Fighting talk: The new propaganda

Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game, argues Robert Fisk

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror... 

Jackson Browne: We are the spill

July 12th - DailyMail.co.uk

I was struck the other day by a comparison made on 5 Gyres, the blog site of scientists and activists who are working to draw attention to the growing concentration of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. 

According to the scientists' and activists' estimate, the amount of oil used to produce plastic every day is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every day from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. 

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer

May 6, 2010, NY Times- By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The President's Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.

No new nukes -- plants, that is

The Los Angeles Times

Nuclear power plants are being pushed as part of climate-change legislation. But the focus should be on renewable power sources, which are getting cheaper and don't produce radioactive waste.

As the Senate debates climate legislation that could reinvent the country's energy infrastructure, it is richly ironic that lawmakers who consider themselves rock-ribbed fiscal conservatives are among the strongest backers of nuclear plants -- a vastly expensive, inefficient and dangerous source of energy that requires massive taxpayer bailouts.

Designs for new UK nuclear reactors are unsafe, claims watchdog

By Terry Macalister - The Guardian

Major setback for energy plans as report finds flaws in US and French models 

Britain's main safety regulator threw the government's energy plans into chaos tonight by damning the nuclear industry's leading designs for new plants. The Health and Safety Executive said it could not recommend plans for new reactors because of wide-ranging concerns about their safety.

A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030

by Mark Z. Jacobson & Mark A. Delucchi (Scientific American Magazine)

A Path to Sustainable Energy
by 2030; November 2009; Scientific American Magazine; by Mark Z.
Jacobson; Mark A. Delucchi; 8 Page(s)

In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to
agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most
effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil
fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that
such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement.
We think they can.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

By Kitt Doucette (Rolling Stone Magazine)

A floating mass of trash twice the size of Texas has turned the Pacific into
an ocean of plastic, killing sea life - and working its way up the food chain. 

The current print edition of Rolling Stone.

Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle

-By Anna Lenzer (Mother Jones)

Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?

View entire article on Mother Jones

Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

November 8, 2009

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies - to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That's a lot of estrogen.

Obtaining the Playlist from Guantanamo

By Lawrence Iser (huffingtonpost.com)

The rock duo Heart, Ann and Nancy Wilson, were upset last fall when the GOP borrowed their '70s hit Barracuda as the theme for VP candidate Sarah Palin, and used it without their permission. So were John Mellencamp, the band ABBA and a host of other artists, who complained about the use of their songs during McCain-Palin campaign appearances.

It's a Nuclear Retreat, not Renaissance

Another Major Setback for "Nuclear Renaissance": Industry Goes 0-6 in 2009 Efforts to Overturn State Bans on New Nuclear Reactors.

Our Plastic Legacy Afloat

NYTimes Editorial

August 27, 2009 : Until recently, the earth had seven continents. To that number, humans have added an eighth - an amorphous, floating mass of waste plastic trapped in a gyre of currents in the north Pacific, between Hawaii and Japan. Researchers have estimated that this garbage patch may contain as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris and is perhaps twice the size of Texas, if not larger.

Readings, June 2009

1. The Kill Company by Raffi Khatchadourian in the New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2009
2. The Sheikh Down by Shane Bauer in Mother Jones, September + October 2009
3. A Just Cause (Does not Equal) A Just War by Howard Zinn in The Progressive, July 2009

Readings, May 2009

1. US Torture: Voices From The Black Sites - The ICRC Report On The Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" In CIA Custody By Mark Danner, in The New York Review Of Books, April 9, 2009
2. The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means - The ICRC Report On The Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" In CIA Custody By Mark Danner, in The New York Review Of Books, April 30, 2009
3. Let My People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
4. Bandit Roads: into the lawless heart of Mexico by Richard Grant

Readings, April 2009

1. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (a novel)
2. From A to X A Story In Letters by John Berger (a novel)
3. A Perfect Storm - The Economic Crisis Slams The Non-Profit World by Eyal Press (an article from The Nation Magazine)
4. Hell On Earth by Pico Iyer (an article from The New York Review of Books)
   

Readings, March 2009

1. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
2. The Second Plane by Martin Amis
3. Nine Ways We Can Talk to Cuba by Center for Democracy in the Americas
4. Speaking in Tongues by Zadie Smith
5. The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Holldobler and Edward Wilson, review by Tim Flannery
6. The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll, review by Fred Halliday