December 18, 2013

There will be no blog until December 31 due to the Christmas holidays. I expect to return then. I wish you all a great holiday season!

Tuesday, December 17, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day

'Small world of murder': As homicides drop, Chicago police focus on social networks of gangs
By Tony Dokoupil, Senior Staff Writer, NBC News

CHICAGO — It was an overcast noon, and 12 miles from the city’s sparkling core, Police Commander David McNaughton was ready for murder. His district on the southwest side responded to 39 killings last year, among the highest body counts in the city, which itself recorded 506 murders, the most in the nation. But instead of another bloody year, McNaughton has had to contend with a new surprise: peace and quiet.
“When people say stop and frisk is bad, well, no it’s not,” said the white-haired commander, handpicked to police the rancid, tumble-down stretches around Midway Airport. “We’re going to save their lives by talking to them.”

With days left in 2013, McNaughton would seem to be right: Murders are down this year by almost half in his district and about 20 percent citywide, according to department data. It’s the equivalent of more than 80 lives “saved,” as the commander puts it, and the lowest Chicago murder toll in a half century. But these happy new trend lines come with nettling questions about how they were accomplished, and grave doubts about whether the good times can continue in 2014.

During the course of two days this month, NBC News toured the new Chicago way and the science behind it, encountering an almost buoyant Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, the top cop in America’s reigning “murder capital.” He smiled as he raised the blinds in his fifth floor office on South Michigan Avenue. “I’ve never stood by these windows before,” he said, waiting a beat before explaining why. “It’s too dangerous.”

He was joking, of course. But it’s easy to understand McCarthy’s light-minded mood once you understand the almost-magical promise of his approach.

Policing ‘hot people,’ not ‘hot spots’
The switch was thrown quietly in May 2012, hidden inside a 16-page directive, “Gang Violence Reduction Strategy,” and largely ignored amid a 60 percent rise in murders in the first quarter alone. With less than a year on the job, McCarthy had already disbanded two special task forces, roving teams that muscled neighborhoods into submission. Now he was betting on what he calls “the next phase of community policing in this world”: an emphasis not on the traditional “hot spots” for crime, but on the “hot people” who commit most criminal acts.

Rather than merely responding to crimes or swarming bad neighborhoods, the Chicago Police Department committed to using the new science of social network analysis — the same tools that allow Silicon Valley to predict who you know and what you might like to buy — to detail the city’s “small world of murder,” as one researcher put it, and use that knowledge to stop the next bullet before it's fired.

This is a profound, first-of-its-kind shift in strategy, albeit reliant on old-school intelligence and similar methods for gathering and acting on it. About 80 percent of the shootings in Chicago are gang related, according to police, so the city organized a closed-door, maps-out, all-hands “gang audit.” That identified about 60 active gangs, 600 factions, and the linguini of social and geographic lines that tie and divide them.

But the audit is perpetually refreshed, augmented by new intelligence from each district and flowed back into a master system, which spits out gang bulletins in close to real time. Now when there’s a shooting, police don’t just converge on the crime scene — they get reports that predict the next scene, the next victim, and even the next likely shooter, allowing them to converge on those locations as well.
“We got a pre-crime unit now,” McCarthy told NBC, making a favorite joke of the moment. It’s a nod to the sci-fi of Philip K. Dick, whose agents in “Minority Report” eliminated criminals before they broke bad. As a description of Chicago’s police work in 2013, however, “pre-crime” reduction is less a joke than a reality decades in the making, and now seemingly here.

If the progress continues, it could mean an end to the city’s legacy of gang warfare, and a preview of the future of police work nationwide.
Officer Chris Kaloudis greets an incoming inmate at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Kaloudis is an intelligence officer here, the largest jail in America and a destination for gang members arrested in Chicago--most of whom are frisked for actionable info by Chris or one of his colleagues. "I get to know them," said the smiling, 15-year veteran of the County Sheriff's office, and what he learns helps Chicago Police to know the streets.

Civil liberties advocates raise concern
But civil libertarians and neighborhood activists are already alarmed. While McCarthy arrived to trumpet blasts about rebuilding community relations, he risks the opposite happening, and for a simple reason: His social network approach is data heavy and dependent on knowing the streets — which means questioning a lot of people, regardless of guilt or innocence.  

“Chicago is the new New York when it comes to stop-and-frisk,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois.

He’s the architect of an intensifying ACLU inquiry into the police department’s use of “contact cards,” detailed forms that document police engagement, including names, ages and associates, all of which adds to the department’s reservoir of actionable information.

While contact cards pre-date McCarthy, who for years was in charge of police strategy in New York City, they have nearly doubled since Mayor Rahm Emmanuel appointed him superintendent in mid-2011. This year, according to an analysis by the Chicago Tribune, McCarthy’s cops are on pace to engage 650,000 residents. The city doesn't track how many of their interactions are voluntary or what portion resulted in frisks.
But if the ratios match McCarthy's alma mater, Chicago will stop about 100,000 more people than New York City did in an average year in the last decade. “We’re alarmed,” said Grossman, who suspects many of these stops failed to meet standards for “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing.  

Adam Collins, a spokesperson for the police department, says the contact cards reflect an increase in "positive" interactions with the community. But McCarthy says that frisks are part of police work. “Everything will improve if we just get out of the cars and put our hands on people,” he boomed at a meeting with a deputy chief last January, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“It’s not a practice that’s randomized and you just walk up to people and start stopping them,” he explained to NBC. “None of this is by accident.”

Stopping a war before it starts
Down the road from McCarthy, in the 8th District, along a stretch of barred and barricaded corner stores, the even more cheerful and unapologetic Commander McNaughton invited a visitor around to his side of the desk to show-off what Chicago’s network-based police work looks like in action. Since he hasn’t had gang murders in his area for months, he called up on his computer an incident from late May, a drive-by shooting that wounded a teenager on the 2700 block of West 64th Street.

Even before the kid was in an ambulance, McNaughton got a flash message from a first responder, a dispatch telling the force that the victim had ties to two gang factions, the Sixth Ward and Lex City. He clicked on the document, his screen blinked, and up popped a report with pictures of four young black faces — “Rockwell Boys/Hit Squad” emblazoned above them.

Without a lick of physical evidence, these four kids, aged 15 to 17, were suspects in the shooting, their pixellated images on every terminal. They were profiled as potential murderers — in other words, known gang members, according to the bulletin, with a reported beef with the victim and a history of settling scores with triggers and clips.

But they were also potential victims. Below their head shots and names the report listed their hangout and noted ominously that “retaliation can be expected” there.
McNaughton dispatched police to this next potential scene. Then he called up another longer intelligence report, showing eight more young black faces, “Sixth Ward/Lex City” emblazoned above them. These kids were profiled as the next potential shooters, a murder squad in waiting, all of them friends and associates of the victim, all of them with known whereabouts. McNaughton dispatched more of his troops to find these kids, and stop a war in the making.

“It’s a cycle that just keeps feeding itself,” he explained, radiating the same optimism as his boss, a glow more often found onstage at TED talks. “We’re not waiting to see a pattern. We’re catching the first one, and taking immediate steps.”

Less than two weeks later, those steps led to the arrest of one of the Rockwell Boys for the shooting. It wasn’t a kid from the original four, but an associate police found through the same network. At the same time, in the days the case was open, McNaughton’s cops were all over the predicted scenes. They made a dozen more arrests than in the same period the year before, catching one of the Rockwell Boys with a gun a block from where they expected the next spree — a shootout that McNaughton says never did happen.

The social world of Chicago gangs
Such predictive work is possible thanks to the research of Chicago-born sociologist Andrew Papachristos, the son of a diner owner from a gang-plagued community on the North Side. Papachristos resolved to go into law enforcement. But he balked at the way police tried to anticipate crime with near-ubiquitous “risk factors” — generic qualities like poverty that turned millions of black or brown people into targets while doing little for public safety. He thought he could do better.

Papachristos, 37, now a professor at Yale, is a pioneer in the application of social network science to shooting patterns. His first peer-reviewed papers on the issue were published only in the last year, but back in 2011, he got the chance to brief McCarthy on the promise of his findings.

Using arrest records, he mapped the social world of Chicago gangs and demonstrated death’s narrow path through this community. People within two handshakes of a murder victim, for example, were 100 times more likely to be involved in a future murder than a stranger.

Most dramatic of all, he showed that people inside this closed circle of violence were about as likely to pull the trigger as they were to take the bullet. They weren’t predators or prey, in other words: They played both roles at once. If police could intervene, he thought, they could save not just one life but also a series of lives.

McCarthy has run with this insight. Oakland and Boston, among other cities, have incorporated social network science into a program called “Operation Ceasefire,” which reaches out to gang members and targets them for social services. Only Chicago, however, has made “two degrees of association,” as the department calls it, the backbone of a comprehensive policing strategy — and a strategy that has in some ways only just begun.

Last year, instead of policing an estimated 100,000 gang members citywide, McCarthy’s department used social mapping to scrutinize the 14,000 or so most likely to fire a bullet or take one. This year McCarthy and his department have refined their focus even more, generating a “heat list” of ranked individuals in every district. The higher the ranking, the greater the risk of the person dying or killing — a risk at least 500 times that of a person not on the list.  

'We will stop you if you make us'
The next step, now underway in two pilot districts, is a “custom notification”: a friendly visit from an officer, bearing a gun, badge and bulletproof vest but also a message of warning, worry, and the potential for reform. The general message, McCarthy says, is “we will help you if you let us, but we will stop you if you make us.”

So far none of the young men visited have accepted city help, he says, but at the same time none committed a violent crime — and, unfortunately, at least one helped proved the apparent precision of the heat list. He was killed in August, shot after leaving a party in an area known as “Terror Town.”  

That kind of accuracy, and the potential for better outcomes, has the superintendent feeling hopeful as he heads into 2014, a crossroads year for the emerging guru of national law enforcement. Another four quarters of downward-trending violence would help prove that the last five were more than a statistical fluke, as some criminologists claim.

But McCarthy’s toughest critics are still in the community, where the drop in murders may fail to translate into feelings of greater safety. None of the more than half dozen people NBC spoke with on 63rd Avenue between murder-plagued Englewood and Chicago Lawn knew of the drop in crime and when told, most spluttered at the idea — along with the future-shock strangeness of McCarthy’s techniques.

Still, as the sun set in Chicago, Superintendent McCarthy remained upbeat about his influence, drawing visitors to a long cabinet crowded with pictures and mementos. Most were from his days in New York. But one item stood out from his time in Chicago, a profile of him in the Tribune, his first big interview after he took the job, pledging to “change the way we do police work in this country.” Whether crime goes up or down, that’s one promise he’s already made good on.


Eighty percent of murders in Chicago are gang-related. Social mapping has led the police to the 14,000 gang members who are most likely to be involved in a murder. Without computers using social network analysis, the police could hardly have produced a gang audit like the one used here. This is better than “profiling” by poverty, this article points out, as it identifies the path of actual crime through the city.

The police are identifying those most likely to murder or be murdered and talking to them to try to lead them to getting help. “So far none of the young men visited have accepted city help, he says, but at the same time none committed a violent crime.” According to this article, murders are down by almost half in the district where this policy has been in effect.

This looks like intelligent policing to me. The fact that the gangs are so overwhelming in Chicago is the reason the social network works so well, but in many cities there are such gang numbers. As long as innocent people are not arrested, this addition of people to the data banks is not, I don't think, harmful, and it seems to be effective as a predictor of crime.





After latest shooting, murder manual author calls for book to be taken 'immediately' out of print – NBC
By Tony Dokoupil, Senior Staff Writer


It was an accessory in the arsenal of Karl Pierson, the student who opened fire last week inside a Colorado high school, leaving one girl in a coma before taking his own life.

“The Anarchist Cookbook,” which Pierson read in the days before his rampage, isn’t a guide to culinary revolution. It’s the original how-to of homicide and mass murder — and sales are still raging, with distribution from the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, even as the work is linked to terrorist acts around the world.
Now, in rare interviews with NBC News, the publisher and the author of the "Cookbook" are trading blows about the book’s future.

“'The Anarchist Cookbook' should go quietly and immediately out of print,” says William Powell, who wrote the book as a stern 19-year-old, an opponent of the Vietnam War who felt violence was justified if it could prevent even greater violence in the process. He has since renounced that position, but never so forcefully, telling NBC in an email that “it is no longer responsible or defensible to keep it in print.”
Published in 1971, the book has sold more than two million copies and influenced hundreds of malcontents, mischief makers, and killers. Police have linked it to the Croatian radicals who bombed Grand Central Terminal and hijacked a TWA flight in 1976; the Puerto Rican separatists who bombed FBI headquarters in 1981; Thomas Spinks, who led a group that bombed 10 abortion clinics in the 1980s; Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995; the Columbine High School shooters of 1999; and the 2005 London public transport bombers.

Just in the last two years, law enforcement has tied the volume to Arizona shooter Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, and at least a half dozen alleged terrorists and school shooters.

Powell, meanwhile, has apologized for the destructive cultural force that bears his name, and posted an eight-paragraph warning to would-be buyers on the book’s Amazon page. But Powell has no say: the rights belong to the publisher and always have — and the publisher has never wavered in his commitment to selling.

“You know, we don’t ban books in America,” says Billy Blann, who bought the rights to the "Cookbook" in 2002, just as digital sales took off. Blann is the founder of Delta Press, “the world’s most outrageous catalog,” as he calls it, and the purveyor of guides on “Justifiable Homicide,” “The Poor Man’s Nuclear Bomb,” and “The Butane Lighter Hand Grenade.”

Of hundreds of titles offering frank tips on bombs, bullets and blades, however, "The Anarchist Cookbook" remains his most-asked-for volume, he says, contributing largely to his $3 million in annual revenue and supporting a semi-retired life in a 6,000 square foot home in southern Arkansas.

“I’m sure I got my money back,” he says of the deal.
Web searches for the "Cookbook" have grown “more than 5,000 percent” in the last decade, according to an estimate by Google Trends. At the same time sales of the book have surged past the Penguin and Signet editions of Moby Dick, according to Amazon rankings, and Blann has no plans to pull back now.

When told of this latest school shooting, he goes silent a moment on the phone. “I feel bad about that,” he says at last. “But there’s victims of almost anything and everything, and I just don’t think we need to start banning books in America.”
This isn’t Blann’s first public fight over violent literature. A little more than a decade ago, a former police chief and several preachers in his hometown of El Dorado, where he serves on the city council, tried to shutter Delta Press, calling it a “satanic stronghold” and a cesspool for violence and subversion. “God showed me the city of El Dorado,” said Dwain Miller, a pastor at Second Baptist Church, waving a copy of the Delta Press catalog, “and he said, ‘there is a dark cloud over the city.’” Blann said his books were for “entertainment” and “academic” use only, a line he echoes today.

But what about Amazon and Barnes & Noble? Neither bookseller responded to NBC’s requests for comment. Both companies show the "Cookbook" in stock and ready to ship in time for Christmas. Both will even gift-wrap it, and ship some of Blann’s other titles — including primers on how to garrote, stab, and burn — in the same bundle for free.

Legally, this is all protected, says Christina Wells, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Missouri Law School. As public expression, a book can only be prohibited or punished if it “is likely to incite imminent lawless action,” according to a 1969 Supreme Court ruling.

It’s hard to prove that an act was aided or abetted by a given book, or that the influence was imminent, so there’s never been a successful lawsuit against "The Anarchist Cookbook"—or any how-to guide to violence for that matter. Corporate booksellers have escaped legal action as well. “Their First Amendment defense is pretty strong,” says Wells.

In 2010, after a father-son team of British white supremacists drew on "The Anarchist Cookbook" to make a jar of ricin, a London judge joined police in calling for a ban on the title. But Amazon said the law could not compel them to stop selling the book. “Our goal is to support freedom of expression and to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover and buy any title,” a spokesperson for the bookseller said at the time, adding that they would only remove a book if the law specifically found it to be illegal.

On Monday the parents of Colorado school gunman Karl Pierson said they were "shattered" by their son’s actions. They don’t understand why he made three Molotov cocktails, grabbed a shotgun and a machete, and slipped into a side door of his high school, gun drawn. Perhaps the "Cookbook" wasn’t pivotal, although machetes and Molotov cocktails are included. It’s a mystery and a tragedy for everyone.
But for William Powell, it’s also an opportunity, a chance to make the two chapters of his life into one. In the 40-plus years since he wrote "The Anarchist Cookbook," he has reinvented himself as an educator on the international stage, running a series of elite schools abroad, before settling in Malaysia. There he owns a teacher training center and writes books on pedagogy for the State Department.
One of his fundamental ideas is that schools need to be made safer, and, ironically, a way to move toward that goal is to pull "The Anarchist Cookbook" out of print.
“I hope this helps,” he says.


This article states that the Anarchists Cookbook was the book which Timothy McVeigh read. It is not. That was The Turner Diaries. The following is about that book from Wikipedia.

“The Turner Diaries is a novel written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce (former leader of the white nationalist organization National Alliance) under the pseudonym "Andrew Macdonald".[1] The Turner Diaries depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the United States federal government, nuclear war, and, ultimately, to a race war leading to the extermination of all groups deemed by the author as impure such as Jews, gay people, and non-whites.[2] The book was called "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" by The New York Times and has been labeled a "bible of the racist right" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[3”

William Powell, this author, now wants the book to be withdrawn from publication, but the publisher is not willing to stop selling it. It apparently makes too much money. It's interesting that Powell is now, after so many years, wishing he hadn't written the book. Again from Wikipedia, this is about the author. “William Powell (born 1949) is the author of The Anarchist Cookbook, which he has since disowned. He and his wife are currently the co-directors of Education Across Frontiers, an organization aimed at the professional development of international school teachers and administrators.” The Wikipedia article titled William Powell Author gives many excepts from the book, and it is radical, even for the Vietnam era. I wonder how he went from radical to teacher, and how his organization Education Across Frontiers is related to the State Department.

Two other books were written by this author – Saudi Arabia and Its Royal Family, 1982, and The First Casualty, 1979, and are available on Amazon. I found no description of either book, or biography giving the educational background of the author under any source on the web. His organization's website is www.educationacrossfrontiers.com/‎ and is located in Malaysia, a nation which is given as being closely linked with the US in education and counter-terrorism on the State Department's page for Malaysia.




Pope Francis: Out with the conservative cardinal, in with the moderate – NBC
By Tracy Connor and Aaron Mermelstein

Four years ago, the former archbishop of St. Louis, Raymond Burke, was caught on tape saying that the head of the Washington archdiocese, Donald Wuerl, and other moderates were "weakening the faith" by refusing to ban pro-choice politicians from receiving communion.

Burke had to apologize for the remark, but it didn't diminish his profile in Rome under former Pope Benedict, who had appointed him head of the Vatican's equivalent of the supreme court and given him a coveted spot in the influential Congregation of Bishops.

Now, there's a new pontiff in town.
Pope Francis this week shook up the bishops panel, replacing the conservative Burke, now a cardinal, with none other than the moderate Wuerl, also a cardinal, in a move that could have a far-reaching effect on church leadership.

"This is one of the most significant moves so far," the Rev. Thomas Reese, author of "Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church," said of Monday's big announcement. "This is a clear signal of change among the bishops."
Dr. Michael Higgins of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., agreed, saying, "I think we're seeing the beginning of more radical reforms."

Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, has made it clear that he is taking a more pastoral approach to the papacy with less of a focus on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Just this month, in a television interview, Burke made it equally clear that those issues remain a priority for him. "We can never talk enough about that," he said.
Jaime Allman, Burke's chief spokesman when he headed the St. Louis archdiocese, said he worries that the church is being "cleansed" of opposing views.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, seen as a moderate, will replace Burke.
“I think the pope is under a lot of pressure from certain people to quiet individuals who are perceived to be more focused on the orthodoxy, the tougher line than the softer line, and that’s Cardinal Burke," Allman told NBC News.

“There is some perceived effort that somehow the more activist members of the Catholic Church somehow need to be removed from influence."
The Congregation of Bishops oversees the selection of bishops around the world, giving its recommendations to the pope, who ultimately makes the call.
Higgins noted that Francis did not boot Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada, the Benedict confidante who heads the congregation and was seen as a papal contender during the last conclave.

"He doesn’t want to do a scorched earth policy," said Higgins. "It's more like, 'These are the people I can work with and these are the people who can temper the conservative influence.'"

By global standards, Wuerl — along with the rest of the U.S. bishops and cardinals — leans more conservative than many of his counterparts around the world, Higgins said.
But there is no question that Burke draws the harder line on divisive issues like contraception, abortion and embryonic research — the very type of topics that Pope Francis has complained are an obsession among some church leaders.

In recent years, Burke has banished a nun who spoke out for the ordination of women, resigned from the board of a hospital that hosted pro-choice singer Sheryl Crow at a fund-raiser, referred to President Obama as an "agent of death," and repeatedly called for clergy to deny communion to public figures who support abortion rights.

Wuerl is less scolding and has steadfastly opposed from-the-top bans on the sacraments for lawmakers whose political views diverge from church teaching.
"Incrimination of others has become a hallmark among some groups and individuals in the Catholic Church in our country today," Wuerl wrote in a 2009 editorial titled "Casting the First Stone" that reads like Pope Francis could have penned it.
Burke has not been completely cast from the Vatican hierarchy; he's keeping his job as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura — for now, anyway.
But as a member of the Congregation of Bishops, Wuerl will have a say in which bishops lead the church into the future. Reese noted that the Archdiocese of Chicago — the third largest in the U.S. — will soon have a vacancy when Cardinal Francis George reaches mandatory retirement age of 75.
"The pope has shown he does not want canon lawyers, he wants pastors," Higgins said.


The denial of sacraments to politicians who are pro-choice has been bothering me since the last few years when it first came into the news. One thing I don't like to see is any religious group becoming too political in their orientation. That includes Protestant Christians, as well as Catholic. My Unitarian Universalist Church is slightly active, on the part of the poor, immigration, and other liberal causes, but they have a worship service which is based on spiritual and ethical goals, and would never put pressure on their Republican members or anyone else to vote for any one candidate over another – and we do have some Republicans in the group.

The list of Burke's highly contentious actions is enough to make me think, again as in the last few actions of Pope Francis, that he will end up with a cleaner and more equitable church, perhaps in history. If he will tackle the church's passing of the pedophile priests on to other parishes that will be great. The sexual abuse of children is not a disciplinary matter that the church should administer, but a crime and one that should bring a lengthy prison term.





Algae converted to crude oil in less than an hour, energy department says
By John Roach


This concentrated goo of algae can be converted into a bio-crude in less than an hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The day when planes, trucks and cars are commonly revved up on pond scum may be on the near horizon thanks to a technological advance that continuously turns a stream of concentrated algae into bio-crude oil. From green goo to crude takes less than an hour.

The goo contains about 10 percent to 20 percent algae by weight. The rest is water. This mixture is piped into a high-tech pressure cooker where temperatures hover around 660 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of 3,000 pounds per square inch in order to keep the mixture in a liquid phase.

Inside the cooker are "some technology tricks that other people don't have" that help separate the plant oils and other minerals such as phosphorous from the water, Douglas Elliott, a fellow at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., explained to NBC News.

An hour after being poured into the cooker, gravity separates the crude oil from the water as it flows out the other end. "We can clean up that bio-crude and make it into liquid hydrocarbons that could well serve to displace the gas, diesel, and jet (fuel) that we make from petroleum now," he added.

What's more, a further water-processing step recovers methane — essentially natural gas — from the leftover plant material. The remaining nitrogen-rich water and recovered phosphorous can be recycled to grow more algae.

Elliott and colleagues describe the process in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Algal Research. Utah-based biofuels company Genifuel Corp. has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant.
The process takes raw algae slurry and converts it into a bio-crude that can be further refined into gasoline.

Revisited technology
The so-called hydrothermal liquefaction technology that Elliott and his colleagues used to create the bio-crude was pioneered in the 1970s, but fell out of favor as researchers focused on developing algae strains that yield high amounts of oil in the form of lipids.

To recover the oil from these high-yielding plants, the algae is dried and the oils extracted in a process that that is energy intensive and thus expensive. 
Hydrothermal liquefaction "has the advantage that it makes use of the whole algae, therefore it has the significant advantage that there is no need to promote lipid accumulation or indeed to extract lipids," Aris Karcanias, an energy analyst at FTI Consulting in London, explained to NBC News in an email.

"Furthermore," he added, "there is no need to expend energy for the algae drying process."
Despite the advantages, until now, Elliott explained, most demonstrations of the technology have been at the lab scale and done in so-called batch reactors. That is, the teams can only produce one batch of crude at a time. In addition, they use chemical solvents to separate the water from the oil.

Using the continuous process described in Algal Research, "we find that, if we do it the right way, we don't need those chemical steps," Elliott said.

Challenges ahead
Among the remaining challenges to make algae-derived biofuels a contender in the global energy marketplace is the ability to efficiently grow a sufficient amount of the plant for conversion into biofuels, according to Elliott.

There are also regulatory hurdles such as rewriting standards and specifications to allow the plant-derived oils to be blended into, or used in lieu of, petroleum-based fuels. "The fact is, they do look a little bit different and they have slightly different properties," he explained. 

In addition to Genifuel, who is collaborating with the Department of Energy on this process, other companies pursuing algae-based biofuel technology worth watching include Sapphire Energy, Cellana, and Synthetic Genomics, according to energy consultant Karcanias.

Throughout the industry, he said, "further research is required to enhance algal oil productivity on a continuous basis, ability to demonstrate wastewater treatment and optimize nutrient cycle." If that's achievable on a commercial scale, he added, "It will be an important and indeed useful step forward."


This looks like a breakthrough, though it will presumably burn “dirty” with CO2 emissions just like natural oil does. It does beat oil spills on our oceans and making an industrial site out of our Alaska wildlife environments, and maybe it will prevent the need for fracking. I hope all goes well with the project.




Fla. school named for Ku Klux Klan leader to be renamed – NBC
By Eric M. Johnson, Reuters


A Florida high school that for 54 years has borne the name of a leader of the Ku Klux Klan is to be renamed, officials said. The Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., where more than half the students are black, will change its name from that of the man who allegedly was the Ku Klux Klan's first grand wizard.
A new name will be proposed in January.

"We recognize that we cannot and are not seeking to erase history," said Constance Hall, a board member for the Duval County school, which was founded 54 years ago.
"For too long and too many, this name has represented the opposite of unity, respect, and equality," Hall said in a statement.

Forrest was an innovative cavalry leader and a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He  joined the Ku Klux Klan after the war; there remains a dispute over his role.

With its roots in the Civil War era, the Ku Klux Klan has long been associated with hooded, white-robed night riders who menaced blacks with cross burnings, lynchings and other acts of violence.

The honoring of Confederate heroes and emblems has been a divisive issue in the United States, with proponents saying it pays homage to regional history and opponents saying it amounts to racism.

Memphis, Tenn., in February this year dropped Confederate names from three city parks. One was named after Forrest.

Omotayo Richmond, who moved to Jacksonville from New York, wrote in a Change.org petition that garnered more than 160,000 signatures in support of changing the school's name that doing so would go toward healing "so much racial division" in Florida.

"African American Jacksonville students shouldn't have to attend a high school named for someone who slaughtered and terrorized their ancestors one more school year," Richmond wrote.

The 1,300-student public school, which became racially integrated in 1971, had voted some five years ago to keep the name, but those officials had been replaced, the petition said.


This is one more step toward a peaceful relationship between the races in Jacksonville, which has 30.7% blacks as of the census estimate of 2012. Our current mayor is a black man. See this from Wikipedia:

“Alvin Brown (born December 15, 1961) is an American politician who is Mayor of Jacksonville, Florida. The first African American elected to the position, he succeeded John Peyton on July 1, 2011.[1][2] He is a member of the Democratic Party. Brown became the first African American ever elected Mayor of Jacksonville, as well as the first Democrat elected since Ed Austin in 1991.[2] The win was considered a major upset in light of the momentum gained by the Republican Party and the conservative Tea Party movement in the 2010 elections, and a significant victory for the Florida Democratic Party.[9]
Brown was sworn in as mayor on July 1, 2011.[2]





Charity raffle tickets for $1 million Picasso painting will cost you just $137 – NBC
By Henry Austin, NBC News contributor

Christmas could come early for the lucky winner of a Wednesday charity raffle. They could scoop up a Picasso worth $1 million for just $137.
Entitled “L’Homme au Gibus,” or Man with Opera Hat, the artwork painted with gouache on paper was done by the famous Spanish artist in 1914. He clearly signed “Pablo Picasso” in the upper right hand corner of the 12 by nine inch work.

Maya Widmaier-Picasso, the artist's daughter with the French model Marie-Therese Walter, and his son Claude Ruiz-Picasso, whose mother is the painter and author Francoise Gilot, “both attest to the painting’s authenticity,” according to the 1picasso100euros.com website which is selling the tickets for 100 euros (approximately $137).

Picasso's grandson Olivier, said of the raffle that his grandfather, "would have been amused to be involved in such an operation." 
Pablo Picasso's grandson Olivier, poses with the painting L'homme au Gibus or Man with Opera Hat.

“Everything innovative would interest him," he said. "I think that Pablo Picasso was a pioneer, pioneer in his personal life, in his sentimental life, in his creation." 
Some 50,000 tickets were made available for the painting which was bought by an anonymous donor at a New York gallery. It given to a charity working to save the ancient city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.

The UNESCO-registered International Association to Save Tyre charity is hoping to raise about $5 million at the auction at Sotheby’s in Paris, according to spokeswoman Liliane Assi.

“We are very excited,” she said, "Who can get a Picasso usually? Or a piece of art? Not a lot of people at that value. So we have seen a lot of people buying three and four and five tickets."

She added that the money would go towards creating an institute for Phoenician studies and creating a handicraft village to provide employment for local women, young people and the disabled in Tyre.
“The person who donated the painting is very generous,” she said.  


This is interesting. I hope the charity for the people of Tyre can fulfill their goals and help the disabled there. If they sell all 50,000 tickets for $137.00 each they should raise enough to do a lot of good and the winner of the Picasso will have something that he can sell for a million dollars or more.



­
Concussion Research Slowed By Shortage Of Donated Brains – NPR
by Alan Yu
­
Former NFL linebacker Jovan Belcher's body was exhumed last week so doctors can perform tests on the remains of his brain. The family hopes to find out if a degenerative brain disease played a role in Kansas City Chiefs veteran's death last year, when he shot his girlfriend then killed himself.

The tests probably won't give a lot of answers, considering how long Belcher has been buried, says Dr. Daniel Perl, who runs a brain bank and is a professor of pathology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "I'm not at all certain the diagnosis can even be made on this specimen," Perl tells Shots.

The disease that Belcher's remains will be tested for is chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. At the moment, doctors can only definitively diagnose CTE after a person has died, though new research funded in large part by the NFL and announced by the National Institutes of Health on Monday could change that someday.
CTE occurs in people with a history of concussions, notably boxers and professional football players. The brain trauma appears to cause a buildup of abnormal protein, which is associated with memory loss, bad judgment, aggression and dementia. The NIH will fund eight projects to study the long-term effects of repeated head injuries and to come up with better tools for diagnosing CTE and concussions. The NFL is donating $30 million for the work.

Perl is working on one of those projects with brain imaging specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Washington University in St. Louis. The specialists will study brains with CTE under a microscope and with high-resolution scans of the brain. The researchers hope to identify find features of CTE that they can detect on brain scans in living brains.

One limiting factor is a lack of brains, says Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. A diagnosis can only be made after death, so scientists have to study brain samples from people who donate them.

"We're really stymied in our ability to make progress just because there's not that much brain tissue," Koroshetz says. "We're really very dependent upon people who donate their brains."

The NIH has established a network of brain banks to help researchers get access to tissue samples. Koroshetz says this problem applies to autism research as well, though he is confident of progress with time and more brains.


I'm glad that the NFL is donating money for this research. Football is a real problem, I my opinion. I object to the psychology of violence that is a part of the game, and some coaches were caught within the last few years telling their players to hit the other team hard, which is how some of the concussions happen, I am sure.

Now the scientists just need for more athletes to donate their brains for the research. Of course, I wonder if they will be able to find any cure, even if the research is helpful. At least, maybe they can pinpoint the changes in the brain while the patient is alive and allow them to stop playing to avoid making the damage worse.

Monday, December 16, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day

Judge Becomes Target of Criticism in "Affluenza" Case – NBC
By Greg Janda

Saturday 12/14/13

The judge who handed down a sentence of probation and treatment for a wealthy North Texas teen who killed four pedestrians in a drunken driving wreck is facing public outrage and calls for her removal.

Controversy surrounding the sentence has become focused on the defense's strategy which included testimony that 16-year-old Ethan Couch suffered from "affluenza" -- a diagnosis not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association which refers to an upbringing so privileged that a person is unable to discern right from wrong.

Victim's Family, Attorneys Speak Out After Ethan Couch Sentenced to Probation
Tuesday, Judge Jean Boyd sentenced Couch to 10 years of probation and treatment, possibly to be served at an expensive California rehab facility that would be paid for by the teen's parents. Prosecutors had sought the maximum sentence of 20 years in state custody.

Boyd's decision has led to public calls for her resignation and an online petition on Change.org demanding that Gov. Rick Perry remove Boyd from the bench.
Under current Texas law, the governor can remove a sitting judge from the bench with approval of two-thirds of Texas House and Senate members.

Boyd, who previously announced she is retiring at the end of her term next year, declined to comment on both the sentencing decision and the calls for her removal when contacted by NBC 5.  Boyd said speaking about the situation would be unethical.
The outrage over the sentencing decision is largely linked to the testimony of psychologist Gary Miller, a witness for the defense who said  Ethan Couch suffered from "affluenza," a term suggesting his parents' wealth and privilege taught him there were no consequences for bad behavior.

Related Stories
"Affluenza" Doesn't Excuse Teen in Fatal Crash
"Affluenza" Judge Becomes a Target of Criticism
Victim's Family, Attorneys Speak Out After Ethan Couch Sentenced to Probation
Teen's Sentence in Fatal DWI Crash Sparks Ire
Teen Sentenced in Drunken Crash That Killed Four
Teen Admits Responsibility in Drunken Crash That Killed Four
Teen Charged in Death of Youth Pastor, 3 Others

In addition to the APA, other mental health practitioners believe that diagnosis should not have been used by the defense to justify wrongdoing.
Other critics feel the sentence, and the use of the "affluenza" defense, sends a bad message about personal responsibility.

"I think once you're behind the wheel it doesn't matter where you're from, who you are, how famous you are, how poor, how rich, how anything ... I think when we're given a driver's license, that's a privilege and a part of that privilege has a responsibility," Jeff Miracle, with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, told NBC 5.
Couch's attorneys argue that the judge's sentence will have a significant impact on the convicted teen and his life going forward.

Scott Brown, Couch's lead attorney, said the teen could have been freed after two years if he had drawn the 20-year sentence. Instead, the judge "fashioned a sentence that could have him under the thumb of the justice system for the next 10 years," he told the Star-Telegram.

"And if Ethan doesn't do what he's supposed to do, if he has one misstep at all, then this judge or an adult judge when he's transferred can then incarcerate him in prison," Brown said. "He's taken away from his family, he's taken away from all the things that he's been given."


Affluenza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Affluenza, a portmanteau of affluence and influenza, is a term used by critics of consumerism. The book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic defines it as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more".[1]

A potential criticism of the idea of affluenza is that it presents subjective social critique as an objective, inevitable and debilitating illness.

British psychologist Oliver James asserts that there is a correlation between the increasing nature of affluenza and the resulting increase in material inequality: the more unequal a society, the greater the unhappiness of its citizens. Referring to Vance Packard's thesis The Hidden Persuaders on the manipulative methods used by the advertising industry, James relates the stimulation of artificial needs to the rise in affluenza. To highlight the spread of affluenza in societies with varied levels of inequality, James interviewed people in several cities including Sydney, Singapore, Auckland, Moscow, Shanghai, Copenhagen and New York.

James also believes that higher rates of mental disorders are the consequence of excessive wealth-seeking in consumerist nations.[3] In a graph created from multiple data sources, James plots "Prevalence of any emotional distress" and "Income inequality", attempting to show that English-speaking nations have nearly twice as much emotional distress as mainland Europe and Japan: 21.6 percent vs 11.5 percent.[4] James defines affluenza as 'placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame', and this becomes the rationale behind the increasing mental illness in English-speaking societies. He explains the greater incidence of affluenza as the result of 'selfish capitalism', the market Liberal political governance found in English-speaking nations as compared to the less selfish capitalism pursued in mainland Europe. James asserts that societies can remove the negative consumerist effects by pursuing real needs over perceived wants, and by defining themselves as having value independent of their material possessions.

Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss' book, Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough, poses the question: "If the economy has been doing so well, why are we not becoming happier?" (p vii). They argue that affluenza causes over-consumption, "luxury fever", consumer debt, overwork, waste, and harm to the environment. These pressures lead to "psychological disorders, alienation and distress" (p 179), causing people to "self-medicate with mood-altering drugs and excessive alcohol consumption" (p 180).

As a legal defense[edit]
In December of 2013, State District Judge Jean Boyd sentenced a North Texas teenager, Ethan Couch[6], to 10 years probation for driving while drunk and killing four pedestrians after his attorneys successfully argued that the teen suffered from affluenza and needed rehabilitation, and not prison. The teen was witnessed on surveillance video stealing beer from a store, driving with seven passengers in his Ford F-350, speeding, and had a blood-alcohol content of 0.24. A defense psychologist testified in court that the teen was a product of affluenza and was unable to link his bad behavior with consequences due to his parents teaching him that wealth buys privilege. The rehabilitation facility near Newport Beach, California that the teen will be attending will cost his family $450,000.00 annually.[7][8]


http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/12/250490841/probation-for-teen-who-killed-4-heres-the-judges-thinking

­ Most of the reports we're seeing focus on the argument from the boy's attorneys that he suffered from "affluennza" — a coddled upbringing during which his wealthy parents have never held him accountable for his actions. The reports have relatively little mention of State District Judge Jean Boyd's reasoning or go into much detail about the conditions of the sentence.

"Boyd ordered the 16-year-old to receive therapy at a long-term, in-patient facility. He will stay in Tarrant County juvenile detention until the juvenile probation department prepares a report about possible treatment programs.

"If the teen violates the terms of his probation, he could be sent to prison for 10 years. ...
"In delivering the sentence, Boyd told the victims' families in the packed courtroom that there was nothing she could do that would lessen their pain. And she told the teen that he, not his parents, is responsible for his actions.

The Star-Telegram adds that "Scott Brown, an attorney who represented the teen with Reagan Wynn, said the teen could have been freed in two years if Boyd had sentenced him to 20 years. 'She fashioned a sentence that could have him under the thumb of the justice system for the next 10 years,' Brown said."


When I started to read this article I was expecting to end up feeling very cynical about the judge's ruling, but as was pointed out in the NPR blog which I posted above, the judge “fashioned a sentence that could have him under the thumb of the justice system for the next 10 years,” and that if he had been sentenced to ten years in prison he would probably be out after two years. All I can say is that the judge could have sentenced him to two years in prison plus 10 years of probation. However, she wanted him to go into the long term treatment for his mental condition, however it was acquired.

Books on Affluenza are mentioned in the articles above, for closer reading. As the term was first used it referred to people who inherit or win large amounts of money and are as a result separated from the life that they had built over the years, such as alienation from old friends and family who wouldn't have money, and removal from their daily habits, for instance going to work and having a feeling of usefulness as a result. They also may feel worried that the money which so suddenly appeared might be taken away, leaving them impoverished again. We adjust to our living conditions and form a life around them as we mature, and removal from that can feel disturbing, like no longer knowing who we are. There is also a feeling of guilt because the money wasn't earned and amassed slowly, and because so many people are still poor.

This case was about something darker, though, the fact that the boy's parents had apparently taught him that the privilege and freedom from consequences that goes along with wealth is legitimately his, and the sentence of the judge seems to acknowledge that line of thinking. This case is the first time such an argument has been used as a defense, according to the NBC article, and as a result is genuinely shocking to the American mind. But this very set of privileges have been firmly in place in human society since the beginning of mankind, and have influenced both juries and judges before, and even the arresting police officers, especially in small town, closed environments like the deep South where one or two prominent families may well get away with all kinds of crimes and still retain their social standing.

Those who doubt it should read The Great Gatsby. It's a great read, and has much to say about an extremely unequal distribution of wealth such as the US and much of the world had in the 1920's. Some think that the disparity between rich and poor is again heading in that direction in the US, with a resultant loss of our Middle Class, who have stabilized our society so far against class warfare. It certainly causes me to worry about our future.




Climate change expert's fraud was 'crime of massive proportion,' say feds – NBC
By Michael Isikoff


The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits  over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his “historic” lies are “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.

Beale’s lawyer, while acknowledging his guilt, has asked for leniency and offered a psychological explanation for the climate expert’s bizarre tales.

“With the help of his therapist,” wrote attorney John Kern, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Kern also said Beale was driven “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives … that are fueled by his insecurities.”

The two sentencing memos, along with documents obtained by NBC News, offer new details about what some officials describe as one of the most audacious, and creative, federal frauds they have ever encountered.

When he first began looking into Beale’s deceptions last February, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, How could this possibly have happened in this agency?” said EPA Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan, who spearheaded the Beale probe, in an interview with NBC News. “I’ve worked for the government for 35 years. I’ve never seen a situation like this.”

Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses -- including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.

Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.

In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.

To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials -- including McCarthy -- that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
“Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010 email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho, ho.”

In fact, Beale had no relationship with the CIA at all. Sullivan, the EPA investigator, said he confirmed Beale didn’t even have a security clearance. He spent much of the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod.

“He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”
Nor was that Beale’s only deception, according to court documents. In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.

When first questioned by EPA officials early this year about his alleged CIA undercover work, Beale brushed them aside by saying he couldn’t discuss it, according to Sullivan. Weeks later, after being confronted again by investigators, Beale acknowledging the truth but “didn’t show much remorse,” Sullivan said. The explanation he offered for his false CIA story? “He wanted to puff up his own image,” said Sullivan.

Even at that point, prosecutors say, Beale sought to “cover his tracks.’” He told a few close colleagues at EPA that he would plead guilty “to take one for the team,” suggesting that he was willing to go to jail to protect people at the CIA. This has led some EPA officials to continue to believe that Beale actually does have a connection to the CIA, Sullivan said.

Kern, Beale’s lawyer, declined to comment to NBC News. But in his court filing, he asks Judge Ellen Huvelle, who is due to sentence Beale Wednesday, to balance Beale’s misdeeds against years of admirable work for the government. These include helping to rewrite the Clean Air Act in 1990, heading up EPA delegations to United Nations conferences on climate change in 2000 and 2001, and helping to negotiate agreements to reduce carbon emissions with China, India and other nations.

Two congressional committees are now pressing the EPA, including administrator McCarthy, for answers on the handling of Beale’s case. The new inspector general’s reports fault the agency for a lack of internal controls and policies that allegedly facilitated Beale’s deceptions.

For example, one of the reports states, Beale took 33 airplane trips between 2003 and 2011, costing the government $266,190. On 70 percent of those, he travelled first class and stayed at high end hotels, charging more than twice the government’s allowed per diem limit. But his expense vouchers were routinely approved by another EPA official, a colleague of Beale’s, whose conduct is now being reviewed by the inspector general, according to congressional investigators briefed on the report.
Beale was caught when he “retired” very publicly but kept drawing his large salary for another year and a half. Top EPA officials, including McCarthy, attended a September 2011 retirement party for Beale and two colleagues aboard a Potomac yacht. Six months later, McCarthy learned he was still on the payroll

In a March 29, 2012 email, she wrote, “I thought he had already retired. She then initiated a review that was forwarded to the EPA general counsel’s office . But the inspector general’s office was not alerted until February 2013 and he didn't actually retire until April.

Sullivan said he doubted Beale’s fraud could occur at any federal agency other than the EPA. “There’s a certain culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing,” he said. “They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very trusting and accepting.”

In a statement to NBC News, Alisha Johnson, McCarthy’s press secretary, said that Beale’s fraud was "uncovered" by McCarthy while she was head of the Office of Air and Radiation. “[Beale] is a convicted felon who went to great lengths to deceive and defraud the U.S. government over the span of more than a decade,” said Johnson. “EPA has worked in coordination with its inspector general and the U.S. Attorney's office. The Agency has [put] in place additional safeguards to help protect against fraud and abuse related to employee time and attendance, including strengthening supervisory controls of time and attendance, improved review of employee travel and a tightened retention incentive processes.”


This article is so extreme that it's actually funny. I wonder, though, what the other employees at EPA are doing. There may be a major scandal if they start investigating the management there in other ways and find eve more abuses. It's a prime example of waste in the Federal government, and I think is probably a drop in the bucket around the government departments. The military has been shown to be very wasteful also more than once. This is one problem with having a government that is so large in scope – minor details like phantom employees get ignored. The Republicans don't do any better than the Democrats about such problems. Beale's activities started in 2003 and were not caught until he retired and kept on collecting his salary.





­ Another Partisan Divide: Mitt Romney's Looks – NPR
by Adam Wollner

­ Mitt Romney speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 15. New research suggests Democrats and Republicans had different perceptions of his physical appearance during the 2012 election.

It's clear that Republicans and Democrats had different political opinions about Mitt Romney. But did Romney literally look different to the two sides? A forthcoming study suggests that might be the case.

According to new research from Ohio State University psychologists, individual political biases might have caused 2012 GOP presidential nominee's physical appearance to appear different to Republicans and Democrats.

Here's how the study worked: Researchers brought in 148 undergraduate students and asked them about their views of Romney and President Obama, how likely they were to vote in the election (or if they had already voted) and to rate themselves as a Democrat or a Republican, and as a liberal or conservative.

Then the students were directed to compare 450 pairs of slightly different images of Romney's face and asked to select the one in each pair that they thought looked the most like him. (The participants were plenty familiar with Romney; the study was conducted over the course of several weeks in November 2012, both in the days just before the presidential election and in the immediate aftermath.)
­
Once the photos were selected, researchers created two sets of composite photos of Romney's face — one based on the choices of the GOP-leaning participants, and another based on the Democratic-leaning participants.

When a separate group of 213 adults were asked which images of Romney looked more trustworthy and more positive, overall they chose the ones generated by the Republicans.

"That our attitudes could bias something that we're exposed to so frequently is an amazing biasing effect," said Ohio State University psychology professor Russell Fazio, the senior author of the study, in a release. "It suggests that people may not just interpret political information about a candidate to fit their opinion, but that they may construct a political world in which they literally see candidates differently."

The full report, Political Attitudes Bias the Mental Representation of a Presidential Candidate's Face, will soon be published in the academic journal Psychological Science.


Psychological experiments are often very interesting, and this is no exception. I am a Democrat and I didn't vote for him, but I have always thought Romney is a handsome and clean-cut looking man. He may look a little smug compared to Obama, but he mainly knows the art of having a nice smile in political persuasion. When he gave his reason for courting the rich instead of the poor, however, he said that the Republicans can never win over the poor, so he is not ignorant of the main issues dividing the parties, and accepts his side's involvement in the debate without guilt. He, to me, is clever enough to keep from showing his feelings, but in reality has little sympathy with the underprivileged.



­

How Plastic In The Ocean Is Contaminating Your Seafood – NPR
by Eliza Barclay
­
We've long known that the fish we eat are exposed to toxic chemicals in the rivers, bays and oceans they inhabit. The substance that's gotten the most attention — because it has shown up at disturbingly high levels in some fish — is mercury.

But mercury is just one of a slew of synthetic and organic pollutants that fish can ingest and absorb into their tissue. Sometimes it's because we're dumping chemicals right into the ocean. But as a study published recently in Nature, Scientific Reports helps illuminate, sometimes fish get chemicals from the plastic debris they ingest.
"The ocean is basically a toilet bowl for all of our chemical pollutants and waste in general," says Chelsea Rochman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, who authored the study. "Eventually, we start to see those contaminants high up in the food chain, in seafood and wildlife."

For many years, scientists have known that chemicals will move up the food chain as predators absorb the chemicals consumed by their prey. That's why the biggest, fattiest fish, like tuna and swordfish, tend to have the highest levels of mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other dioxins. (And that's concerning, given that canned tuna was the second most popular fish consumed in the U.S. in 2012, according to the National Fisheries Institute.)

What scientists didn't know was exactly what role plastics played in transferring these chemicals into the food chain. To find out, Rochman and her co-authors fed medaka, a fish species often used in experiments, three different diets.
One group of medaka got regular fish food, one group got a diet that was 10 percent "clean" plastic (with no pollutants) and a third group got a diet with 10 percent plastic that had been soaking in the San Diego Bay for several months. When they tested the fish two months later, they found that the ones on the marine plastic diet had much higher levels of persistent organic pollutants.

"Plastics — when they end up in the ocean — are a sponge for chemicals already out there," says Rochman. "We found that when the plastic interacts with the juices in the [fish's] stomach, the chemicals come off of plastic and are transferred into the bloodstream or tissue." The fish on the marine plastic diet were also more likely to have tumors and liver problems.

While it's impossible to know whether any given fish you buy at the seafood counter has consumed this much plastic, Rochman's findings do have implications for human health, she notes. "A lot of people are eating seafood all the time, and fish are eating plastic all the time, so I think that's a problem."

And there's a lot of plastic out there in the open ocean. As Edward Humes, author of Garbology, told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2012, the weight of plastic finding its way into the sea each year is estimated to be equivalent to the weight of 40 aircraft carriers.

Consider the five massive gyres of trash particles swirling around in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans alone. Those gyres, Hume told Gross, contain "plastic that has been weathered and broken down by the elements into these little bits, and it's getting into the food chain."

One of those gyres is the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Fish could encounter the plastic in those gyres, but also much closer to shore, says Rochman.
Even so, the consensus in the public health community still seems to be that the benefits of eating fish — because of their omega-3 fatty acids, among other assets — exceed the potential risks. And many researchers advocating for Americans to increase their fish consumption argue that the levels of dioxins, PCBs and other toxic chemicals in fish are generally too low to be of concern.

The Environmental Protection Agency does put out advisories to warn consumers when fish get contaminated with chemicals in local U.S. waters. But a lot of our seafood now comes from foreign waters, which the EPA does not monitor. Just a tiny fraction of imported fish get tested for contaminants.

As for Rochman, she says her research in marine toxicology has persuaded her to eat seafood no more than twice per week. And she now avoids swordfish altogether.


I don't like fish enough to eat very much of it, but I do eat sardines in olive oil and smoked oysters. In a seafood restaurant I eat shellfish and calamari or shrimp and lobster. Fresh salmon baked with herbs tastes very good to me, but it is usually expensive, so I don't often get it. Besides, salmon are endangered, or were, so I wouldn't like to see a whole species die out.

These five gyres that are in the oceans are news to me. I had seen one gyre – only one – on a cable television documentary about the plastic in the ocean. That was around ten years ago. There is a huge amount of plastic that has washed down into the ocean, and as it breaks up into small particles the little fish are eating it and, I understand, some die of starvation as a result, because plastic has no food value, but fills up their stomach. That's sad. That's like the polar bears which are beginning to starve now as the North Pole sea ice melts and they can no longer hunt seals. This news article is not uplifting and happy. It's one more story about our environment being overwhelmed by human-caused damage.




Ga. student suspended for year after hugging teacher – CBS

DULUTH, Ga. - A high school senior won't graduate on time after being suspended for one year for hugging a teacher.

CBS Affiliate WGCL reports that a hearing officer at Duluth High School found that the boy violated the Gwinnett County Public Schools' rules on sexual harassment.
Surveillance camera video captured Sam McNair, 17, entering a room, placing his arms around the back and front of the teacher and tucking his head behind her neck.
The teacher alleged in a discipline report that McNair's cheeks and lips touched the back of her neck and cheek, according to WGCL.

The 17-year-old denied he sexually harassed his teacher or that he kissed her. He said he has hugged his teachers many times before, including this one, and has never been warned about doing so. WGCL reports McNair has previous suspensions, but none for sexual harassment.

However, the teacher alleged in the discipline report that she warned McNair about giving teachers hugs and that they were inappropriate, the station reported.
The boy's mother, April McNair, was shocked when the district told her that her son was suspended for giving a hug. She told WGCL that the district should have notified her prior to taking any action that could jeopardize his college plans.

"He's a senior," April McNair said. "He plays football, getting ready for lacrosse. And you're stripping him of even getting a full scholarship for athletics for college."

A spokesperson for Gwinnet County Public Schools would not comment on the case specifically, but said in a statement that "hearing officers consider witness testimony, a review of the known facts, and a student's past disciplinary history . . . when determining consequences."

Sam McNair (who says he and his mom are both huggers) told WGCL's Jeff Chirico he does not think that he should be punished for a hug. "You never know what someone's going through. I hug might help. But in this case it hurt, right?"

A district spokesperson couldn't comment on the case but says parents can appeal the decision to the school board.


This article is a little distressing to me because I understand “huggers,” who have warm rushes of good feeling toward their friends and can only express it by a hug. A co-worker of mine on my last job brought me his key to the office and, our business transacted, surprised me with a hug. I was grateful and it made me happy.

I can see how a teacher may feel that a “proper distance” must be maintained as a part of the respect of her position. I can also see how she would be made afraid if “his lips and cheek touched the back of her neck.” That was one step beyond a warm, friendly hug.

I wish our society were more open in general about feelings, however. I prefer being around people who may occasionally hug me. It restores some part of me that was starved when I was a girl. We had a loving family at base, but the hugging and praise were rare and the arguments were commonplace. I grew up a little distant as a result. I have changed in my adult years to be more enthusiastic and open. I am going to continue to hug people.




Marijuana linked to brain-related memory woes, schizophrenia risk in teens – CBS
ByRyan Jaslow

Marijuana use may harm teens' brains, new research suggests.
Researchers have found structural changes related to memory in former pot smokers who were in their young 20s but used during their teenage years. The changes look similar to what schizophrenia does to the brain, according to the study, published Dec. 16 in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

"The study links the chronic use of marijuana to these concerning brain abnormalities that appear to last for at least a few years after people stop using it," lead study author Matthew Smith, an assistant research professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement.
With more states legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana, Smith says more brain studies are essential.

Marijuana is the most commonly-used illicit drug in the U.S. The U.S. government considers it illegal, but two states, Colorado and Washington, legalized recreational use following Nov. 2012 elections. An estimated 7.3 percent of Americans older than 12 use marijuana, and more than 7.6 million people use it daily. Roughly 6.5 percent of all high school seniors smoke marijuana daily, up from 5.1 percent five years ago.
 
Medical marijuana: What does science say?
More states are legalizing medical marijuana but Dr. Margaret Haney, director of the Marijuana Research Laboratory at Columbia University, tells ...
Experts also argue marijuana can be addictive for about 10 percent of users.
But,are the young putting their brains at harm by smoking? To find out, researchers recruited 10 young adults who smoked pot daily when they were 16 and 17 but had quit at least two years earlier, and compared them to 15 people with schizophrenia who had smoked, 28 people with schizophrenia who had never used drugs, and 44 healthy control subjects.

They found changes in gray matter areas of the brain associated with working memory, which is the ability to process information and transfer it to long-term memory, if needed. Gray matter is rich in neurons (nerve cells) and plays a role in routing signals to areas responsible for numerous functions like memory and movement. 
Researchers saw memory-related structures of the brain, including the thalamus, stratum and globus pallidus, appeared to shrink and collapse inward, which may be a result of a decrease in neurons. They say their study is different because previous pot studies focus on the outer layer called the cortex, but this study looks deeper in the brain at "subcortical" regions.

The younger the participants were when they started smoking pot chronically, the more abnormal the shape of the brain regions. That suggests that regions related to memory may be more susceptible to pot’s effects if abuse starts at an earlier age, according to the researchers.

They concede their study only looked at one point in time, so more research is needed to track brain development in young adults who use marijuana.
A closer look at the 15 pot-smokers with schizophrenia found 90 percent of them smoked heavily before they developed the mental health disorder. They also had more deterioration in the thalamus, which also controls for motivation along with memory. Other research has shown that this area is typically impaired in people with schizophrenia.

While previous studies have linked schizophrenia to pot use, the researchers said, “this paper is among the first to reveal that the use of marijuana may contribute to the changes in brain structure that have been associated with having schizophrenia."
 
Marijuana like you've never seen it before
What's next for medical marijuana? Hint: it doesn't involve a match, pipe or rolling papers. Some of it doesn't even get you high
 "If someone has a family history of schizophrenia, they are increasing their risk of developing schizophrenia if they abuse marijuana,” the researchers explained.
One expert disagreed with that statement.

"I thought that was a little bit of a jump," Dr. Scott Krakower, assistant unit chief of psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., told HealthDay. "We know people with schizophrenia use marijuana. It's going to be very hard to say that someone has schizophrenia because they used marijuana. That's going to be hard to prove."

Previous research has tied to marijuana use in teens to IQ drops, but that link has been challenged by subsequent studies.
"Future research needs to be done to verify the implications of marijuana use on the ... structure of the brain," said Krakower. "It needs to be studied in a group of people over a period of time."


Like so many college aged young people in the late 1960's, I smoked marijuana for a short period of time with friends. It didn't seem to do me any great harm, but I did notice that its effect is at least slightly hallucinogenic, and schizophrenics do have hallucinations.

I do strongly question medicinal use of it unless scientists can eliminate the euphoria and hallucinations. Even more do I object to the legalization of it, as that marijuana would not be chemically changed to make it safer. I can see the “decriminalization” of it, since so many young people are put in jail or prison simply for possessing or using a small amount of it. I think we should be mandating mental health treatment for them instead.

Saturday, December 14, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day


US, Chinese warships narrowly avoid collision in South China Sea – NBC
By David Alexander, Reuters

A U.S. guided missile cruiser operating in international waters in the South China Sea was forced to take evasive action last week to avoid a collision with a Chinese warship maneuvering nearby, the U.S. Pacific Fleet said in a statement on Friday. 

The incident came as the USS Cowpens was operating in the vicinity of China's only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, at a time of heightened tensions in the region following Beijing's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone farther north in the East China Sea, a U.S. defense official said. 

Another Chinese warship maneuvered near the Cowpens in the incident on December 5, and the Cowpens was forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision, the Pacific Fleet said in its statement. 

"Eventually, effective bridge-to-bridge communications occurred between the U.S. and Chinese crews, and both vessels maneuvered to ensure safe passage," a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in an email. 

The Cowpens had been in the Philippines helping with disaster relief in the aftermath of the massive typhoon that hit the region in November. The U.S. Navy said it was conducting regular freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea when the incident occurred.

China deployed the Liaoning to the South China Sea for maneuvers in the midst of the tensions over the air zone, which covers air space around a group of tiny islands in the East China Sea that are administered by Japan but claimed by Beijing as well. 
Beijing declared the air zone late last month and demanded that aircraft flying through it provide flight plans and other information. The United States and its allies rejected the Chinese demand and have continued to fly military aircraft into the zone. 

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea and is involved in territorial disputes with several of its neighbors in that region as well. 
Asked if the Chinese vessel was moving toward the Cowpens with aggressive intent, an official declined to speculate on the motivations of the Chinese crew. 
"U.S. leaders have been clear about our commitment to develop a stable and continuous military-to-military relationship with China," the official said in the email. 
"Whether it is a tactical at-sea encounter, or strategic dialogue, sustained and reliable communication mitigates the risk of mishaps, which is in the interest of both the U.S. and China," the email said. 

The Pacific Fleet said the incident with the Cowpens underscored the need for the "highest standards of professional seamanship, including communications between vessels, to mitigate the risk of an unintended incident or mishap." 
"It is not uncommon for navies to operate in close proximity, which is why it is paramount that all navies follow international standards for maritime rules," the defense official said in the statement. 



“Sustained and reliable communication” apparently failed to be maintained here. At the last minute contact was made and the collision was avoided. We, of course, were in the Chinese waters at the time of “heightened tensions,” and an incident that looks like international posturing occurred. Couldn't two large ships see each other? It's just one more addition to the tensions. The UN does need to settle this claim on the islands by Japan and China. Japan appears to have the prior claim, according to the article two weeks or so ago, but China is the big boy. Hopefully, it won't come to war.




Student tried to cover up frat-link in fatal hazing: cops – NBC
By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

While college freshman Mike Deng lay brain dead after a hazing ritual gone wrong last weekend, his Pi Delta Psi "big brother" made a call from the hospital — telling others to get rid of anything that would identify them as fraternity members, court documents allege.

The apparent coverup attempt was detailed in a search warrant affidavit filed by police, who ultimately seized a heap of frat regalia, along with suspected marijuana, hallucinogenic mushrooms and paddles, from a house in the Poconos rented by the New York City students.

That's where, they say, Deng was repeatedly tackled running a gauntlet blindfolded and carrying a sand-filled backpack in the freezing dark during a fraternity gathering.

The papers say that the three Baruch College students who finally took Deng, 19, to the hospital early Sunday — more than an hour after he was knocked unconscious — initially claimed the finance major was wrestling in the snow, fell backward and hit his head.

During a second grilling, Sheldon Wong, described as the pledge educator, "showed great remorse and refused to provide information about the ritual and the incident," police wrote. Deng's big pledge brother, Charles Lai, said he was sleeping and didn't see what happened, they said.

Upon further questioning, though, Lai said he was taking part in the ritual known as The Gauntlet, telling cops that Deng was supposed to try to reach him "while other fraternity brothers physically prevent that from happening," the affidavit says.
Wong then gave details of the ritual, as well, "and states Deng was pushed but didn't see who did it."

The detective wrote that he also learned through interviews "that while at the hospital [Lai] made a phone call, using his cellular phone, to a male at the residence and told him to dispose of all fraternity memorabilia and items."
Efforts to reach Lai and Wong, along with members of the national board of Pi Delta Psi, were unsuccessful.



Marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms – that may help to explain the incident. Asian youths are supposedly such good students, and I assume good citizens, but in a group male bonding session they act just like American teenagers – they abandon their common sense. I have never liked fraternities and sororities, though I think the sororities don't do such mischievous pranks to their pledges.

I would like to see all purely social organizations thrown off campus, so people would have to join groups that have a social service, self-improvement, or other useful activity at their heart. When I was in high school there was a debating club, the band, the school paper, future teachers, etc. Those organizations should be headed by the University and ban hazing. I say that, because high school and college marching bands also engage in hazing sometimes. The only real group activity in most fraternities is their alcohol and drug parties, and they actively keep out non-members, so the regular student body would have little opportunity to come to one of their parties. Of course, there would be a major outcry if fraternities were banned, especially from alumni. Those extraverted, highly social people on campus wouldn't allow such a radical move.





Newly detected greenhouse gas is 7,000 times more potent than CO2 – NBC
Denise Chow LiveScience


Smog shrouds downtown Los Angeles, a city with one of the worst air quality levels in the country.

A greenhouse gas that is thought to have a potent impact on global warming was detected in trace amounts in the atmosphere for the first time, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Toronto discovered very small amounts of an industrial chemical, known as perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), in the atmosphere. While only traces of PFTBA were measured, the chemical has a much higher potential to affect climate change on a molecule-by-molecule basis than carbon dioxide (CO2), the most significant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and a major contributor to global warming, said study co-author Angela Hong, of the University of Toronto's department of chemistry. 

"We look at potency on a per-molecule basis, and what makes this molecule interesting is that, on a per-molecule basis, it's very high, relative to other compounds in the atmosphere," Hong told LiveScience.

Potency measured
This potency is measured as radiative efficiency, which describes how effectively a molecule is at preventing long-wave radiation from escaping back into space. The higher the radiative efficiency, the greater that molecule can influence climate. This value is then multiplied by the greenhouse gas's atmospheric concentration to determine its total climate impact. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]
"It takes into consideration where it would exist in the atmosphere, how it absorbs heat, and what else is in the atmosphere," Hong explained. "It's not an intrinsic property; it's a measure of how it would behave in the Earth system."

In these meteorological terms, PFTBA has the highest potential to affect climate of all known chemicals to date, the researchers said.
"Calculated over a 100-year time frame, a single molecule of PFTBA has the equivalent climate impact as 7,100 molecules of CO2," Hong said.
But, it's important to note that the amount of PFTBA in the atmosphere is still far less than global concentrations of carbon dioxide, she added.
"If we had more (PFTBA) in the atmosphere, we'd see more warming," she said. "This is very potent on a per-molecule basis, but there's very little of it in the atmosphere."
Just a pinch of PFTBA

For the study, the researchers collected atmospheric data from November 2012 to December 2012, and measured the proportion of PFTBA in the atmosphere at 0.18 parts per trillion. This means that for every 1 trillion air molecules, less than a full molecule of PFTBA is present. For comparison, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million earlier this year.

PFTBA has been used in electrical equipment since the mid-1900s. So far, there are no policies in place to regulate its use, particularly within the context of climate change, Hong said.

There are also no known ways to destroy or remove PFTBA from the atmosphere, and the chemical has a very long life span. Molecules of PFTBA could linger in the lower atmosphere for hundreds of years, according to the researchers.
Yet, much is still unknown about the chemical's history, including whether concentrations of PFTBA have changed over time.

"Our measurements are snapshots within the November to December 2012 period, so we can only see how things varied during that time," Hong said. "We don't have any historical measurements, so we can't project backward or forward."
The researchers hope their findings encourage others to study the chemical's behavior, and how it could affect global warming.

"This work is the first measurement ever, but we're not in the monitoring business," Hong said. "It would be really nice if we could get other people to measure and monitor PFTBA."

The study was published online Nov. 27 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.


It's impossible to keep up with the progress of science and technology -- it's moving too fast since the Industrial Revolution. So many of the problems to our environment that emerge are a byproduct of something that we do all the time without realizing the other effects of the activity. Farming is a major source of water pollution. Cows when they chew their cud belch up large quantities of CO2. Cars, buses and power plants are the main polluters. Every now and then a push emerges to make car exhaust cleaner by mandating changes on the auto industry, but it remains a major problem.

Our population growth is one of the main causes of all this pollution. We drive cars, eat large quantities of beef, negligently pour discarded motor oil and other chemicals into the city drains. The aggregate of these activities is overwhelming our environment, and every effort to change is too little, too late.

I am not encouraged. I can only watch it happen. I admit I drive a car and eat beef. I don't pour anything down the city drains or litter. I wish the population as a whole could be made more conscious of things that could be done. Most people in the US are too involved in their daily activities to care very much. It may be a lost cause.



­
Africa Wanders From Mandela's Path To Democracy – NPR
by Greg Myre

­ When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Africa's record on democracy was abysmal. One stark fact summed it up: Not a single African leader had ever lost his job at the ballot box in the three decades since African countries began receiving independence around 1960.

But with Mandela leading the way, South Africa became the most prominent example of the emerging democracies and open elections that spread across the continent in the 1990s.

The end of the Cold War also meant that the U.S. and the Soviet Union withdrew support for many African dictators. In some African states, this created the space for competitive politics. It other places, the dictators fell and the nations collapsed into chaos. Think Somalia.

So which way are the trend lines pointing today?
African nations are holding elections with greater regularity than ever before. However, a change of power through elections is still relatively rare and many authoritarian leaders have learned how to hold elections for show while making sure the preferred outcome is never in doubt.

In a eulogy for Mandela on Tuesday in South Africa, President Obama described him as the "last great liberator of the 20th century." Then, in a message directed at leaders across the continent, the U.S. president said it was not sufficient to simply praise Mandela.

"There are too many of us who happily embrace Madiba's legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality," Obama said, referring to Mandela by his clan name.

Democracies, At Least In Name
This year reflected the mixed picture and contradictory trends when it comes to democracy in Africa.

In Senegal, the African country that's perhaps been the most stable over the past half-century, challenger Macky Sall easily won the presidential runoff election in March 2012 over Abdoulaye Wade, a two-term incumbent whose third term was opposed by many voters. Both rounds of presidential voting were carried out smoothly.
Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe's election in July, President Robert Mugabe, who is 89 and has ruled for 33 years since independence, won another term. International observers described the election as flawed due to ballot box irregularities and intimidation by Mugabe's party.

"Africa is getting to the point where elections are becoming the norm in most countries," said Brooks Spector, a former U.S. diplomat who now lives in South Africa and writes about African politics for the website The Daily Maverick. "However, the record of governance in many countries is still very spotty."

Coups Outnumber Democratic Transitions
Coups are less common than they used to be, but African leaders are still more likely to be tossed out at the point of a gun than in a multiparty election.
In the Central African Republic in March, Muslim militias ousted President Francois Bozize, who is Christian. This marked the first time Muslims have come to power in a predominantly Christian nation. The ongoing fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands. French troops are now trying to restore order and the U.N. has voted to send in a peacekeeping force.

The Economist magazine last year judged there to be only one full African democracy — the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius — and 11 "flawed democracies" out of the more than 50 African nations.

The U.S. group Freedom House, which ranks the relative freedom of countries worldwide, said in its 2013 report that overall, conditions in Africa have declined for the past five years.

"While the region saw several significant gains, especially in West Africa, civil conflicts and the emergence in some countries of violent Islamist groups prevented an overall upgrade for political freedom," the report said.

Even In South Africa, Cynicism Grows
Next year, South Africa will hold its fifth election since the end of apartheid two decades ago. Vigorous debate in parliament is the norm, the media is aggressive and lively and ordinary citizens remain extremely proud of the country's democracy.
However, there's growing cynicism over corruption and the sense that the African National Congress, Mandela's party, has become complacent after so many years in full control of the government.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013
The ANC remains the overwhelming electoral favorite, even though President Jacob Zuma is so unpopular in some circles that he was repeatedly jeered and booed when he appeared at Mandela's memorial service.

Zuma has been involved in a series of controversies, alienating many South Africans. A government watchdog group is currently investigating $20 million in state spending to upgrade Zuma's private home. Zuma's office says it was for improved security, but reports say it also included a swimming pool and other luxuries.

The criticism directed at Zuma is seen as part of a larger frustration with many apartheid-era problems that remain unresolved: a lack of decent housing, high unemployment and a shortage of good schools. The government has been unable to get a handle on crime and corruption is seen as becoming more widespread and entrenched.
"You can't eat democracy," is a catchphrase for South Africans who support the country's electoral politics, but believe the government hasn't been able to deliver for millions of its impoverished citizens.



On the television news was a report on a white backlash that is occurring in South Africa, as white groups set up boot camps to train young whites for a race war. On the other hand, the following long article on genocide against white farmers is found at this web site – http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html. Wikipedia also has a long article on the subject. The Wikipedia article Rainbow Nation describes the image as a simplified and candy coated reality. The racial hatred on both sides continues.

The whites are, however, a small minority, so their ability to overwhelm the black factions is not great, it seems to me, and according to the genocide watch article, the police are not actively arresting and convicting the young blacks who have killed white farmers. The government has to enforce this “rainbow” or it will be a mere fiction. I hope civil war doesn't destroy the democracy that has been set up and the vision of Mandela for egalitarianism. It would be a shame for his influence to have been so temporary.




­ White House Hires A Crisis Manager, Easing Democratic Worries – NPR
by Mara Liasson

­ It's not big enough to be called a shakeup, but the new hire announced this week at the White House is important: John Podesta will come on board in January as a counselor to the president.

Podesta is a Democratic wise man, the founder of the Center for American Progress, a policy and personnel incubator for Democratic administrations, and he just started a new think tank on income inequality — the problem President Obama says will animate his second term.

Podesta is also a second-term crisis management specialist. He was Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, helping him survive impeachment.
His hiring has already soothed some jangled nerves among the current president's supporters in Washington.

"I thought, 'Fantastic,' " says Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's former press secretary. She is one of a small, inside-the-beltway group of Democrats who have been desperate for reassurance that the recently unsteady Obama White House was getting its act together.
With the Podesta announcement, the White House appears to have sent that message.
"I think they've known for a while that they need to reach out, they need to broaden their circle a little," Myers says. "The president has been famously reluctant to do that. So how do you widen the lens? One of the ways you do that is you reach out and you bring in new people, and it's very helpful to bring in people who come preloaded with tremendous experience."

A Fan Of Executive Powers
Podesta is not a completely new face in the Obama camp. He ran the president-elect's widely praised transition team in 2008 and 2009, and he's been advising the White House from the outside.

Heard On 'Weekend Edition Saturday'
In November 2012, host Scott Simon talked with John Podesta about the transition from the first Obama administration to the next. Podesta served as co-chair of President Obama's 2008 transition team.
 
For some time he's been telling the Obama team that as legislative action becomes increasingly less likely, it should focus more on using the president's executive powers. Podesta told NPR in January that Obama has plenty of authority under the Constitution to change and implement policy.

"I think that he's got a lot of cards to play, and I think he can be extremely successful," he said.

The White House has taken Podesta's advice — often to the frustration of Congress. With Podesta inside the administration, the president will probably do even more.
"The execution of government does make a difference," said Podesta in another NPR interview. "It sounds incremental, but in the end of the day, putting those points on the board will make a difference in terms of what the growth rate is, what the unemployment rate is."

GOP: Podesta Can't Change What's Already Broken
Execution of government is a Podesta focus — and lately it's been an embarassing weakness for the Obama administration.

Not surprisingly, Republicans dismissed the latest personnel move as a distraction, pointing to a series of troubles — from Syria to NSA eavesdropping and, above all, to the health care rollout — that have hurt the president's ratings on credibility and competence.

"I won't give the president advice on his own staff," says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, "but the problem here is the substance of his No. 1 issue. The issue he wanted to be most associated with is a failure, and no amount of shifting the chairs around on the Titanic is going to solve that problem."

Podesta can't erase the fact that the health care website didn't work or that the president made a promise that he now says ended up being inaccurate. But Democrat Steve Elmendorff says that Podesta can help — a lot.

"Nobody can make up for where they are," says Elmendorff, who was senior advisor to former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. "The president's admitted they've made some mistakes. The staff has admitted they made some mistakes, and they need to fix it. And what John can do is provide direction and a fresh set of eyes and ears on how to move forward and do the right thing."

Podesta and the White House have a lot on their plate for the new year. They've got to get the health care law working; they need to figure out how to help Democrats get through the 2014 elections with the least amount of damage; and then, starting with the president's State of the Union speech early next year, they need to map out the final chapter of the Obama presidency.


Another adviser never hurts, and Podesta has been a trusted helper to Obama and Clinton in the past. According to this article other Democrats approve of this move, so I do too.





­ Scientists Map Vast Reserves Of Freshwater Under The Seabed – NPR
by Alan Yu

­ Not all the water in the sea is seawater.
Scientists think there are vast reserves of fresh groundwater buried under the oceans — a potentially valuable resource for coastal cities that need freshwater.
A recent report in Nature estimates the amount of fresh groundwater around the world at about 120,000 cubic miles — that's 100 times more than all the groundwater that has been pumped up from wells since the 1900s. The reserves are scattered across coastal regions around the world.

Researchers drilled down at various spots and used modeling techniques to calculate how much water there is altogether. The water isn't immediately drinkable, but it's much less salty than seawater and therefore cheaper to desalinate.

The study's lead author, Vincent Post of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training in Australia, says scientists knew such freshwater reserves existed but thought they formed only under rare conditions, according to ScienceDaily.
"Our research shows that fresh and brackish aquifers below the seabed are actually quite a common phenomenon," Post tells the science news site. He adds, "Knowing about these reserves is great news because this volume of water could sustain some regions for decades."

Two-thirds of the world's population will be living under water stress conditions by 2025, according to estimates by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In particular, coastal regions of the U.S., South America, the southern parts of Africa, Europe and Australia could see their water supply drop by 20 percent or more by 2050, according to the United Nations Environmental Program.

This isn't the first time scientists have found fresh groundwater buried in the seafloor, but the study is the first global survey of all the known undersea reserves, says Mark Person, professor of hydrology at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He says scientists have made such discoveries around the world — including in coastal regions off Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Indonesia and Tanzania.

"There's just been an explosion of interest in documenting all these instances of freshwater," says Person, one of the study's authors.

So how did all this water get there? Several million years ago, the sea level was a lot lower, so rainwater and runoff from glaciers filled up the water tables in these areas. Over time, sea levels rose and covered up the aquifers, which are sealed in by layers of sediment.

And why is this just coming to light? The depth of these reserves ranges from 650 to 3 miles. Person points out oil companies have to drill much deeper than that to find oil, so their instruments are not turned on at the level of these freshwater reserves.
Post tells ScienceDaily that there are two ways to get to the water: "Build a platform out at sea and drill into the seabed, or drill from the mainland or islands close to the aquifers."

That's not likely to come cheap.
While places such as Cape May, N.J., are already drilling and desalinating freshwater underground for use, getting to freshwater reserves under the oceans will probably be more expensive, says Kenneth Miller, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Rutgers University.

Miller's research has involved drilling into freshwater reserves offshore, and he says drilling three holes about 2,500 feet down cost around $13 million. And some reserves will be saltier – and need more processing — than others, depending on what kinds of sediment surrounds them. Finer grains seal in fresher water while coarser grains hold saltier water, Miller says.

"[Tapping the freshwater reserves] represents a potential alternative that may be economic," says Person, the study co-author. He notes, however, that the scientists have not yet tapped into one of these reserves and that this is a non-renewable resource.

And the study points out that water is relatively cheap now, but these reserves could be important if coastal areas have less water in the future.



Even if we do tap into groundwater under the sea it's likely to be partly salty, and it is a non-renewable source of water, so we need to be investing in desalination plants soon if not now, as Cape May is already doing, which could process sea water as well and will be needed to provide for our ever growing population. It could be useful at the present in areas that are often drought stricken, such as Florida and Texas. The more experience we have with desalination, the more of the “glitches” in the process will be worked out when 2050 comes. 2030 is only 15 years from now and global warming is expected to produce even more droughts.