“’That stuff is bad news,’ my friends told me. ‘It’ll mess you up, even kill you.’ But I didn’t listen. I needed a fix, and I needed it soon. The place where I used to score was shut down, and it was imperative that I find a new connection. I hit the streets, and it didn’t take long to find someone who was holding.” (08/20/08)
“One of the demonstration sports of this year’s Olympics has been grousing about Beijing’s pollution, speculating on what air quality will be like tomorrow, asking athletes about their breathing, and otherwise pondering particulates in the air. There’s certainly no doubt that Beijing’s air is gross. Yesterday was a pretty good day, but according to the World Bank, the city’s air quality is much worse than Athens or Barcelona on average, with about twice as much particulate matter in the air as both those former hosts of the Games. Pulmonologist Dr. Janis Schaeffer says Beijing’s air quality is 30 percent worse than famously smoggy Los Angeles. Even as they make grave faces about the problems air pollution has caused, commentators marvel at the efficiency and thoroughness of the preparation for this year’s Games, unlike the nail-biting delays and general bumbling in Athens four years ago.” (08/22/08)
“For the last few days, I have been chewing over this short Financial Times article about the global economic quandary created by high oil prices. The item is informative. The rub is that oil-producing nations tend to save money rather than invest it. When oil-consuming nations send their petrodollars abroad, the capital essentially disappears from the market, and global demand falls, potentially slowing the world economy. The solution to this problem — massive investment — creates another one: How should producers invest money from super-high oil prices? That’s interesting. That’s not what drives me nuts. This is what drives me nuts: To illustrate just how expensive oil is, the writer begins with this lede: ‘At today’s prices the value of oil in the ground exceeds the combined value of all the world’s equity and debt markets.’” (08/21/08)
“In weighing the benefits of each nominee, conversation has largely focused on the various roles this candidate will have to fill: The candidate should be a safe choice, they say, able to help Sen. Obama gain an audience in parts of the south, and to lend him credibility on foreign policy — for many, the largest gap in the senator’s resume. Absent from this conversation has been a weighing the various VP candidates’ environmental record. Where there ought to be lively discussion, there is — listen closely now — crickets. This reflects a larger silence on climate change, in which the media trails far behind Americans’ climate concerns.” (08/19/08)
“Apparently the UK is the world’s sixth largest importer of water. This, it is claimed, is affecting drier areas of the world where water resources are either already stressed or very likely to become so in the near future. As such, we are now being asked to factor in our water footprint to our daily shop. Businesses are likewise being urged to evaluate their water footprints and take steps to reduce water consumption. Needless to say, a much simpler solution would be to treat water supplies as an economic good, by making water demand less independent of users’ willingness to pay for it.” (08/22/08)
“While controversy and discord between the two major political parties about energy policy play out in the media, in reality they do not disagree at the level of principle. The current energy debate is a skirmish between those who advocate energy socialism without drilling (or with some drilling if needed as a political bargaining chip) and those who advocate energy socialism with drilling. Neither major presidential candidate advocates a free market in energy.” (08/22/08)
“When I lived in New York City, I used to marvel at the weeds that would force their way up through sidewalk cracks. What a will to live, I thought: From clumps of dirt crammed between concrete slabs, these vigorous shoots fended off the hard, slapping heels of a thousand rushing city dwellers, just to claim a place in the sun. The effort to save South Central Community Farm in Los Angeles reminds me of those defiant survivors. Stepped on by the city, evicted two ago years by a developer who gained title to the land in a sweetheart deal (as I laid out in this 2005 article), these pioneering urban farmers aren’t done fighting back. Miraculously, there still seems to be a slim chance of restoring the formerly lush 14-acre property as a site for food production and green space in one of the city’s poorest and bleakest areas. ” (08/19/08)
“Indoctrination itself is not illegitimate. In fact, it is an intrinsic part of child rearing. Out of love and concern, parents explicitly or implicitly formulate desired outcomes for the young lives they have created. Parents generally hope their children will adhere to their own traditions and belief systems, which they attempt to inculcate. The question parents must face is, ‘Who will do the indoctrinating?’ Schooling is an adjunct to child rearing. The schooling options available force parents to make decisions regarding the level of autonomy they wish to exercise. They retain the greatest control over their children’s developing beliefs by schooling them at home. An alternative is to enroll their children in an institution where they are certain the indoctrination conforms to their own values, such as a religious school. When parents send a child to a tax-funded school, they sacrifice their autonomy to alien interests.” (originally published 1999; posted 08/20/08)
http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=4846
“I think it’s dangerous to view the science through the lens of whether it will help advance a policy proposal in the public arena. Yes, they are probably correct to observe that medium-term cooling (of apparently non-anthropogenic origin) will make it harder to persuade the public to take immediate action. They are also correct to observe that the long-term warming trend is still real, despite its coexistence with other cyclical factors. At the end of the day, if you keep adding a heat-absorbing substance to a system receiving thermal radiation, eventually you’ll get a system that is overall warmer (at least when averaged over the time scale of cyclical effects).” (08/20/08)
“Between 1997 and 2002, the percent change of farms making $5,000,000 or more was 42 percent. The typical acres per farm harvested for corn jumped from 200 in 1982 to 450 in 2002. And just to be clear about the take-home point: large-scale family and non-family farms accounted for 9.7 percent of farms while contributing 75.4 percent of the value of production in 2004; fewer, larger farmers like Larry are responsible for ever more crop production and the number of mid-sized family farms has gone through the floor. Why should we care about the loss of what has come to be called the ‘agriculture of the middle,’ the mid-sized family farms that were once the backbone of the farm economy? In short, because we lost the grassroots base for action on federal farm policy.” (08/19/08)
edited by Thomas L. Knapp
Freedom News Daily
