TATIANA GULENKINA PHOTOGRAPHY
Inter-American Defense Board Conference on Regional Fault Lines (Photos)
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21st Century Public Intelligence 3.1
SchwartzReport: Bees Make 70 of 90 Human Foods Possible — US Lost One Third of All Bee Colonies in 2012, While EU Striving to Protect Their Bees
01 Agriculture, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Although there is still great resistance as you can see in this report slowly, at least in Europe, the truth about the role of pesticides and herbicides in the decline of the bees is being recognized. Here in the U.S. nothing is happening, even as the collapse of bee colonies increases. About one-third of bee colonies was lost this last year. Of the 90 plant food stuffs humans eat 70 are utterly dependent on bee poll! ination.
EU Proposal to Protect Bees Stirs Hornets' Nest
DON MELVIN – The Associated Press
BRUSSELS – An attempt to protect Europe's bee population has kicked up a hornets' nest.
On Thursday, the EU's commissioner for health and consumer policy, Tonio Borg, proposed to restrict the use of three pesticides – called nenicotinoids – to crops to which bees are not attracted.
The three pesticides were clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiametoxam; the crops from which they would be banned include sunflowers, rapeseed, cotton and maize. The policy would take effect July 1 for the EU's 27 nations and be reviewed after two years.
But while environmentalists welcomed Borg's proposal as an important first step, Borg's spokesman, Frederic Vincent, confirmed that some countries reacted unenthusiastically, preferring further study to immediate action. He declined to identify them.
Marco Contiero of the environmental group Greenpeace said Britain was firmly opposed, and Germany and Spain were either opposed or wanted more time to consider.
Luis Morago of the advocacy group Avaaz, meanwhile, condemned what he called “spurious” British and German opposition and said 2.2 million people had signed an Internet petition calling for a comprehensive ban on the pesticides.
Beekeepers have reported an unusual decline in bees over the past decade, particularly in Western Europe, the European Food Safety Authority says. Bees are critically important to the environment, sustaining biodiversity by providing pollination for a wide range of crops and wild plants – including most of the food crops in Europe, it says.
SchwartzReport: Get Police OUT of the Schools
04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Law EnforcementHere is the latest in the school-to-prison pipeline, part of the New American Slavery trend. This time the outrage comes from
The United States is not just the number one jailer in the world. It also incarcerates juveniles at a rate that eclipses every other country. Evidence has long been building that schools use the correctional system as a misplaced mechanism for discipline, with children being sent to detention facilities for offenses as minor as wearing the wrong color socks to school. A juvenile county chief judge testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that these are not isolated incidents, but rather systemic trends that bombard prosecutors and courts with a glut of cases in which kids pose no danger but merely ‘make adults mad”:
When I took the bench in 1999, I was shocked to find that approximately one-third of the cases in my courtroom were school-related, of which most were low risk misdemeanor offenses. Upon reviewing our data, the increase in school arrests did not begin until after police were placed on our middle and high school campuses in 1996-well before the horrific shootings at Columbine High School. The year before campus police, my court received only 49 school referrals. By 2004, the referrals increased over 1,000 percent to 1,400 referrals, of which 92% were misdemeanors mostly involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disrupting public school.
Yoda: Volunteerism in Russia
Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Government bad, , volunteers good?
By Will Englund and Kathy Lally, Published: February 2
SchwartzReport: One Third of Americans (USA) Qualify as Idiots
Cultural Intelligence, IdiocyI am having a hard time accepting this, it depresses me and makes me uncomfortable but data is data, and I am afraid I am going to have to accept that about a third of the country are too stupid to handle the 21st century. Here is some more data: Fifty per cent of the people in the U.S. have an I.Q. of 100 or less, and about 15 per cent have an I.Q. lower than 85. That didn't matter! much in the 13th century, but it matters a lot in the 21st.
One-third of Americans Believe God Decides who Wins Sporting Events
DAVID FERGUSON – The Raw Story
A recent study by the Center for Public Religion has found that nearly 3 out of every 10 Americans believes that God decides the outcome of sporting events by favoring players who are virtuous and who God perceives as good.
According to the study, ‘Americans are less likely to believe that God plays a role in the outcome of sporting events than they are to believe God rewards religious athletes. While only about 3-in-10 (27%) Americans, believe that God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event, a majority (53%) believe that God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success, compared to 42% who disagree.”
‘We can’t just gloss over this,” said Dennis Traynor of Acronym TV. ‘A majority of U.S. citizens in 2013 think that the all-knowing creator of the universe is sitting in the heavens looking down upon the extreme poverty and misery that encompass the world that he created in six days and sees that half of his beautiful creatures live on less than $2.50 a day and 80 percent of humanity living on less than $10 a day and not only gives a shit what happens on Super Bowl Sunday, but will be rewarding one team over the other based on the purity and faithfulness of the football players’ religion on either team.”
SchwartzReport: US DoE Proposes to Recycle Radioactive Metal Into Consumer Products Secretary Chu’s Final Disgraceful Act + Eugenics & GMO RECAP
03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Officers CallSeveral readers sent me different versions of this story and, at first, I thought this is not possible. These stories are some kind of urban legend. But, to my amazement, it turns out this is true. It is hard to believe anyone, even the greediest, could be this stupid. But there you are.
I urge you to contact your Representative and Senators, and to sign the petition. This DOE plan is stupidity at an almost surreal level.
Take action against DOE's radioactive metal “recycling” scheme!
On a vital radioactive waste battlefront, NIRS has put out an alert against a scheme to “recycle” vast quantities of radioactive metal from across the nuclear weapons complex into the consumer product recycling stream. NIRS asks, “Will the next zipper on your pants be radioactive? How about your silverware?”, and explains:
“The Department of Energy wants to mix radioactive metal from nuclear weapons factories with clean recycled metal and let it enter into general commerce–where it could be used for any purpose.
It's a foot in the door for revival of a vast–and discredited–radioactive waste deregulation plan defeated in 1992.en and children.
Yoda: Organization of American States Dead? Chile Playing Both Sides Cuba to Lead the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)?
01 Brazil, 02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace IntelligenceSpanish, Force Speaks. English Not.
CELAC Rising: The Monroe Doctrine Turned on Its Head?
Last Monday, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC) met for its second summit in Santiago, Chile, one year after its founding meeting in Caracas, Venezuela in 2011. The Summit is the culmination of roughly a decade of efforts to create a viable mechanism for greater integration in the Americas, and particularly a year of planning by a “troika” of representatives from, believe it or not, Chile, Venezuela and Cuba. They were able to pull it off successfully, despite their obvious differences, and all 33 presidents or heads of state from the region attended, with the exception of Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, who sent a letter with his Vice-President Nicolás Maduro.
CELAC explicitly excludes the US and Canada, a historic first for a hemispheric organization with huge symbolic importance, because it answers a long-standing dream for unity of the subcontinent that harks back to Simón Bolívar and the struggles for independence from the European colonial powers. Beyond the symbolism, however, it is strategically crucial: It means that there is now a subcontinent bloc of developing nations that can speak with one voice,, and also serve as a counterweight to US political and economic hegemony.
