Translate

Thursday, August 25, 2011

20

Blog Image
"There's Justice In The Universe"
Twenty years ago, the single-hulled tanker ‘Exxon Valdez’ ran aground and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil.  This led to  the phasing in of double-hulled tankers by all  of Exxon’s competitors.  Sunoco, Conoco Phillips and Chevron did not use any single-hulled tankers last year; but, Exxon still does.  Last year, Exxon used more single hulled tankers than its nine largest rivals combined.

Exxon defends this by saying that this saves the company $18 million a year.  For  Exxon, which made $45 billion in profits last year, that’s less than one penny per share.  You’d think their reputation would be worth more than that.

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/26/ghost-ship/
"Union dues.

The mission of American unions may have been to improve the working situation for American workers but the BUSINESS is union dues.

About the only kind of growth in the union business for a long time has been in unionizing foreign workers. The unions made especially strong in-roads among illegal workers.  Thanks to a loophole in the 1986 law that made it illegal to hire an illegal alien, it is perfectly legal for a union to provide membership to an illegal alien.  But the unions are hopeful that they will be able to get union dues out of a lot more of the 8 million illegal aliens if an amnesty can be secured for them."

http://www.youtube.com/numbersusa

http://www.americanworker.org/
Sometimes a child may suffer from epilepsy so severe that the only relief that doctors can offer is to open the skull and slice completely through the ‘corpus callosum’ (the flat bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain)…. and remove the brain hemisphere in  which the seizures start.  After surgery, the space soon fills with cerebrospinal fluid.  It may take a year of physical therapy to recover from losing a hemisphere.
Article containing more:
www.tinyurl.com/d3rrfx

The human brain is a jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk-heap of prototype brains still used by lower species.  At the top are the most nimble parts:
*The 'prefrontal cortex' -- thinks and analyzes.
**Hippocampus -- makes and holds onto our immediate memories.
***Basal Ganglia (at the bottom) -- nearly identical to reptilian brains, this controls voluntary, but barely conscious, actions...

In situations involving familiar, routine motor skill activities, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as sort of an autopilot.  When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on  the way to work, the basal ganglia is operating the car; that's why you'll sometimes find yourself having arrived at work without a clear recollection of the route you took, or the scenery you saw.

The Week / 04-03-2009
Illegal charcoal making causes deforestation that negatively impacts the mountain gorillas’ habitat.  One way to stem this activity is the low tech making of bio-fuel briquettes. These are little donut-shaped bricks that are made from biological matter like leaves and manure. These briquettes burn hotter and last longer than charcoal does.

Donations to help the local populations establish more press machine work sites are needed.  For project’s details:

http://gorilla.cd/

www.tinyurl.com/d7d6lp

www.tinyurl.com/ca3leg

www.tinyurl.com/c5gz9p
Millions of years ago, 'Proconsul africanus' lived in Africa. Geologic rifting in east Africa created a mountain barrier that separated the proconsul population into 2 groups. Those on the western divide evolved into apes.  Loosely speaking, those on the eastern slope evolved into hominids -- they had access to the seashore where they incorporated into their diet sea foods rich in essential amino acids that enhanced brain development as they mastered primitive tool use to better procure these and other foods.
One of many sources:
http://www.helium.com/items/532480-an-overview-of-human-origins-and-evolution-in-africa
page #2:
http://www.helium.com/items/532480-an-overview-of-human-origins-and-evolution-in-africa?page=2

Continuing Human Evolution
After 'HomoSapiens' began to recover in numbers after our near extinction 75,000 years ago [the ‘bottleneck’ created by the explosion of the super volcano Toba], we differentiated into 3 basic racial groups (Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid) in 3 different parts of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

A dense planet that is composed of mainly rock and is lacking a thick, Jupiter-like atmosphere is  called a ‘super-earth’ type planet.  Of the 340 exoplanets discovered thus far, 20 are super-earths (with a wide range of temperatures and atmospheric conditions) --- one of which is call Corot-7b / about 450 light-years distant.  It is the smallest of the super-earth planets found (less than twice the diameter of earth).  It rotates with one side always pointed at its yellow-orange sun.  That side is perpetually about 3000 degrees (F.) -- which melts rock into a sea of lava.  It would have a mineral-vapor laden atmosphere that condenses as lava precipitation towards the cold side.

50+ billion super-earth class planets are estimated to exist in our galaxy.

Discover; May 2009 Issue
In 1991, Somalia descended into war after the fall of the regime of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. During the next decade, some European and Asian countries took advantage of the chaos in Somalia and sent their commercial fleets to fish in Somali waters.
Other European countries sent to Somalia thousands of drums of toxic waste, including nuclear waste, to be dumped at sea. Without a coast guard to monitor and prevent such illegal activities, Somali fishermen began organizing and arming themselves to confront waste dumpers and to collect fees from foreign vessels taking fish out of their waters. What began as a legitimate fight against foreign exploitation turned into a criminal enterprise when everyone discovered its lucrative potential… attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia more than doubled from 2007 to 2008. According to the United Nations, Somalia's pirate gangs raked in roughly $25 million to $30 million last year alone.

http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/PiratesUN

http://law.lexisnexis.com/webcenters/RuleofLawResourceCenter/Issues-Spotlight/Somali-Pirates-Does-the-Rule-of-Law-Apply-to-the-High-Seas
http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/cheerleader.asp

That's my kind of gal.
"Many climate change skeptics point to the current extreme cold and wintry weather in Europe, and earlier Arctic blasts in North America, as proof that there is no global warming.

But climate experts have long predicted that wide swings in heat and cold, as well as drought and flood, will become more and more frequent worldwide as the average global temperature warms due to greenhouse gasses. 

NASA’s Goddard Institute has processed the weather observations for 2008 and found it was the 9th warmest on record, despite seeming to have been much cooler than any in the recent string of record hot years.

That pause in our warming climate last year prompted some to proclaim that it was proof global warming doesn’t exist. But NASA points to the La NiƱa ocean cooling in the Pacific as the primary cause of 2008’s and early 2009’s brief global cooling."

www.earthweek.com/2009/ew090213/ew090213h.html
www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensofaq.shtml#present
Increases in diseases like childhood asthma and autism cannot be due to major shifts in the human gene pool.  One pollutant, mercury, is  expelled into the atmosphere & returns to earth in precipitation.  There are 320 other common pollutants -- flame retardants, PCBs, phthalates (found in plastics, shampoos, soaps, lotions, deodorants, etcetera).  When these interact with other environmental influences, such as diet and stress, maladies creep in.  Studies of how thousands of human genes interact are beginning to reveal much -- but one thing remains clear:
"we're slowly poisoning ourselves"
... from April 2009 Discover Magazine

[I guess that's one form of population control.]