Sunday, March 2, 2014

The reality show known as New Jersey: Port Authority Show Business?

The former Port Authority officials (five who are no longer with the agency and one who is still there) outlined the strategy and execution of the plan in separate interviews with The Star-Ledger. Each asked that their names not be used because they feared repercussions from speaking out even after they had left the agency.
The first proposal disclosed to the public, the former officials explained, was deliberately inflated. Also planned was Christie and Cuomo’s shocked — shocked! — reaction and an unusual one-day series of eight public hearings. Those hearings were all held during the morning or evening rush hours to discourage attendance by irate commuters, but were stacked with union members who backed the hike because of the construction jobs it would fund.
                          Port Authority officials: Battle over toll hikes was all for show

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Breaking ChristieGate, BridgeGate, UPDATED!!!!

02/24/14

1.)  The Many Lies of Chris Christie

02/22/14

1.)  Document: Month-long traffic study for Fort Lee 

02/21/14:

1.) Frustration boils over at Christie's town-hall-style event [video] 

2.) At Chris Christie town hall, woman says officials confiscated her 'Resign Christie' signs

3.) For Christie, Awkward Return to a Setting He Once Ruled

4.) Chris Christie's Mansion Fund Collected Millions From Political Favor Seekers

5.)  2 Quick Thoughts About the Christie - NJ Scandal(s)

6.)  ChristieGate: P.A. Chief Samson Caught in a Lie, Changes Story Yet Again

7.)  Governor Christie's Bridge-gate scandal lawyer, Randy Mastro, withdraws from PA suit in conflict

8.) More: Chris Christie's Mansion Fund Collected Millions From Political Favor Seekers

02/18/14/: 

1.) GWB scandal: Newly uncensored messages under review by NJ lawmakers:Committee has full documents redacted by Wildstein and are now focusing on Sen. Kevin O'Toole's role 

2.) Police Union Implicated in Bridgegate Owed Hundreds of Jobs to Christie

3.) Bill Maher is launching his own personal protest against MSNBC's wall-to-wall coverage of the George Washington Bridge scandal.

4.)  The mayor of Fort Lee said today he will not cooperate with lawyers hired by Gov. Chris Christie’s office to investigate the George Washington Bridge scandal

5.) Walmart hires Christie cronies to turn no into yes

 02/13/14:

1.) Chris Christie's Entire Career Reeks It's not just the bridge 

 

Thursday, February 13, 2014

GMO/IMO: A disgusting, unhealthy, profit inspired agricultural technology and their "studies."

Go here for the full story:  About Those Industry Funded GMO Studies . . .

Let's put aside the fact that this line of thinking would mean that while fossil fuel behemoths Exxon Mobil (market cap:$394.83B), Chevron (market cap:$215.45B) and BP (market cap:$150.07B) (total: $760.35B) have been completely stymied in their efforts to buy the scientific consensus they desire on climate change, but a medium large company like Monsanto (market cap: $57.43B) has been able to manipulate tens of thousands of scientists performing thousands of studies for three decades with no whistleblowers resulting in a scientific consensus that has been bent completely to their will. Let's put that aside.
Instead, let's first take a look at the evidence, before moving to unravel some of pretzeled logic often employed to dismiss the weight of that evidence in support of the scientific consensus on GMOs.
Take for example the EU. Politicians in the EU aren't that friendly to GMOs and they wanted to be very careful about them. So they ponied up EURO 200 million over the course of decade to look into the matter. The studies they carried out are neatly summarized in A Decade of EU Funded GMO Research [pdf].
More links from the author of the above :

A Decade of EU Funded GMO Research (2000-2010) [pdf].
European Commission | Directorate-General for Research
Studies with independent funding
Biofortified.org
Assessment of the health impact of GM plant diets in long-term and multigenerational animal feeding trials: A literature review
Chelsea Snella, et al. | Food and Chemical Toxicology | March 2012
A Meta-Analysis of Effects of Bt Crops on Honey Bees
Michelle Marvier, et al. | PLOS One | 9 January 2008
Toxicity studies of genetically modified plants: a review of the published literature
José L. Domingo | Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition | 2007
A literature review on the safety assessment of genetically modified plants
José L. Domingo, Jordi Giné Bordonaba | Environment International | May 2011
An overview of the last 10 years of genetically engineered crop safety research
Alessandro Nicolia, et al | Critical Review of Biotechnology | 16 November 2013
Association of financial or professional conflict of interest to research outcomes on health risks or nutritional assessment studies of genetically modified products
Johan Diels, et al | Food Policy | April 2011
Unintended Compositional Changes in Genetically Modified (GM) Crops: 20 Years of Research
Rod Herman, et al | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry | 15 February 2013
Single study syndrome:€“ clutching at convenient confirmation
Graham Coghill | Science or Not | 23 October 2012
[cross posted at REALFOOD.ORG]
And some more:
Voluntary Instead of Mandated GMO Food Labeling: The Industry’s Latest
Farmers Fight World’s First Landmark GMO Cross-Pollination Contamination 

Christie Scandals Log: Ongoing


 01/13/14 

1.) Chris Christie's Entire Career Reeks It's not just the bridge 

 

The plight of the butterfly. Not that fly actually!

Read all about it here with links and such----Over Easy: The Monsanto Butterfly Effect

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Another "old wives tale" verified: Nature can't be denied!


The implications are obvious.  War, crime, abuse are all a part of a biological gift that just can't stop giving.  And they keep giving their gifts of stress, mental illness, disability and disease for several generations.  Illness in our society can influence the quality and length of our lives.  It is the manifest concern and business of all citizens.  Science News reports in this month's issue:

 Along with eye color, height and dimples, parents’ fears can pass down to children, scientists report December 1 in Nature Neuroscience. The results, from experiments with mice, suggest how fallout from a person’s traumatic experiences might ripple through generations.
 Mouse parents learned to associate the scent of orange blossoms with a shock. Their children and their grandchildren startled in response to the scent — a sign of fear — even though they had never smelled it before. Offspring also had more neurons that detect the orange blossom scent than mice whose parents weren’t exposed to the scent.

Sperm cells alone can deliver this fear message, study authors Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler of Emory University found. DNA in the sperm cells was imprinted with this fearful association: A gene that codes for the molecule that detects the orange blossom odor carried a chemical stamp that may have changed its behavior. 

Information from parents’ experiences could be important for survival. Knowing that a particular scent signals a nasty shock could help an animal avoid trouble without having to endure the shock firsthand. Ancestral experience could be an under-appreciated influence on animals’ and people’s brains and behaviors, the authors write. (my bold)