I’ve been engaging in a little debate over at the Oil Drum, on the relative merits and risks of nuclear plants (for generating electric power, that is). My primary pro-nuke “learned friend” has come right out and said openly that in his (I am pretty sure he is male) opinion, Chernobyl and Fukushima are no [...]

a couple of my Durham friends do some cultural crit… Dystopian novels—stories of the future going badly wrong—have apparently now surpassed the vampire and fantasy genres in the young adult fiction market. The books, and the phenomenon of their popularity, have provoked numerous discussions online, in schools, and in the sort of serious, adult magazines [...]

Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed [...]

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park. Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan “Keith” McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry [...]

De’s post on the new peasant revolt got me thinking. Let’s talk about this. In some depth. Raj Patel on Food Sovereignty The latest enclosure scheme: On 18-20 April 2011, a gathering of some 200 farmland investors, government officials and international civil servants will meet at the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC to discuss [...]

I just did an article for my employing content mill on the ecological effects of the European starling. Pretty interesting. At any rate, they are among the USDA’s top 100 invasive species, numbering well over 200 million in the US. I guess they compete pretty hard for food with others, snatch cavity nests from other [...]

Hat tip to Henry for alerting us to Ellen LaConte’s piece on producing your own food. linked below. This is catching on here in our new little town of around 20,000 souls. Hereabouts it’s a church thing. The Adrian Ecumenical Forum has just begun making donation community gardens, one 500 square footer that will be [...]

Out of sight, out of mind- right? Well that’s what Big Ag companies in Florida are hoping for. SB 1246 introduced on the 8th by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa would make it a first-degree felony to photograph a farm without consent. This is the sort of legislation that will turn down the exposure on factory [...]

The United States has shown real hypocrisy in its treatment of two Arab revolutions – Libya and Bahrain. In Libya, the U.S. and its European allies have decided to go in with all guns blazing. With Bahrain it’s a different story as the Americans refuse to lift a finger to evict Saudi Arabia after their [...]

Here’s the NYT story: Despite warnings from President Obama that his return could cause yet another tumultuous political development here, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice exiled former president of Haiti, was preparing to leave his adopted home in South Africa on Thursday to go back to Haiti. FULL And here is a piece by [...]