kind of agriculture into the highly vulnerable uplands of my home country. I can show you farms that in my lifetime have been mostly in grass that are now suddenly covered, line fence to line fence, with monocultures of corn or beans….

So we have these two things, a promising start on what we call, loosely, sustainable land use, and we have a still far larger industrial extractive agriculture operating, really, against the land.

e360: On your place where you live now and farm, what are some of the practices that you employ and use to take good care of the land and make it sustainable?

Berry: The farm that my wife and I have is in every way marginal. Every foot of it is either steep, which is most of it, or it floods [Laughs]. So it’s land that you can learn a lot from in a hurry because it is so demanding of care. The way to deal with that land is to keep it covered with permanent pasture or woodland. We have some slopes in pasture that ought to have remained woodland, but we’ve kept most of it going the way it came to us.

e360: And do you do forest logging there as well?

Berry: Most of our woodland we don’t use, but some we use for firewood, an occasional saw log, fence posts, that sort of thing. The emerald ash borer [a destructive beetle] is now among us, and we are cutting the large trees that the emerald ash borer has killed. The ash wood is valuable as sawed lumber, and it’s also wonderful firewood… My son does woodworking, and so it’s worthwhile to him to have supplies of sawed boards laid up.
e360: You write a lot about local agriculture and the local economy, about local traditions and the importance of connections to the land. Why do you think this is so important?

Berry: That starts with the obvious perception that land that is in human use requires human care. And this calls for keeping in mind the history of such land, of what has worked well on it and the mistakes that have been made on it. To lose this living memory of what has happened to the place is really to lose an economic asset.

I’m more and more concerned with the economic values of such intangibles as affection, knowledge, and memory. A deep familiarity between a local community and the local landscape is a dear thing, just in human terms. It’s also, down the line, money in the bank because it helps you to preserve the working capital of the place.

e360: You along with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute have proposed a 50-year farm bill. Can you explain what that is and how it would differ from typical US farm bills?

Berry: Unlike the typical US farm bill, the 50-Year Farm Bill attempts to address the real and ongoing problems of agriculture: erosion, toxicity, loss of genetic and species diversity, and the destruction of rural communities, or the destruction, where it still survives, of the culture of husbandry. It begins with the fact that at present, 80% of the land is planted annually in annual crops such as corn and beans, and 20% in perennials. It proposes a 50-year program for the gradual inversion of that ratio to 80% perennial cover and 20% annuals. It’s pretty clear that annual plants are nature’s emergency service. They’re the plants that come in after, say, a landslide, after the land has been exposed, and they give it a temporary cover while the perennials are getting started. So our predominantly annual agriculture keeps the land in a state of emergency.

It’s hard to make a permanent agriculture on the basis of an emergency strategy. By now the planted acreages have grown so large that most soybean and corn fields, for instance, are not seeded to cover crops, and so they lie exposed to the weather all winter. You can drive through Iowa in April before the new crops have been planted and started to grow, and you don’t see anything green mile after mile. It’s more deserted than a desert. And the soil erosion rates in Iowa are scandalous.

e360: I know you’ve had people tell you that your writing has inspired them to think about chucking their jobs and their city life and go farm. What do you tell them?

Berry: Well, I try to recommend caution. You don’t want somebody who’s 45 or 50 years old, who doesn’t know anything about farming, to throw up his or her present life and undertake to make a living from farming at a time when farmers, experienced farmers, are failing and going out of business. So characteristically I’ve said, “If you do this, keep your town job. If you’re not independently wealthy, you’ve got to have a dependable income from somewhere off the farm.” And I’ve tried to stress the difference between depending on the weather, on nature, for an income and depending on a salary. There’s a very wide gulf between those two kinds of dependence.

e360: Three years ago you participated in a sit-in at the governor’s office in Kentucky over the issue of mountaintop removal mining. What was that like, and why did you get involved with it in the first place?

Berry: I got involved because I was tired of talking. I saw that we were going to Frankfort [the state capital] every year and trying to talk to senators and representatives in the General Assembly, and to the governor if we could.Their very understandable impulse was to get rid of us as quickly as possible and have us leave feeling good… There are two parties in Kentucky — the party of coal and the party of everything else. Both the Democratic politicians and the Republican politicians, mostly, in most areas of the state, have to pay homage to coal, to even think about running for office.

So it was clear that talking wasn’t going to do any good. I don’t think what we wound up doing did any good either, but we had to raise the stakes somehow. And so we did go to Frankfort, confront the governor, and we had a list of requests that he would have to grant or he would not get rid of us. And he pulled a pretty smart trick on us. He invited us to spend the weekend. For obvious reasons, he didn’t want pictures in the paper of these innocent people being led off in handcuffs, and he said “Just stay, be my guests.” He outsmarted us. But he couldn’t neutralize us — the circumstance that he put us in really gave us a lot of visibility, a lot of contact with the press, and attracted a lot of sympathy.
e360: Do you think any positive developments have occurred since then?

Berry: No. I think we’ve got to keep up our opposition to land abuse and we’ve got to continue to communicate what that’s all about and what it signifies. What it signifies is that some people are willing to go the limit in earth destruction, to put it entirely at risk and destroy it entirely to preserve “our way of life.” A lot of people are willing to tolerate that.

Mountaintop removal is as near total destruction as you can imagine, because it does away with the forest, it does away with the topsoil that sustained the forest, it does away with the very topography — even people’s family graveyards go. And it’s done in complete disregard not only of the land but of the people who live downhill, whose lives are threatened, whose water supplies are destroyed, whose homes are damaged. The people downhill, downstream, and ahead of us in time are totally disregarded.

e360: As someone who’s followed your writing over the years, it seems to me that in some ways you’ve become more radical in your thinking, unlike a lot of people who as they get older tend to become more conservative. Do you think that’s true, and if so, why?

Berry: It’s true. One reason is that as I’ve grown older I’ve understood more clearly the difficulties that we’re in, the bad fix that we’re in and that we’re leaving to our children. And as I’ve grown older I’ve understood that when I put my comfort on the line as a protester or whatever, I’m doing what old people ought to do. I have less life to live than the young people. I think the old people ought to be the first ones in line to risk arrest.
e360: I’ve heard you describing the difference between optimism and hope, and you said that in terms of the issues you really care about, you would not describe yourself as optimistic but as hopeful. Can you explain that?

Berry: The issue of hope is complex and the sources of hope are complex. The things hoped for tend to be specific and to imply an agenda of work, things that can be done. Optimism is a general program that suggests that things are going to come out swell, pretty much whether we help out or not. This is largely unjustified by circumstances and history. One of the things that I think people on my side of these issues are always worried about is the ready availability of cynicism, despair, nihilism — those things that really are luxuries that permit people to give up, relax about the problems. Relax and let them happen. Another thing that can bring that about is so-called objectivity — the idea that this way might be right but on the other hand the opposite way might be right. We find this among academic people pretty frequently — the idea that you don’t take a stand, you just talk about the various possibilities.

But our side requires commitment, it requires effort, it requires a continual effort to define and understand what is possible — not only what is desirable, but what is possible in the immediate circumstances.
e360: You’ve had many opportunities over the years to leave Port Royal — you had teaching jobs at universities — but you made the decision to go back and stay there. Why?

Berry: Well because I love the place. Both my father and my mother came from the Port Royal neighborhood, and I was one of the farm-raised young people who loved both farming and the place. Port Royal is what a lot of people have been schooled to call “nowhere.” I remember a college student who told me, “I’m from a little nowhere place in Illinois.” And I said, ”Wait a minute. I want to ask you something: Who told you that where you come from in Illinois is nowhere? There is no such place as nowhere.” We’ve dumped our garbage in our places, we’ve polluted them and mistreated them in every way, because we thought they were nowhere. It’s extremely important, it seems to me, that those nowhere places should be inhabited by people who will speak for them.

e360: You’ve had four careers, really — writer, farmer, activist, and teacher. How do you see those parts of your life fitting together?

Berry: A question I’m often asked is, “How have you balanced these various pursuits?” And the word “balance” always implies that I have balanced them, and of course I haven’t. It’s been difficult and sometimes a struggle to keep it all going.

e360: Difficult in what way?

Berry: Well, to find time for it all. I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.
• Roger Cohn is the editor of Yale Environment 360

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/06/wendell-berry-americans-sustainability-joke

Whole Foods Pushing It's Comfort Zone

2015-01-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer - I own some Whole Foods stock.

Will have to check on this store in the near future - from The Motley Fool -

Why This One Store Means So Much to Whole Foods Market Inc.

By Brian Stoffel
September 28, 2014

When you think of your typical Whole Foods (NASDAQ: WFM ) location, what type of neighborhood comes to mind? For most people, the answer is easy, whether it's in the city or the burbs: wealthy
Not surprisingly, these types of neighborhoods have helped Whole Foods grow from an industry outsider two decades ago to the most important grocer on the country's landscape. And perhaps no city is a better blueprint for what Whole Foods hopes to accomplish than the greater Chicagoland area, where there are currently 19 Whole Foods locations.
Here's what the breakdown of each location looks like, given their unique zip codes.
Even outliers can be explained away, like 60626, which is located in South Evanston. It should be pointed out that this particular location used to be a Wild Oats before Whole Foods acquired the chain. Its close proximity to the wealthy zip code just to the north accounts for a large base of business.
As a whole, these locations clearly represent a better-off demographic than the average American community, and help explain at least some of Whole Foods' success.
But lately, many are worried that the company has become a victim of its own success. "The company is simply running out of wealthy neighborhoods, and competition will take away the lower-end customers," the bears say.
Time will tell if that's true or not. But for those looking for a crystal ball into the future, one location in American Southeast could be the closest thing we have to glimpsing into Whole Foods' futureBut lately, many are worried that the company has become a victim of its own success. "The company is simply running out of wealthy neighborhoods, and competition will take away the lower-end customers," the bears say.
Time will tell if that's true or not. But for those looking for a crystal ball into the future, one location in American Southeast could be the closest thing we have to glimpsing into Whole Foods' futureOn Aug. 13, 2013, the city of Savannah, Georgia, opened its very first Whole Foods location. The store is located on what used to be a lot for car sales, but had since been abandoned following the Great Recession.
Though it's still early in the game for the company, any success that Whole Foods experiences in Savannah could be a huge deal moving forward. That's because the location isn't anything like what many think of as a "typical" Whole Foods location.And in case you were thinking that this location could benefit from some wealthy neighbors, consider a few key facts. Though Hilton Head is just 30 miles from Savannah, the wealthy South Carolina tourist hub already has a Whole Foods.
What's more, the three zip codes that share a physical border with this particular Savannah Whole Foods location are similar in makeup. The median household income across the three averages to roughly $36,000, with 27% living in poverty, and 32% having obtained a college degree.
How to succeed in unlikely areasThere are lots of strategies and assumptions underpinning Whole Foods' plan in Savannah. It might surprise some to know that, typically, Whole Foods has focused far more on an educated population rather than a wealthy one -- though the two tend to be highly correlated.
But with this move, the company is deviating from the plan. One possible explanation is that the healthy food movement has become so prevalent -- it's the champion cause of our First Lady -- that those without a college education are also well aware of the benefits of healthy eating.
The company is also creating a highly tailored experience for patrons in Savannah as well. For instance, the building reflects the historical Victorian architecture of the South, there is a mural on the side of the building painted by local college students, the Parlor -- a beer and wine lounge/bar -- serves many local specialties, and a mobile kitchen stands outside to offer food for those on the run.

The Whole Foods location in Savannah offers an outdoor, mobile kitchen. Photo: Whole Foods
The company itself does not break out sales for specific locations, so its difficult to get an immediate reading on how well the store has fared in its first full year of operation. And by being located in Wisconsin myself, a trip to Savannah -- tempting as it sounds in autumn -- isn't in the cards.
If you do live in the Savannah area, leave a comment in the box below to let us know about your experience. The most important thing for investors to watch is if the company keeps the store open or -- even better -- if it rolls out more locations in Savannah because of its initial success.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/28/why-this-one-store-means-so-much-to-whole-foods-ma.aspx

Mission Impossible?

2015-01-01T13:45:00.000-05:00

    When I was a kid in the 1960's I loved the TV series Mission: Impossible. Characters in the show regularly employed very realistic latex masks as disguises and a variety of low tech means to thwart high tech systems. So it is with interest that I note various news outlets reporting now that using fingerprint scans for id is not reliable. Up til now, fingerprints have been said to be a secure method of identification but now not so sure.......
    I also did a search on latex masks. One of the top results is a company that advertises that their latex masks are of the same quality as those in Hollywood movies. Not sure if that is Mission: Impossible quality but it does make me wonder about just how anonymous someone can be - for good or bad purposes. And it definitely brings up issues of someone actually impersonating another person.
   From The Washington Post -

Why fingerprints scans may not be the future of digital verification

By Andrea Peterson December 29, 2014

Fingerprint scanners are becoming increasingly mainstream -- they even come built-in many Apple devices.
But researchers are finding ways to spoof biometric ID methods, and they come with their own set of privacy and security drawbacks.
Biometrics researcher Jan Krisller demonstrated how he spoofed a politician’s fingerprint using just a high definition photo at a conference held by the Chaos Computer Club in Germany this weekend. Krisller, who also goes by "Starbug," and the group previously showed off a way to spoof Apple's Touch ID system by creating a fake finger modeled off a fingerprint left on a glass surface.
One key problem with biometrics is that they are permanent.
The much maligned password is less secure than using a unique biological marker to identify yourself, but it can be changed if it is leaked or compromised in some way. Your fingerprints, on the other hand, are yours forever.
And the immutable nature of the fingerprints becomes even more concerning when you consider how public they can be. You leave prints out in the world just going through your day -- and Krisller shows data needed to fake the prints can also be captured remotely without direct contact.
"Biometrics are not secrets," American Civil Liberties Union analyst Jay Stanley explained to The Washington Post earlier this year.
As fingerprint scanners become more and more common, they are also raising legal questions. At least one court has ruled that police could compel a suspect to give up his fingerprint, but not his passcode, in order to unlock and search his cellphone.

Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/29/why-fingerprints-scans-may-not-be-the-future-of-digital-verification/?hpid=z19

Energy Options Overlooked

2014-12-13T12:14:00.000-05:00

A very good question........

Why has 'microhydro' been neglected as a solution to energy poverty?

Power from streams and small rivers has been proven to provide sustainable energy in Peru and Nepal - Zimbabwe is next

Lucy Stevens

Wednesday 24 September 2014 12.02 EDT

We live in a world of growing resource scarcity. The oft-quoted statistic is that by 2050 two thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water stress or scarcity.
Currently, agriculture is the largest user of water, but as the World Bank’s Thirsty Energy initiative points out, increasing demands for energy will also require increasing use of freshwater. And as populations rise, so will the need for more water and energy for food production.
Many say we need greater efficiency in order to help manage some of these difficult trade-offs between water, energy and food. Much of this debate is focused on macro-level solutions. However, the International Energy Agency has calculated that 55% of all new electricity supply will need to come from decentralised systems if we are to reach the goal of universal energy access by 2030.
So could decentralised, off-grid solutions hold the key? For many years, influencers have debated whether community-based, off-grid schemes can deliver energy sustainably. But this battle has not yet been won. Recently new lines have been drawn by Bill Gates, who called for centralised, fossil-fuel based electrification to solve energy poverty and SunEdison founder Jigar Shah who responded by putting forward the case for distributed renewable solutions.
While this debates goes on at the policy level, what do experiences on the ground tell us? At Practical Action, we have found that micro hydropower (or microhydro) systems, which produce power from streams and small rivers, provide huge potential for sustainable energy.
For example in Peru, microhydro systems installed in the mid- to late-1990s are still running today. Not only do they provide electricity for light bulbs and other small appliances, they can also supply continuous power for local clinics, allow people to use fridges and run small businesses. We found they reduced household energy expenditure by more than half, and 60% of families said their incomes had increased.
However, there is still unexplored potential for decentralised hydropower. In both Peru and Nepal (where micro-hydro schemes are widespread), there was rarely any deliberate attempt to connect the electricity generated to agricultural systems, or to make use of the channelled water for irrigation. This means missing out on a set of potentially transformational opportunities. Decentralised energy systems can not only improve energy access, but also help to maximise the relationships between water, energy and food, both now and in the future.
More recently, and learning from our experiences, we have been making the connection between agriculture and energy more directly. Together with Oxfam we have been working in Zimbabwe, for example in the Himalaya scheme which uses the electricity generated by the microhydro plant, as well as the channelled water, for much-needed irrigation.
The approach does of course have it’s challenges. Across the schemes we’ve developed in Zimbabwe familiar challenges and trade-offs emerge, particularly with a recent severe two-year drought followed by heavy rains. For example, in Chipendeke in Zimbabwe, initial planning for hydropower failed to fully accommodate existing irrigation needs. As a result during the dry season, there was insufficient water to run both the irrigation and the hydro simultaneously. Eventually the villagers reached a compromise where the microhydro plant was switched off for short periods to allow more water for irrigation.
In Ngarura, there were delays in construction of the microhydro project and farmers lost trust. They continued cultivating the steep river banks, and when the rains came there was heavy siltation of the system. The lesson there was that farmers have to be convinced of the benefit of the scheme in order to preserve the river banks.
Despite these problems, in both cases solutions were reached through dialogue and the community balancing their priorities. It is important not only to focus on the infrastructure for hydropower but also the institutions to support it and that is as much part of increasing resilience as the energy or water itself.
Development organisations can sometimes be rightly accused of being starry-eyed about the potential of community ownership and management. In the case of a microhydro plant this can impose unrealistic burdens, and in the absence of support structures from local technicians, spare parts, and a clear sense of ownership infrastructure can quickly fall into disuse. But the sector has been learning, as research shows. The right systems for decentralised energy production can be created and it can provide a sustainable solution to energy poverty.
Lucy Stevens is policy and practice adviser - energy and urban services at Practical Action. Follow @PracticalAction on Twitter.
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/sep/24/why-has-microhydro-been-neglected-as-a-solution-to-energy-poverty

Expendable In North Dakota, But Oil Is Cheaper This Holiday Driving Season

2014-12-01T15:43:00.001-05:00

The New York Times lays out a bit of the problem not withstanding a fact check or two - see bottom - but nothing major misrepresented.

The Downside of the Boom

North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances.

By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBERT GEBELOFF NOV. 22, 2014

WILLISTON, N.D. — In early August 2013, Arlene Skurupey of Blacksburg, Va., got an animated call from the normally taciturn farmer who rents her family land in Billings County, N.D. There had been an accident at the Skurupey 1-9H oil well. “Oh, my gosh, the gold is blowing,” she said he told her. “Bakken gold.”

It was the 11th blowout since 2006 at a North Dakota well operated by Continental Resources, the most prolific producer in the booming Bakken oil patch. Spewing some 173,250 gallons of potential pollutants, the eruption, undisclosed at the time, was serious enough to bring the Oklahoma-based company’s chairman and chief executive, Harold G. Hamm, to the remote scene.

It was not the first or most catastrophic blowout visited by Mr. Hamm, a sharecropper’s son who became the wealthiest oilman in America and energy adviser to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. Two years earlier, a towering derrick in Golden Valley County had erupted into flames and toppled, leaving three workers badly burned. “I was a human torch,” said the driller, Andrew J. Rohr.

Blowouts represent the riskiest failure in the oil business. Yet, despite these serious injuries and some 115,000 gallons spilled in those first 10 blowouts, the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which regulates the drilling and production of oil and gas, did not penalize Continental until the 11th.

The commission — the governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner — imposed a $75,000 penalty. Earlier this year, though, the commission, as it often does, suspended 90 percent of the fine, settling for $7,500 after Continental blamed “an irresponsible supervisor” — just as it had blamed Mr. Rohr and his crew, contract workers, for the blowout that left them traumatized.

Since 2006, when advances in hydraulic fracturing — fracking — and horizontal drilling began unlocking a trove of sweet crude oil in the Bakken shale formation, North Dakota has shed its identity as an agricultural state in decline to become an oil powerhouse second only to Texas. A small state that believes in small government, it took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar industry with a slender regulatory system built on neighborly trust, verbal warnings and second chances.

In recent years, as the boom really exploded, the number of reported spills, leaks, fires and blowouts has soared, with an increase in spillage that outpaces the increase in oil production, an investigation by The New York Times found. Yet, even as the state has hired more oil field inspectors and imposed new regulations, forgiveness remains embedded in the Industrial Commission’s approach to an industry that has given North Dakota the fastest-growing economy and lowest jobless rate in the country.

For those who champion fossil fuels as the key to America’s energy independence, North Dakota is an unrivaled success, a place where fracking has provoked little of the divisive environmental debate that takes place elsewhere. Its state leaders rarely mention the underside of the boom and do not release even summary statistics about environmental incidents and enforcement measures.

Over the past nine months, using previously undisclosed and unanalyzed records, bolstered by scores of interviews in North Dakota, The Times has pieced together a detailed accounting of the industry’s environmental record and the state’s approach to managing the “carbon rush.”

The Times found that the Industrial Commission wields its power to penalize the industry only as a last resort. It rarely pursues formal complaints and typically settles those for about 10 percent of the assessed penalties. Since 2006, the commission has collected an estimated $1.1 million in fines. This is a pittance compared with the $33 million (including some reimbursements for cleanups) collected by Texas’ equivalent authority over roughly the same period, when Texas produced four times the oil.

“We’re spoiling the child by sparing the rod,” said Daryl Peterson, a farmer who has filed a complaint seeking to compel the state to punish oil companies for spills that contaminated his land. “We should be using the sword, not the feather.”

North Dakota’s oil and gas regulatory setup is highly unusual in that it puts three top elected officials directly in charge of an industry that, through its executives and political action committees, can and does contribute to the officials’ campaigns. Mr. Hamm and other Continental officials, for instance, have contributed $39,900 to the commissioners since 2010. John B. Hess, chief executive of Hess Oil, the state’s second-biggest oil producer, contributed $25,000 to Gov. Jack Dalrymple in 2012.

State regulators say they deliberately choose a collaborative rather than punitive approach because they view the large independent companies that dominate the Bakken as responsible and as their necessary allies in policing the oil fields. They prefer to work alongside industry to develop new guidelines or regulations when problems like overflowing waste, radioactive waste, leaking pipelines, and flaring gas become too glaring to ignore.

Mr. Dalrymple’s office said in a statement: “The North Dakota Industrial Commission has adopted some of the most stringent oil and gas production regulations in the country to enhance protections for our water, air and land. At the same time, the state has significantly increased staffing to enforce environmental protections. Our track record is one of increased regulation and oversight.”

Researchers who study government enforcement generally conclude that “the cooperative approach doesn’t seem to generate results” while “the evidence shows that increased monitoring and increased enforcement will reduce the incidence of oil spills,” said Mark A. Cohen, a Vanderbilt University professor who led a team advising the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

With spills steadily rising in North Dakota, evidence gathered by The Times suggests that the cooperative approach is not working that well for the state, where the Industrial Commission shares industry oversight with the state’s Health Department and federal agencies.

One environmental incident for every 11 wells in 2006, for instance, became one for every six last year, The Times found.

Through early October of this year, companies reported 3.8 million gallons spilled, nearly as much as in 2011 and 2012 combined.

Over all, more than 18.4 million gallons of oils and chemicals spilled, leaked or misted into the air, soil and waters of North Dakota from 2006 through early October 2014. (In addition, the oil industry reported spilling 5.2 million gallons of nontoxic substances, mostly fresh water, which can alter the environment and carry contaminants.)

The spill numbers derive from estimates, and sometimes serious underestimates, reported to the state by the industry. State officials, who rarely discuss them publicly, sometimes use them to present a rosier image. Over the summer, speaking to farmers in the town of Antler, Lynn D. Helms, the director of the Department of Mineral Resources, announced “a little bit of good news”: The spill rate per well was “steady or down.” In fact, the rate has risen sharply since the early days of the boom.

Presented with The Times’s data analysis, and asked if the state was doing an effective job at preventing spills, Mr. Helms struck a more sober note. “We’re doing O.K.,” he said. “We’re not doing great.”

He noted it is a federal agency, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, that regulates oil transmission pipelines. “You can’t use the spills P.H.M.S.A. was responsible for and conclude my approach to regulation is not working,” he said.

Indeed, as the tangle of buried pipelines has grown, there have been no federal pipeline inspectors based in North Dakota. But there have been no state inspectors, either, to oversee the much larger network of gathering pipelines unregulated by the federal government — a fount of many spills.

Penalizing companies for every violation is imprudent and can be counterproductive, Mr. Helms said, potentially “leaving the citizens of North Dakota with enormous liabilities on their hands when bankrupt operators walk away.”

Continental Resources hardly seems likely to walk away from its 1.2 million leased acres in the Bakken. It has reaped substantial profit from the boom, with $2.8 billion in net income from 2006 through 2013.

But the company, which has a former North Dakota governor on its board, has been treated with leniency by the Industrial Commission.

From 2006 through August, it reported more spills and environmental incidents (937) and a greater volume of spillage (1.6 million gallons) than any other operator. It spilled more per barrel of oil produced than any of the state’s other major producers. Since 2006, however, the company has paid the Industrial Commission $20,000 out of $222,000 in assessed fines.

Continental said in a written response to questions that it was misleading to compare its spill record with that of other operators because “we are not aware other operators report spills as transparently and proactively as we do.” It said that it had recovered the majority of what it spilled, and that penalty reductions came from providing the Industrial Commission “with precisely the information it needs to enforce its regulations fairly.”

What Continental paid Mr. Rohr, the injured driller, is guarded by a confidentiality agreement negotiated after a jury was impaneled for a trial this September. His wife, Winnie, said she wished the trial had gone forward “so the truth could come out, but we just didn’t have enough power to fight them.”

Looking back now, one thing gnaws at her.

“You know what really bothered me?” Mrs. Rohr said. “Harold Hamm flew up to see the damage to the rig but didn’t go see the guys who were burned.”

Embracing the Oil Industry as Economic Salvation

Given the state’s history of population loss and economic decline, state officials delighted in the arrival of oil companies eager to exploit the tremendous untapped potential of the primeval Bakken formation deep beneath the sweeping prairies and rugged badlands of western North Dakota.

Especially during the first years, officials were anxious that this oil boom, like previous ones, could be fleeting, that oil companies, if not embraced, could shift their rigs and capital investment to fields with less severe winters and better access to markets.

“There was a mentality that we should be helping things along, not getting in the way with regulations,” said Todd Sattler, a lawyer who served as a state oil and gas hearing officer through mid-2011. “It wasn’t blatant disregard for bad things, just permissive.”

Mr. Sattler said he tried to establish a protocol for field investigations, preparing a three-page checklist of procedures, including how to conduct witness interviews. The response from the state’s chief inspector, he said, was: “I’m not going to be a cop out there, Todd.”

In 2006, the Industrial Commission issued 419 drilling permits, processing applications in five days. By 2011, when it handed out 1,927 permits, it was still managing to issue them in 10 days. At that point, concerned that the Environmental Protection Agency might establish a moratorium on fracking — the legislature set aside $1 million to sue the E.P.A. — there was a desire to establish facts on the ground.

Some officials in western North Dakota challenged the accelerating pace. “It was so ragtag and breathless,” said Dan Kalil, the Williams County Commission chairman. “Infrastructure in every facet wasn’t able to keep up.”

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said: “It’s easy to say it’s been too fast, too much. But this is what North Dakotans have hoped for, prayed for.” Investors from all over the country are now drawn to tiny, remote places like Watford City, where “there wasn’t a damn thing” seven years ago, he said.

“We’ve got the largest-producing Cinnabon anywhere in the world,” he said. (The Williston Cinnabon, more precisely, has the highest sales in a travel plaza, the company said.)

In the first five years, the “slow, nasty drip, drip, drip” of routine spills — as Edmund Baker, environmental director for the Fort Berthold Reservation in the heart of the oil patch, calls it — went largely unnoticed and sometimes unreported to the authorities.

In the spring thaw of 2011, however, after a winter of record snowfall, scores of oil waste pits overflowed at once. The large, open pits, adjacent to rigs throughout the Bakken at that point, disgorged oil-based drilling mud that mixed with snowmelt and streamed across farmland and into stock ponds, creeks and river tributaries.

Farmers were horrified; the local news media took note. And, in concert with the development of a new regulation outlawing liquid waste pits, the Industrial Commission undertook its first — and so far only — crackdown on spills. It filed several dozen formal complaints against companies that, Mr. Helms said, had defied the Mineral Resources Department’s warning to take precautions to prevent the predicted overflows.

Hess Oil was one target. It paid its fines in full: $112,500.

Continental, like some other companies, disputed its responsibility.

Its lawyer, a former counsel to the Industrial Commission, proposed that consent agreements state that the overflows were caused by unforeseeable extreme weather. Instead, the agreements attributed the violations “in part” to bad weather “unforeseen by Continental.”

Still, the Industrial Commission accepted $12,500 rather than $125,000.

That fall, at a commission meeting in Bismarck, Mr. Helms explained the logic behind the waste pit settlements.

Most companies would make “a voluntary 10 percent payment” and 90 percent would be suspended for a year, during which the operator would have to “keep completely clean” of the offense, Mr. Helms said, according to the meeting minutes. This works, he added, because “keeping that 90 percent hanging over their head for a year creates a culture change within the company.”

Mr. Helms said this had been departmental practice since the early 2000s when officials were trying to prod Earl Schwartz of GoFor Oil — his logo was a gopher in a hard hat — to plug some wells and start production on others.

Sarah Vogel, a former Industrial Commission member, said she considered it a startling admission that current policy was based on “the treatment of a small wildcatter from an earlier era.”

“It’s absurd to compare an Earl Schwartz to a Hess or any of these other enormous companies worth billions,” she said. “To me, announcing publicly that it is your practice to suspend the bulk of all fines makes a mockery of the whole enforcement system. Should we tell the general public that if they’re caught speeding, the fine is $100, but they only have to pay $10? It’s an invitation to violate the law.”

Bearded and deliberative, Mr. Helms is a petroleum engineer by trade, with a hand that bears the burn scars of an industrial accident. The state’s senior oil official since 2005, he previously worked at Texaco for two years and at Hess for 18.

To his critics, Mr. Helms personifies a cozy relationship between the commission and oil companies. His dual mission heightens this, they say, as he is compelled by statute both to promote “the greatest possible economic recovery of oil and gas” and to enforce regulations.

Mr. Helms, however, said that his background gives him access and authority, and that his job is to promote responsible development, not the industry.

“In order to effectively do that I have to be on a first-name basis with C.E.O.s and managers,” he said. “If they didn’t trust me, and if they expected every time they made a mistake they were going to get slapped with a great big fine or be singled out or profiled, I wouldn’t get straight answers.”

The commission has imposed its stiffest penalties on smaller companies. Last year, it fined Halek Operating, whose leader had a history of swindling investors in Texas, a record $1.5 million for a defective waste disposal well that threatened a town’s water supply. But Halek has gone out of business, and the state is unlikely to obtain more than the $140,000 in bonds it has seized.

Mr. Helms said that problems in the oil patch were often the fault not of the major companies but of the contractors who do their physical labor.

“The large independents — the bread and butter of the North Dakota oil industry — really understand their social license to operate and really try to emphasize environment, health and safety,” he said. “But there’s a disconnect.”

L. David Glatt, Mr. Helms’s counterpart in the Health Department’s environmental division, has voiced the same sentiment. Though the state’s chief environmental regulator, he described himself on a radio show last year as “not a regulations guy” — after the host said that “the word ‘regulation’ is like Lucifer” in North Dakota.

Before the boom, Mr. Glatt said in an interview, the Health Department had “a very hands-on, personalized approach, going out and helping people solve their problems.”

“Now with the oil boom bringing in people who are just here to make a living or make money,” he said, “we are being forced to change our regulatory approach to in some cases a very heavy-handed one, which is a paradigm shift for us.”

Judging by the data, the Health Department, overseen by civil servants and not elected officials, appears to have been tougher on the oil industry than the Industrial Commission has. It has collected over three-quarters of the fines levied, amounting to at least $4.1 million since 2006.

Still, most of that revenue derived from a single industrywide enforcement action that, Mr. Glatt said, the industry itself requested.

After years of underestimating volatile emissions from its oil storage tanks in the Bakken and allowing them to vent directly into the air, the industry “self-reported” the potential pollution and safety problem to the government.

A task force was formed; the companies devised a new model for estimating the emissions and pledged to control them through devices. And then they made a request: “They wanted fines to be collected by the state to reduce their exposure to lawsuits,” Mr. Glatt said. “We said, ‘Sure, we’d be more than happy to take your money.’ ”

The Health Department did not publicize that it collected record penalties for these violations last year: $2.64 million, including unprecedented sums like $418,500 from Hess and $305,400 from Continental.

“We are not wired like that,” Mr. Glatt said. “It goes to the fact that, honestly, when I get to the point where I have to collect a penalty, I look at that as a failure on our part.”

A Record Spill Puts the Focus on the Costs of a Boom

At her isolated farmhouse near Tioga, Patricia Jensen disarms guests — pipeline executives, oil spill cleaners — with a glistening berry pie fresh from the oven. She and her husband, Steven, are firm but nonconfrontational in their approach to what he calls the “ecological nightmare” in the backyard of the family’s century-old homestead.

“We’ve kind of taken a route of not being too sour, but yet we’re really concerned,” Mr. Jensen said.

What happened to them last fall — considered the largest on-land oil spill in recent American history — confronted North Dakota with the potential costs of the boom.

It shined a light on the state government’s lack of transparency when it went unreported to the public for 11 days. It raised awareness that spills of all magnitudes were daily and routine. It highlighted the inadequacy of pipeline monitoring.

And it made clear that even in the worst cases the authorities are hesitant to use punitive sanctions. More than a year after the spill, neither the federal nor the state government has penalized the company responsible, Tesoro Logistics of San Antonio.

“Clearly, they have impacted the groundwater system,” Mr. Glatt said. “There will be an enforcement action. But we use a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is if you get into it and clean it quickly, the stick won’t be as severe.”

Late last September, Mr. Jensen was harvesting waist-high durum wheat when he found his combine’s tires wet with an unmistakable sheen. His wife called the operator of a nearby well, which contacted Tesoro, and both companies immediately sent out representatives.

“It was dark out at this point,” Mrs. Jensen said. “We went to drive wide around what we thought was the spill and realized that we were not at the edge of it. We were still in it.”

Mr. Jensen continued: “There was a question of, well, whose line is it? It was squirting out of the ground. But the minute Tesoro shut its valve, there was a loud sucking sound.”

In its initial report, Tesoro seriously underestimated the contamination. A week and a half later, after a “subsurface assessment” request by the state, it tripled its estimate to 20,600 barrels, or 865,200 gallons. The lost oil had soaked a large stretch — equal to about six football fields — of the windswept land where the Jensens run cattle and rotate crops like sunflowers and sunshine-yellow canola.

The spill was publicly disclosed only after local reporters learned of it, provoking an outcry from environmentalists that led to the creation of a spills website.

In Tioga, a preliminary investigation found a small hole in the pipeline that appeared to have been caused by lightning, said the federal pipeline administration, whose final investigation has yet to be completed.

That cast the incident as an act of nature, but Tesoro officials now acknowledge that the hole had gone undetected for as long as two months.

“How do you lose over 20,000 barrels of oil and not realize it?” Mr. Glatt said. “That does kind of boggle the mind a little bit.”

In a statement to The Times, Tesoro expressed “deep regret.”

“Our systems did not prevent the spill, and we find that unacceptable,” it said. “We have put additional systems and controls in place and are committed to operating a safe pipeline system.”

Before the leak sprang in July 2013, Tesoro had not conducted an internal inspection of that segment of pipeline for eight years. Federal officials had last inspected the Tesoro network in North Dakota in 2010.

Pipeline leaks are not the most common cause of spills; valve or piping connection problems are, The Times found. But they spew the greatest volume of oil and wastewater and are the most likely to cause pollution.

Unlike several other major oil-producing states, North Dakota has until now relied on federal inspectors — based in Kansas City, Mo., 950 miles from Tioga — to monitor all its oil transmission lines, interstate and intrastate.

At the time of the spill, Brian Kalk, chairman of the state Public Service Commission, felt keenly frustrated, he said: “The company was not as forthright as they should have been. Everybody in the state was asking what’s going on, and I didn’t have jurisdiction on this pipeline. I didn’t like it.”

As a result, Mr. Kalk’s commission is seeking to take over the monitoring of the crude oil transmission pipelines that travel solely within the state.

Transmission pipelines, which carry oil to market, are not the only problem, however. Until this year, no authority, federal or state, monitored what Mr. Helms estimates to be 18,000 miles of gathering pipelines, which transport oil and wastewater from wells to collection sites. In fact, the North Dakota government does not even know their precise locations.

But, with legislative permission, Mr. Helms is taking the gathering lines under his aegis and hiring the state’s first three hazardous-liquid pipeline inspectors.

In Tioga, the Jensens are inclined to look at the bright side, though 33 acres of their farmland have been cordoned off for an industrial cleanup operation expected to take at least another year. They are glad that their spill was oil, not wastewater — “There’s no cleaning up of that,” Mr. Jensen said — and hope it served as “an eye-opener.”

“The industry really wants to fight putting monitoring devices on pipelines, but it’s a no-brainer, seems like,” Mr. Jensen said. “The cost of monitoring equipment is obviously far cheaper than the cost of cleanup.”

Tesoro said the cleanup would cost more than an initial estimate of $4 million and “less than $25 million.” It hired a Canadian company, Nelson Environmental Remediation, to treat the contaminated soil by burning it on site in “thermal desorption units.”

“We’re kind of like the proctologists of the industry,” said Warren Nelson, the company’s vice president. “We deal with the problems nobody wants to talk about.”

From Wastewater Contamination, Sterilized Soil and Shriveled Crops

One August evening this year, after a barbecue dinner beneath an elaborate skull-and-antler chandelier in the Outlaw Shack at Antler Memorial Park, Mr. Helms and Mr. Glatt faced an audience of farmers disgruntled by the wastewater contamination of northwestern North Dakota.

Their corner of the state is like a cautionary tale. It is pocked with the remnants of 1980s oil production: abandoned wastewater ponds, some of which leached brine downward and outward, sterilizing the soil and shriveling crops. State officials have estimated it would cost $2 million each to reclaim what might amount to 1,000 ponds, said State Representative Marvin E. Nelson.

“Well, we have more than $2 billion in our Legacy Fund,” he said, referring to a set-aside fund containing oil tax revenues. “So why not take the legacy from this oil boom to fix the legacy from the last oil boom?”

Though the industry now disposes of oil field brine primarily by injecting it deep underground, it still needs to be transported to disposal wells and remains a stubborn pollution problem. For every barrel of oil, about 1.4 barrels of brine is produced, state officials say, and far more of it spills than does oil.

And while the industry calls it saltwater — “which makes it sound harmless, like something you would gargle with,” said Derrick Braaten, a lawyer who represents farmers — it is highly saline and can be laced with toxic metals and radioactive substances.

Three years ago, a farmer in the Antler audience experienced one of the largest oil field wastewater spills ever in North Dakota. A leaking wastewater line contaminated some 24 acres of farmland and eight surface ponds, and the site has yet to be restored to health.

After the leak was detected, cleanup crews pumped out two million gallons of severely contaminated water, with chloride levels 2,700 times higher than normal, and a generator was still pumping out contaminants this summer.

“Three years!” the farmer, Darwin Peterson, exclaimed at the meeting. “Three years, and this spill has been addressed in a Band-Aid fashion. Meanwhile, that 24 acres has expanded, with Mother Nature, to the neighbors. When is enough enough?”

State officials say the spill far exceeded the 12,600 gallons originally reported by the company, Petro Harvester, though it remains listed that way on the state’s spills website. Mr. Helms, in an email last year to his spokeswoman, Alison Ritter, estimated it at 332,000 gallons. Mr. Nelson, the legislator and agronomist, thinks it probably was three times that much.

The state has not yet penalized Petro Harvester.

Underlying the state’s regulatory posture is the premise that spills are all but inevitable and will increase alongside increases in drilling. But that is not a universally shared perspective.

“There’s this idea that spills are just the cost of doing business,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But there’s no technical justification for all these spills. And it’s not acceptable. It’s just not. It just shows how poorly the oil and gas industry is doing its job, and that nobody is making them do it right.”

To a skeptical audience in Antler, Mr. Helms proclaimed that North Dakota was “head and shoulders above our sister states” in the region for its vigilance as measured by the ratio of wells to inspectors, the frequency of inspections and the authority to fine up to $12,500 per offense a day.

He said that almost all problems found by his inspectors were corrected within 30 days of verbal warnings. Some 2,500 warnings were issued last year, Ms. Ritter said; only 4 percent resulted in a written violation and only nine complaints were filed (up from four in 2012).

In the park, Mr. Helms offered a boardroom-style PowerPoint presentation, including a graphic that he said contained the “good news” that the spill rate per well was steady or down.

His figures, however, provided to The Times later, show that the number of spills continued to grow faster than the number of wells — just not as fast as before. All told, the number of wells is up 200 percent and spills 650 percent since 2004.

The farmers in Antler said they assumed Mr. Helms’s spills data was comprehensive, but he told The Times later that he was including only spills under his jurisdiction. That omitted hundreds of incidents, including the Jensens’ spill and the 464,000 gallons of oil that gushed from a fiery train derailment near Casselton last December.

The most encouraging statistic, Mr. Helms told the farmers, was that a higher proportion of individual spills were being contained to production sites. That is true according to the numbers he uses. But, looking at the actual volume of pollutants and all reported spills, The Times found a decline, not an improvement, in spill containment — with 45 percent contained from 2011 to 2013, down from 62 percent in the previous three years.

Without engaging in any data analysis, the farmers in Antler were suspicious of the spill estimates because they were based on self-reporting by the industry. “You take the word of the operators? That’s your first mistake,” one man said, to laughter. They remarked that their own spills were often drastically underestimated on the state’s spills website.

Indeed, The Times found scores of cases on that website where the release of pollutants was not just undercounted but marked as zero. One supposedly zero-volume wastewater spill in Bottineau County last year required the removal of 600 dump-truck loads of contaminated soil.

For a North Dakotan trying to make sense of the state’s environmental and enforcement records, numbers are essentially inaccessible. The state spills site posts incidents in chronological order, without summary statistics, and it is not searchable. Oil and gas enforcement data is not made public at all, unlike in Texas, where the legislature mandates quarterly reports.

The Times built a database to analyze the state’s raw information from a variety of perspectives, including a company-by-company assessment. It found that companies in the Bakken spill at different rates. This suggests to some experts that companies could do more to prevent and minimize environmental incidents.

“Whether it’s maintaining equipment properly, monitoring equipment routinely, training individuals well, having backup equipment on site or having containment machinery — there are all kinds of things that can be done,” Professor Cohen of Vanderbilt said. “But they all require money and attention.”

Statoil, a multinational company whose largest shareholder is the Norwegian government, now ranks as the state’s fifth-biggest producer. With a professed goal of “zero incidents, zero releases,” according to Russell Rankin, its regional manager, it has reported no blowouts and has the best record in the state among the major producers in terms of how many gallons of oil it produces for each incident.

Based on volume, Statoil has produced 9,000 gallons of oil for every gallon of spillage; Continental has produced 3,500. Statoil contained some 70 percent of its spill volume to production sites. Continental contained less than half, The Times found.

In its written response, Continental disputed The Times’s “math,” but did not respond further after it was sent a spreadsheet of reported incidents that formed the basis for the findings.

Continental, which on its website calls itself “America’s oil champion,” said it has “implemented a corporate policy focused on reporting, spill reduction and, ultimately, elimination.” It emphasized that it was the largest producer in the Bakken and “managed the largest volume of liquids.” It underscored that “our diligent spill response efforts have enabled us to recover the majority of all volumes spilled.”

And, Continental said, The Times should not imply that “volumes spilled remain in the environment in perpetuity and that we and other operators have no concern for doing anything more than reporting spills as ‘an inevitable byproduct of oil production.’ ”

The Golden Egg

When the Skurupey well blew out last summer, Continental waited some 10 hours to notify the local authorities.

“They should have called us a lot sooner, but when these things happen, the oil companies pretty much take over, " said Sheriff Dave Jurgens of Billings County. “They have their own security, and they don’t let anybody on location, unless you’re with Continental or the state Industrial Commission. And I totally understand why. It’s specialized-type stuff.”

The public never knew the blowout had occurred because the well, like many new wells, had been granted confidential status by the state for competitive reasons; almost everything except its existence was off the record for six months.

Oil, water and chemicals shot 40 feet into the air from the wellhead but did not ignite. One worker was injured with a broken finger and bruises to his head and chest, the sheriff said. “They didn’t call an ambulance, just put him in a pickup and took him to the E.R.,” he said. “That was not very wise on their part.”

The oil misted over hundreds of acres, contaminating hundreds of bales of hay and alfalfa fields.

“They redid the land, washed all the tanks,” Mrs. Skurupey said. “Continental was super-nice. They left no stones unturned, as far as I was concerned. They paid us all for damages, and we signed agreements that we wouldn’t sue.”

Defending itself against the commission’s enforcement action this year, Continental argued that its own investigation revealed that “an irresponsible supervisor’s callous disregard of” its “well-established standard operating procedures” caused the Skurupey blowout.

At the Williston courthouse in September, Continental’s lawyer, Steven J. Adams of Tulsa, Okla., placed the responsibility for the previous blowout in Golden Valley County squarely on Mr. Rohr and his crew, who worked for Cyclone Drilling of Wyoming.

“It was the Cyclone crew that failed to do its job,” he told the jury.

Mr. Rohr’s lawyer, Justin L. Williams of Corpus Christi, Tex., opened by suggesting that Continental prized speed over safety: “Pedal to the metal, no brakes, lives shattered.”

During the voir dire process, many prospective jurors had revealed just how interwoven their lives were not only with the oil industry, but also with Continental. Some had worked for or done business with Continental; others owned its stock or received royalty checks from Continental wells.

Asked if they had strong feelings about the oil boom, almost all, even those who saw the positive, raised their hands to say they thought it had had negative consequences, too. A landowner referred to oil sludge buried and flares burning on her property, a nurse to injured oil workers treated at her clinic, an oil field technician to a “hurry up and wait world” that put profits first.

The next morning, a settlement was reached.

Later, in a nearby hotel, sitting with his lawyers, his wife and a former co-worker, Mr. Rohr lifted his T-shirt to reveal what he had been prepared to show the jury: his pink, waffled back, patched together through skin grafts after the rig at the Beaver Creek State 1-36H well exploded into flames on July 24, 2011.

“My memories of it are bad,” he said. “I seen a big, bright, white light, and I didn’t think I’d make it out. And then that big blast hit me. I was a big ball of flame, running out of there, my safety glasses melting around my eyes. I thought I was blind. Dying.”

Mr. Rohr, who is called A.J., stared into his coffee cup, crying.

Erick Hartse, 23, who had been his assistant driller and escaped injury in the blowout, winced. “I have a lot of guilt,” he said. “I sent A.J. down to check the inside choke that day. It was per our blowout procedures, but I was the last one to see this guy unhurt, unscathed.”

Mr. Rohr and two colleagues were airlifted to a burn center in Minneapolis. With serious burns over 60 percent of his body. Mr. Rohr spent a month hospitalized. Still in constant pain and reliant on painkillers, he has not returned to the oil fields, the only job he has ever known.

The two men and their boss, Wally Dschaak, said they thought from the start that the well, situated in a remote, serene spot about a mile from the Little Missouri River, was going to give them trouble.

“From the day we moved onto that miserable, slimy, dirty location, things had been fighting us,” Mr. Hartse said.

Mr. Dschaak said, “That well was one step away from getting out of control at all times.”

Continental, which declined to discuss the case, imported oil fire specialists from Texas to extinguish the blaze. Later, Cyclone sent Mr. Hartse to Wyoming to help build a replacement rig, he said, but did not allow him to accompany it back to North Dakota. “Continental wanted no part of anybody who was there that day,” Mr. Hartse said.

“I understood Cyclone’s position,” he added. “You can’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Deborah Sontag reported from Williston, and Robert Gebeloff from New York. Michael Wines contributed reporting from Bismarck, N.D.

Sources: North Dakota Department of Health, analysis by The New York Times, Department of Mineral Resources of North Dakota, satellite imagery from Google

Produced by Gregor Aisch, Hannah Fairfield, John Niedermeyer, Matt Ruby and Jeremy White

Correction: November 30, 2014
An article last Sunday about the environmental record and state regulation of the North Dakota oil industry erroneously attributed a distinction to an oil spill last fall on the farm of Steven and Patricia Jensen near Tioga. It is considered the largest on-land oil spill in recent American history, not the largest ever.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/23/us/north-dakota-oil-boom-downside.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar

privacy - what is it good for?

2014-11-19T09:10:00.002-05:00

Privacy? What privacy? Corporations pose at least as much threat to civil liberties as any government.

Uber executive stirs up privacy controversy

By Craig Timberg, Nancy Scola and Andrea Peterson November 18 at 9:20 PM

An Uber executive’s suggestion that the company should investigate the private lives of journalists has sparked a backlash against the popular car service, offering a potent reminder that tech companies are amassing detailed — and potentially embarrassing — records of users’ communications, Internet traffic and even physical movements.
The controversy stemmed from remarks by Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael on Friday night as he spoke of his desire to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families,” referring to journalists who write critically about the company, according to a report published Monday night by Buzzfeed. The same story said a different Uber executive once had examined the private travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter during an e-mail exchange about an article without seeking permission to access the data.
That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”
This week’s incident was the latest reminder about the potential for abuse as intimate information accumulates on the servers of tech companies that have widely varying approaches to user privacy and face few legal barriers in how they use personal data.
“We have never in history been at a point where we were more extortable,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in online privacy. “We have to think about how the service provider itself can be a threat.”
Uber officials have sought to distance themselves from Michael’s comments. Chief executive Travis Kalanick tweeted that they were “terrible,” and Michael issued an apologetic statement calling the remarks “wrong” and expressing regret.
On Tuesday, the company said in a blog post: “Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes.”
The controversy appeared to have wide resonance, especially among women, some of whom already had expressed uneasiness about Uber and its drivers knowing where customers live, work and socialize. Many critics noted that the remarks by Michael focused on the work of a female journalist, Sarah Lacy, editor of Silicon Valley-based PandoDaily, who had repeatedly reported on what she called evidence of sexism by Uber.
“I know many women who erased Uber [apps] from their phones last night. . . . They really stepped over a line,” said Katherine Losse, a former Facebook employee who wrote about that company’s early days in the 2012 book “The Boy Kings.”
Yet Losse and others said privacy issues go far beyond Uber. Days after being hired as Facebook’s 51st employee in 2005, she was given a master password that she said allowed her to see any information users typed into their Facebook pages. (Facebook has instituted more rigorous privacy controls since, it has said.)
Such incidents occasionally have burst into public view, and they are not limited to tech companies. Google in 2010 fired an engineer after he reportedly spied on several teens using company services. Walgreens has been battling a $1.4 million fine for a violation federal privacy laws after a pharmacist in Indianapolis showed private prescription records to her husband, who once had dated the patient, according to news reports.
In the public sphere, several State Department employees inappropriately viewed Barack Obama’s passport records in 2008 when he was running for president.
“In a time when our data ends up in databases, people can use it for their own prurient interests,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Time and time again, people do it.”
Soghoian said that while he was a graduate student — and before he worked for the ACLU — an official with a major technology company once threatened him while he was working to publicize a privacy problem with its service, which collected extensive personal information on users. “If you keep doing this stuff,” the official said, according to Soghoian, “they will dig up stuff on you and try to destroy you.”
Federal law provides little protection should a company decide to deploy users’ information against them. Though the Federal Trade Commission has cracked down on companies that violate their own representations about how they handle data, they have wide latitude so long as they comply with the privacy policies written by company lawyers.
In March, for example, Microsoft revealed that it had searched a user’s Hotmail e-mail account to find an alleged leaker of its corporate secrets. Microsoft initially said that its policies allowed it to “protect our customers and the security and integrity of our products,” but later, amid criticism, it said it would in future cases refer allegations to authorities instead of conducting its own searches of user accounts.
Uber, which connects riders with available drivers through smartphone apps, has quickly grown from a start-up to a company worth $18 billion and operating in 46 countries. Yet the company, like many in the tech industry, has struggled with privacy issues.
Entrepreneur and writer Peter Sims reported in a September blog post that the company displayed his location in an Uber vehicle to the crowd at a 2011 launch party for the service in Chicago. He learned of this after receiving a text from an attendee detailing his exact location.
In Uber’s “Rides of Glory” blog post from 2012, the company published maps highlighting the neighborhoods where residents most often participated in “brief overnight weekend stays.” And while the identities of individual users were “blind” — meaning not personally identifiable — the Uber official studied the gender breakdown to conclude that when a higher ratio of men use the car service, there are more such brief visits in a neighborhood.
Ron Linton, chairman of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, which has battled with Uber over a range of issues, says the company uses data to gain a competitive advantage over traditional cab drivers. “The greater part of their business plan is that they’re going to amass the greatest database of consumer habits that the world has ever seen,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/uber-executive-stirs-up-privacy-controversy/2014/11/18/d0607836-6f61-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html

All One People

2014-10-13T11:56:00.003-05:00

All One People --

Za Ondekoza - Big drums!!!!!!!

2014-10-13T11:52:00.001-05:00

These are stickers from Za Ondekoza - got the stickers at a performance in western Massachusetts during the 1980s.

You Call It Procrastination, I Say I Am Increasing My Productivity

2014-10-13T11:44:00.000-05:00

Some are know to say "It is all how you see it"..... "in the eyes of the beholder"... the cultural lenses we all look through. We are all busy and never have enough time. Or so we make ourselves believe?
A prominent man in my life often admonishes others to "Stop and smell the roses!". He says it has worked for him and he is over 90!

How to Stop Time

By ANNA DELLA SUBINSEPT. 26, 2014

IN the unlikely event that we could ever unite under the banner of a single saint, it might just be St. Expeditus. According to legend, when the Roman centurion decided to convert to Christianity, the Devil appeared in the form of a crow and circled above him crying “cras, cras” — Latin for “tomorrow, tomorrow.” Expeditus stomped on the bird and shouted victoriously, “Today!” For doing so, Expeditus achieved salvation, and is worshiped as the patron saint of procrastinators. Sometimes you see icons of him turned upside down like an hourglass in the hope that he’ll hurry up and help you get your work done so he can be set right-side up again. From job-seekers in Brazil to people who run e-commerce sites in New Orleans, Expeditus is adored not just for his expediency, but also for his power to settle financial affairs. There is even a novena to the saint on Facebook.

Expeditus was martyred in A.D. 303, but was resurrected around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the tempo of the world accelerated with breathtaking speed. Sound familiar? Today, as the pace of our lives quickens and the demands placed on us multiply, procrastination is the archdemon many of us wrestle with daily. It would seem we need Expeditus more than ever.

“Procrastination, quite frankly, is an epidemic,” declares Jeffery Combs, the author of “The Procrastination Cure,” just one in a vast industry of self-help books selling ways to crush the beast. The American Psychological Association estimates that 20 percent of American men and women are “chronic procrastinators.” Figures place the amount of money lost in the United States to procrastinating employees at trillions of dollars a year.

A recent infographic in The Economist revealed that in the 140 million hours humanity spent watching “Gangnam Style” on YouTube two billion times, we could have built at least four more (desperately needed) pyramids at Giza. Endless articles pose the question of why we procrastinate, what’s going wrong in the brain, how to overcome it, and the fascinating irrationality of it all.

But if procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault — and feel bad about them — rather than question our culture’s canonization of productivity?

I was faced with these questions at an unlikely event this past July — an academic conference on procrastination at the University of Oxford. It brought together a bright and incongruous crowd: an economist, a poetry professor, a “biographer of clutter,” a queer theorist, a connoisseur of Iraqi coffee-shop culture. There was the doctoral student who spoke on the British painter Keith Vaughan, known to procrastinate through increasingly complicated experiments in auto-erotica. There was the children’s author who tied herself to her desk with her shoelaces.

The keynote speaker, Tracey Potts, brought a tin of sugar cookies she had baked in the shape of the notorious loiterer Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher famously procrastinated on his “Arcades Project,” a colossal meditation on the cityscape of Paris where the figure of the flâneur — the procrastinator par excellence — would wander. Benjamin himself fatally dallied in escaping the city ahead of the Nazis. He took his own life, leaving the manuscript forever unfinished, more evidence, it would seem, that no avoidable delay goes unpunished.

As we entered the ninth, grueling hour of the conference, a professor laid out a taxonomy of dithering so enormous that I couldn’t help but wonder: Whatever you’re doing, aren’t you by nature procrastinating from doing something else? Seen in this light, procrastination begins to look a lot like just plain existing. But then along come its foot soldiers — guilt, self-loathing, blame.

Dr. Potts explained how procrastination entered the field as pathological behavior in the mid-20th century. Drawing on the work of the British-born historian Christopher Lane, Dr. Potts directed our attention to a United States War Department bulletin issued in 1945 that chastised soldiers who were avoiding their military duties “by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency and passive obstructionism.” In 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association assembled the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the bible of mental health used to determine illness to this day — it copied the passage from the cranky military memo verbatim.

And so, procrastination became enshrined as a symptom of mental illness. By the mid-60s, passive-aggressive personality disorder had become a fairly common diagnosis and “procrastination” remained listed as a symptom in several subsequent editions. “Dawdling” was added to the list, after years of delay.

While passive-aggressive personality disorder has been erased from the official portion of the manual, the stigma of slothfulness remains. Many of us, it seems, are still trying to enforce a military-style precision on our intellectual, creative, civilian lives — and often failing. Even at the conference, participants proposed strategies for beating procrastination that were chillingly martial. The economist suggested that we all “take hostages” — place something valuable at stake as a way of negotiating with our own belligerent minds. The children’s author writes large checks out to political parties she loathes, and entrusts them to a relative to mail if she misses a deadline.

All of which leads me to wonder: Are we imposing standards on ourselves that make us mad?

Though Expeditus’s pesky crow may be ageless, procrastination as epidemic — and the constant guilt that goes with it — is peculiar to the modern era. The 21st-century capitalist world, in its never-ending drive for expansion, consecrates an always-on productivity for the sake of the greater fiscal health.

In an 1853 short story Herman Melville gave us Bartleby, the obstinate scrivener and apex procrastinator, who confounds the requests of his boss with his hallowed mantra, “I would prefer not to.” A perfect employee on the surface — he never leaves the office and sleeps at his desk — Bartleby represents a total rebellion against the expectations placed on him by society. Politely refusing to accept money or to remove himself from his office even after he is fired, the copyist went on to have an unexpected afterlife — as hero for the Occupy movement in 2012. “Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street,” Jonathan D. Greenberg noted in The Atlantic. Confronted with Bartleby’s serenity and his utter noncompliance with the status quo, his perplexed boss is left wondering whether he himself is the one who is mad.

A month before the procrastination conference, I set myself the task of reading “Oblomov,” the 19th-century Russian novel by Ivan Goncharov about the ultimate slouch, who, over the course of 500 pages, barely moves from his bed, and then only to shift to the sofa. At least that’s what I heard: I failed to make it through more than two pages at a sitting without putting the novel down and allowing myself to drift off. I would carry the heavy book everywhere with me — it was like an anchor into a deep, blissful sea of sleep.

Oblomov could conduct the few tasks he cared to from under his quilt — writing letters, accepting visitors — but what if he’d had an iPhone and a laptop? Being in bed is now no excuse for dawdling, and no escape from the guilt that accompanies it. The voice — societal or psychological — urging us away from sloth to the pure, virtuous heights of productivity has become a sort of birdlike shriek as more individuals work from home and set their own schedules, and as the devices we use for work become alluring sirens to our own distraction. We are now able to accomplish tasks at nearly every moment, even if we prefer not to.

Still, humans will never stop procrastinating, and it might do us good to remember that the guilt and shame of the do-it-tomorrow cycle are not necessarily inescapable. The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about mental illness that it acquires its reality as an illness “only within a culture that recognizes it as such.” Why not view procrastination not as a defect, an illness or a sin, but as an act of resistance against the strictures of time and productivity imposed by higher powers? To start, we might replace Expeditus with a new saint.

At the conference, I was invited to speak about the Egyptian-born novelist Albert Cossery, a true icon of the right to remain lazy. In the mid-1940s, Cossery wrote a novel in French, “Laziness in the Fertile Valley,” about a family in the Nile Delta that sleeps all day. Their somnolence is a form of protest against a world forever ruled by tyrants winding the clock. Born in 1913 in Cairo, Cossery grew up in a place that still retained cultural memories of the introduction of Western notions of time, a once foreign concept. It had arrived along with British military forces in the late 19th century. To turn Egypt into a lucrative colony, it needed to run on a synchronized, efficient schedule. The British replaced the Islamic lunar calendar with the Gregorian, preached the values of punctuality, and spread the gospel that time equaled money.

Firm in his belief that time is not as natural or apolitical as we might think, Cossery, in his writings and in his life, strove to reject the very system in which procrastination could have any meaning at all. Until his death in 2008, the elegant novelist, living in Paris, maintained a strict schedule of idleness. He slept late, rising in the afternoons for a walk to the Café de Flore, and wrote fiction only when he felt like it. “So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it,” Cossery would say. He was the archetypal flâneur, in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, whose verses Cossery would steal for his own poetry when he was a teenager. Rather than charge through the day, storming the gates of tomorrow, his stylized repose was a perch from which to observe, reflect and question whether the world really needs all those things we feel we ought to get done — like a few more pyramids at Giza. And it was idleness that led Cossery to true creativity, dare I say it, in his masterfully unprolific work.

After my talk, someone came up to ask me what I thought was the ideal length of a nap. Saint Cossery was smiling. Already one small battle had been won.

Anna Della Subin is a writer and contributing editor at Bidoun, a Middle East arts and culture magazine.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 28, 2014, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Stop Time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/how-to-stop-time.html?_r=0

Less Government - Who Is Watching What You Eat?

2014-08-18T18:50:00.002-05:00

Less government......... corporations are watching what I eat much more than the government.

Food additives on the rise as FDA scrutiny wanes

By Kimberly Kindy August 17, 2014 at 10:08 PM

The explosion of new food additives coupled with an easing of oversight requirements is allowing manufacturers to avoid the scrutiny of the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the safety of chemicals streaming into the food supply.
And in hundreds of cases, the FDA doesn’t even know of the existence of new additives, which can include chemical preservatives, flavorings and thickening agents, records and interviews show.
“We simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals,” said Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food.
The FDA has received thousands of consumer complaints about additives in recent years, saying certain substances seem to trigger asthmatic attacks, serious bouts of vomiting, intestinal-tract disorders and other health problems.
At a pace far faster than in previous years, companies are adding secret ingredients to everything from energy drinks to granola bars. But the more widespread concern among food-safety advocates and some federal regulators is the quickening trend of companies opting for an expedited certification process to a degree never intended when it was established 17 years ago to, in part, help businesses.
A voluntary certification system has nearly replaced one that relied on a more formal, time-consuming review — where the FDA, rather than companies, made the final determination on what is safe. The result is that consumers have little way of being certain that the food products they buy won’t harm them.
“We aren’t saying we have a public health crisis,” Taylor said. “But we do have questions about whether we can do what people expect of us.”
In the five decades since Congress gave the FDA responsibility for ensuring the safety of additives in the food supply, the number has spiked from 800 to more than 9,000, ranging from common substances such as salt to new green-tea extracts. This increase has been driven largely by demand from busy Americans, who get more than half their daily meals from processed foods, according to government and industry records.
Within the past six months, top officials at the FDA and in the food industry have acknowledged that new steps must be taken to better account for the additives proliferating in the food supply. The Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group, has responded more aggressively; it sued the FDA this year, saying the agency has abdicated its oversight of the additives approval process. The Grocery Manufacturers Association also provided seed money this spring to create a research center at Michigan State University to deal with the rising concerns over additives.
For new, novel ingredients — or when approved additives are used in new ways — the law says companies should seek formal FDA approval, which must be based on rigorous research proving the additive is safe. The agency uses the phrase “food additive,” in a narrow legal sense, to apply to substances that get this approval.
But many other additives are common food ingredients — vinegar is considered a classic example. The law allows manufacturers to certify, based on research, that such ingredients are already Generally Recognized as Safe, or GRAS.
For both types of additives, FDA scientists initially conducted detailed reviews of the company’s research. The agency also published its own evaluation of that research in the Federal Register.
This oversight system shifted dramatically in 1997. In response to a shortage of staff members and complaints from industry that the process was too cumbersome and did not improve food safety, the FDA proposed new rules. The agency told companies that were going the GRAS route — which turned a years-long process into one of months — that they no longer would have to submit their research and raw data. The companies can share just a summary of their findings with the agency.
In part, FDA officials hoped that by streamlining the GRAS notification process, companies that previously avoided informing the agency of new additives would be encouraged to keep the government in the loop, current and former agency officials said.
The changes didn’t work out as planned.
For starters, most additives continued to debut without the FDA being notified.
Moreover, companies that did choose to go through the FDA oversight process largely abandoned the formal approval route, opting instead for the new, cursory GRAS process, even for additives that could be considered new and novel, according to agency documents and an analysis of those records by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“They created a side door,” said Tom Neltner, a chemical engineer with the NRDC who has co-authored six academic articles about the FDA additives process over the past four years.
An average of only two additive petitions seeking formal approval are filed annually by food and chemical companies, while the agency receives dozens of GRAS notifications, according to an NRDC analysis of FDA data. Hundreds of other food chemicals and ingredients have been introduced without notifying the FDA at all, according to agency officials, trade journals and food safety groups.
FDA officials, food safety advocates and the food industry all agree there are problems. There are too many cases in which the agency is not notified of new additives or the science remains secret. But there’s no consensus about how to fix the system.
Industry trade groups say that the additives in today’s foods do not pose a public safety risk, but most agree improvements for better tracking and oversight are needed.
“It’s the right time to take a step back,” said Leon Bruner, the Grocery Manufacturers Association’s chief science officer. “There are problems with transparency. How can we be sure that the FDA is aware of ingredients?”

Safety claims not evaluated

When the manufacturer of a vegetarian line of foods called Quorn first approached the FDA in 1986, the company asked that the agency give formal additive approval for a protein-rich fungus the company makes in large fermentation vats.
Marlow Foods dubbed its new fungal ingredient “mycoprotein.”
Fifteen years passed without the FDA moving on the petition. Internal FDA documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show no sign of the agency evaluating the safety claims made in the petition. Because the FDA declined interview requests about Quorn products, it is unclear why the petition sat for so long.
After the long delay and without withdrawing the original petition, Marlow filed a GRAS notification with the FDA in 2001, saying the firm had hired a group of experts who had determined that mycoprotein was safe. Under the rules, the notification did not — nor did it have to — cite every study the company had conducted.
A study that was not mentioned was an unpublished “large scale volunteer trial” from the late 1970s. During the trial, nearly 5 percent of the 200 participants reported feeling ill after eating several “test meals,” according to the study, which was obtained by The Washington Post. Four had “more severe reactions,” including two who started to “vomit violently,” another who became “violently sick” and another who “experienced nausea and vomiting” after eating Quorn products that contain mycoprotein. The study says that the “reactions” could have been caused by a response to mycoprotein.
In a prepared statement, Quorn said the study had been shared with the FDA but was not cited in the GRAS submission because “it was a small study and at that time nearly 25 years old and more recent data was relevant and important to the submission.” The statement also said “many research studies” had been undertaken, and all were shared with the FDA and other regulators.
Once Marlow filed its GRAS notification, the FDA acted quickly. Within six weeks, the FDA signed off on it, using its standard language, noting it was not vouching for the safety of mycoprotein and that it was the “continuing responsibility of Marlow to ensure that food ingredients that the firm markets are safe.”
Within months, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) began alerting the FDA to complaints from consumers in the United States and Britain, where the products have been sold since 1985.
“They said they broke out in hives and had breathing difficulties — anaphylactic reactions,” said Michael Jacobson, the group’s executive director. “The GI episodes they described were violent. They would vomit so hard it could break the blood vessels in their eyes.”
Independent researchers also published three papers in academic journals, between 2003 and 2009, describing severe and even life-threatening allergic reactions to mycoprotein.
The FDA ultimately contacted hundreds of people that the advocacy center sent their way. In 2012, the agency wrote to the group agreeing that “individuals may experience adverse reactions” to Quorn products and that a “food allergy cannot be ruled out.” However, FDA officials said they believed “most of these reactions are due to non-life threatening food intolerance.”
The FDA said it would not challenge Marlow’s GRAS findings.
The CSPI said the FDA treated the concerns as an inconvenience more than a safety concern. It said the agency, at a minimum, should have issued a public warning to people who could be allergic or intolerant, or mandate warning labels. FDA officials strongly disagreed with this characterization, documents show.
In a statement to The Post, Marlow Foods said the fungal-based ingredient in its products is a “natural protein” that is “harvested and fermented in a similar way to beer, yeast or yogurt,” adding that claims that Quorn is unsafe “have been proven inaccurate and lack scientific credibility.” However, the company acknowledges on its Web site that some consumers may have a “true allergic reaction” to its products.

Bypassing the FDA

Companies often bypass the FDA altogether. Under the rules, companies may make their own GRAS determination. Sharing it with the agency and getting it to sign off is voluntary.
In 2007, Japan-based Kao Corp. tried to get the FDA to sign off on its GRAS determination for its extract containing the chemical Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG). The company planned to promote its qualities as an antioxidant and possible fat-burner in a line of diet and sports drinks, according to FDA e-mails obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council through a Freedom of Information Act request.
But the FDA toxicologists first asked Kao to address the findings of more than a dozen scientific studies, including one that showed it could induce “toxicity in the liver, kidneys and intestine.” Another showed it could produce “defects in the brain and heart.” And still another said it may “contribute to infant leukemia,” the FDA e-mails show.
FDA told Kao Corp. to go back to the drawing board. Instead, in 2008, it withdrew its notification. Kao spokeswoman Billie Cole said the company believes its products, which are marketed in Japan, are healthy and safe.
Three years later, another company, Iowa-based Kemin, took out advertisements in trade publications, announcing its green-tea powder containing EGCG was Generally Recognized as Safe. Kemin did not share its GRAS findings with the agency.
The company began marketing the substance to the food and beverage industry for use in “cereal, nutrition and energy bars, soft drinks, sports and isotonic drinks, energy beverages, fruit and vegetable juices, meal replacement and soft candies.”
In a prepared statement, Anita Norian, president of Kemin’s human nutrition and health division, said the product is safe and that the company chose “not to participate in the FDA’s voluntary GRAS determination notification process.” Norian said to do so would potentially undermine the company’s work, allowing other firms to discover “proprietary” information about its product.
This is the opposite of what the overight law intended, the FDA’s Taylor said. Although informing the FDA is voluntary, he said, the law was meant to increase public scrutiny of additive safety by encouraging companies to publish their science in academic journals.
“The assessments need to be based on publicly available information where there is agreement among scientists,” he said. “It has got to be more than three employees in a room looking at information that is only available to them.”

Proliferation taking a toll?

Even when the FDA approves a new additive or signs off on a company’s GRAS determination, a safe ingredient can turn dangerous if its use becomes more widespread than the agency envisioned. And under the rules, the agency has little way of monitoring this threat after the initial introduction of the additive, called “post-market.”
“We do not know the volume of particular chemicals that are going into the food supply so we can diagnose trends,” Taylor said. “We do not know what is going on post-market.”
During the initial review, the FDA sets limits for how much of a chemical or ingredient can be used in a particular product. But the cumulative consumption can soar as the additive is used in more and more types of food and beverages.
This is what happened with caffeine. In 1959, the FDA approved it as GRAS, allowing soft drink manufacturers to add it to their products. But now food manufacturers are loading caffeine into energy drinks, maple syrup, jelly beans and marshmallows.
And what happened with caffeine is now taking place with lesser-known additives.
Carrageenan, extracted from red seaweed, was one of the first substances that the agency recognized as GRAS. The additive is a stabilizer that can help preserve the structure of foods and beverages and is used in products such as evaporated milk.
But as processed foods began to take off, and a demand for low-fat and tasty vegan processed foods became more popular, so did the use of carrageenan. A drop of it in a package of reduced-fat deli meat, a bundle of vegan cheese, a bottle of kefir or a carton of almond milk can keep ingredients blended together and give products a pleasant texture.
Companies sought and secured the FDA’s approval for its use as a food additive for a wider variety of functions — including as a thickener and an emulsifier, which keeps ingredients bound together. That approval further restricted the type of red seaweed that could be used as the source.
Scientists working for the carrageenan industry say the additive is safe.
“When it’s bound to food protein, it cannot interact with the cells; it can’t interact with the intestinal wall,” said James McKim, president of the toxicological research firm CeeTox, who was recently hired as a consultant to the carrageenan trade group, Marinalg. “It runs right through the animals.”
But doctors say the proliferation of carrageenan in the food supply is taking a mounting toll on health. As its uses have multiplied, so have gastrointestinal disorders such as diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease, according to some doctors who specialize in treating patients with gastrointestinal tract problems.
Joanne Tobacman, a University of Chicago physician and professor, asked the FDA in 2008 to examine the additive’s safety, submitting five of her own studies concluding that carrageenan can cause inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes. The studies were financed with grants from the federal government.
The FDA denied her petition, citing several other industry-funded studies that contradicted her findings.
Melvyn Grovit, a clinical nutritionist who treats children with Crohn’s disease, said he started advising his clients to remove carregeenan from their diets with great success after reading Tobacman’s research.
“I’ve given up on the FDA protecting the public; they are protecting businesses,” said Grovit, who also has Crohn’s disease. “The only reason for its presence in so many food products today is that it’s cheap and it makes food processing easy.”

Kimberly Kindy is a government accountability reporter at The Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/food-additives-on-the-rise-as-fda-scrutiny-wanes/2014/08/17/828e9bf8-1cb2-11e4-ab7b-696c295ddfd1_story.html?tid=trending_strip_6

Baseball In A Football Town - Mamie Johnson Takes On City Hall

2014-08-18T12:02:00.001-05:00

Baseball in the city...............

Negro Leagues' Female Star Takes On D.C. Government

Mamie Johnson has played with superstars and met presidents. Now all she wants is a little dirt.

By Alex Brown and Reena Flores

May 8, 2014

Mamie Johnson is not happy.

The Negro Leagues legend is sitting on a field named in her honor, blocks from the Northeast D.C. house where she grew up and still lives.

But Johnson—who talks about baseball the same way Billy Graham talks about Jesus—is sitting not on a baseball diamond, but on an artificial-turf field for football and soccer.

"Right now, I would be forming teams to play ball," says the 78-year-old, speaking of her yearly spring itch to teach kids the game she loves. But without a diamond, that ambition is on hold.

"I'm so pumped up about this dedication that I'm going to have," Johnson said, describing her reaction when she learned that the field would be named after her last April. "Then when I see what they did to it—and put my name on it. You give me a football field and a soccer field, and I'm a baseball player? I am so hurt, and I've never been so disappointed."

She's equally disappointed in the reaction from the powers that be. "When I said something to the mayor [Vincent Gray] about it, you know what he said? 'It's a football field.' But I'm a ballplayer. I'm a baseball player. (Read here for Johnson's thoughts on Bryce Harper, the designated hitter, and President Obama's throwing arm.)

But why is Johnson so intent on getting a diamond for neighborhood kids to play on? And how did she get a field named after her in the first place?

The answer starts some 61 years ago, when a 17-year-old Johnson was pitching in a local game—on that same plot on the corner of 17th and F Streets N.E. But in Johnson's day, a pair of baseball diamonds sat where the football field now lies.

The teenage Johnson was pitching when a scout for the Indianapolis Clowns—a Negro League club that had just lost star Hank Aaron to the recently integrated Major Leagues—saw her and offered her a spot in their lineup. Would she like to play for the Clowns? "Hell, yeah!" Johnson responded.

The next day, she was on a bus for spring training.

For a 5-foot-3 African-American woman in the 1950s, playing professional baseball was regarded as something on the far side of implausible. In fact, Johnson is the only woman to reach that level as a pitcher (the Clowns also had two female position players).

But was her signing just a publicity stunt? Well, a few batters may have thought that. But once Johnson started racking up wins, she quickly gained respect.

Over a three-year career, Johnson compiled a record of 33-8 and hit for a .257 average. "I felt like somewhere down the line I was gonna play pro ball somewhere," she said. "I became someone that no other woman has ever been, and that has been to pitch Major League Baseball with the fellas. Nobody else has done this. So that puts me in a category all of my own, and it makes me very proud."

Even her nickname, "Peanut," speaks to her defying-the-odds mentality. A rival batter, she says, asked how she expected to strike him out, given that she was "no bigger than a peanut." After strike three hit the catcher's mitt, Johnson laughed. "Well, the peanut's pretty good," she said.

Her best pitch? "All of them. Anything. Really. I had 'em all. All except the knuckleball—my hand was too little.… I had a fastball with a wrinkle."

Her best recollection? Making the All-Star team, then pitching three innings in a winning All-Star Game effort. "Just knowing that I was good enough to be there with some of the greatest ballplayers that you could ever think of. A whole lot of people don't realize it, but in the Negro Leagues, we had some of the best ballplayers that ever picked up a bat."

Johnson is all smiles when she talks about her career, her 30 years as a nurse in D.C., and her role in preserving the legacy of the Negro Leagues. And she doesn't shy away from a little name-dropping: legends Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Buck O'Neil.

"I know them very well.… I sit back now sometimes, and I think about, 'Wow, look at who you are. Look where you've been. Look at the people you've met.' The presidents. Eating at the White House. These are the things that baseball has done for me."

But her mood darkens when she talks about baseball in the District today.

As she's watched the sport lose popularity in her neighborhood, that decline has been reflected in the major leagues as well. Where African-Americans once made up 27 percent of all MLB players, this season that number stands at 8 percent—and falling. "We're working in a population where baseball hasn't been a popular sport for some time," said Tal Alter, who directs the Washington Nationals' new youth facility in Southeast D.C.

But while the Nationals have poured millions into the Southeast fields, Johnson wishes D.C. would show that kind of commitment to baseball in the rest of the city. It's not just important for kids to have the same opportunities she had, but for the city's history with baseball to be preserved.

She cited baseball's role in moving the country forward on civil rights—overcoming long-standing prejudices, as black players showed they could compete. "Baseball moved a whole lot of things, believe me," she said. "Baseball moved segregation a great deal. We've come a long ways, baby, but we've got a long ways to go."

To her, the field at 17th and F—where her story began—is a big part of that legacy. "I have a field that I came from," she said.

Johnson says she'll still find a way to coach local youth teams this summer, as she has for decades. But she wishes she could do so in the neighborhood where she's lived for nearly 70 years. "I could find the kids to come out here," she said. "If I had a place for them to come, I'd have kids on this field."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/negro-leagues-female-star-takes-on-d-c-government-20140508

Nelson Mandela Memorial Service, Washington, DC, December 11, 2013

2014-08-17T10:30:00.000-05:00

Invitation to memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Washington, DC, USA, December 11, 2013 -

Love Your Enemies

2014-08-17T08:30:00.001-05:00

Another bumper sticker -