Kasztanka, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski's favorite combat mare, was stuffed upon her death in 1927 and after World War II was destroyed, allegedly on the orders of Piłsudski's enemy, Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski.
...a spokeswoman for the federal Food and Drug Administration tells the Anchorage Daily News that the ocean is so huge, and Alaska fisheries so far away, that there is no realistic threat. Alaska's food safety program manager, Ron Klein, says the FDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have demonstrated that Alaskans have no cause for worry. Klein says that based on the work they're doing, no sampling or monitoring of our fish is necessary
"...based on the work they're doing." What kind of work? Does it include sampling? They just said it wasn't necessary, so no. Blanket assurances from officials are always reassuring.
It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted? Answering such a question — the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark — is anything but simple.
"USGS Confirms Himalayan Glaciers Are Melting & Climate Change is to Blame"
"Lomborg: Just Kidding. We Do Need Climate Action Now" "Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change" Convenient how this asshole changes his mind right after his bullshit was used to derail climate change action.
I'm beginning to think that blogging may be bad for my psychic health. You read more, make an effort to get better informed and share the fruits of your inquiry, and it seems all you get for your efforts is a more vivid sense of how truly screwed and helpless we are. Not so long ago a friend asked me why I thought so many people invested so much intellectual energy in the distractions of pop culture, and I offered the opinion that it was an act of denial, because it might help people to deal with living in a society that is in a long-term decline and in which ordinary people are essentially powerless to do anything about it. Is this actually true? Naturally I hope not, and that I'm wrong, like the people who predicted an uncontrollable population explosion in the 1970s.
What Rob occasionally talks about regarding the tightening of the internet, appears to be starting down under:
Adam Curtis links to an early 70s documentary about the 1947 passage of the Exodus, which was also intercepted outside territorial waters. The Exodus, carrying Jewish refugees from a port in Marseilles, was intercepted by the British who were enforcing an immigration limit on Palestine. No, this is not the Hollywood film with Paul Newman.
More than half of the federal judges in districts where the bulk of Gulf oil spill-related lawsuits are pending have financial connections to the oil and gas industry, complicating the task of finding judges without conflicts to hear the cases, an Associated Press analysis of judicial financial disclosure reports shows.
I mean in the gulf, and the currents of the world's oceans. They say the slick is bigger than the states of Maryland and Delaware combined, so I don't think it's an idle question. A commenter recently asked me why I reference Xymphora, objecting because of his views on Israel. While I am inclined to partly agree with her, I note that he also is a valuable resource in other respects, and gets a lot of things right, like in his discussion of the oil spill crisis.
Gawker: "The Environmental Protection Agency ordered BP to stop using the toxic dispersant Corexit to break up their oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico. BP decided to keep on using it. And why not? They're basically in charge down there.
That is essentially what Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland discovered when she took a trip down to Grand Isle, Louisiana, in the hopes of getting to Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge. Except that every time she tried to get to Elmer's Island, a funny thing happened: The cops stopped her. Why?
...BP is now regulating access to a state-owned and operated wildlife refuge. Why? "It's BP's oil." That is a quote, from BP flack Barbara Martin. BP now can prevent journalists from going to Elmer's Island unattended, because they own the oil that is ruining it. "
So BP has usurped the state and federal government's functions, with little to no official reaction against them. I was reminded of this 2008 essay, "From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age" [pdf link] from the Army's Strategic Studies Institute, in which author Phil Williams argues that in this new century the primacy of the state will be reduced and powerful forces including international terrorism and organized crime will create a new dark age. I don't remember where I first came across this essay, but it sounds a little like a rehash of Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, which he quotes.
Also, I note that neither Williams nor Kaplan seem willing to consider the possibility that some US policies such as empowering contractor armies or reckless oil companies might actually cause disorder, even if only inadvertently. They're both smart guys, surely they have a capacity to at least wonder about stuff like that, right? And they both take it as a given that the US must take an active interventionist role beyond our borders. (Of course they're talking military, not ecological interventionism.)
