n2doc
n2doc's Journal
De Blasio Criticizes Walker as Enemy of Middle Class
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio brought his message about income inequality to the home state of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, criticizing the potential Republican presidential candidate as an enemy of unions and the middle class.
“I’m not saying Scott Walker set out to destroy Wisconsin’s middle class,” de Blasio said during a speech to 360 people at the annual fundraising dinner for the state’s Democratic Party in Milwaukee. “But if that were his mission, I can’t think of a damn thing he’d done differently.”
Walker, 57, a two-term governor, supported legislation after taking office in 2011 to limit collective bargaining for public employees. He also signed a so-called right-to-work bill this year allowing employees in union workplaces to opt out of paying dues, saying it gave workers freedom and would attract jobs.
Calling labor unions the backbone of the American middle class, de Blasio said the approach of Walker and other Republicans undermines the chance for workers to organize and negotiate better wages and benefits.
more
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-26/de-blasio-criticizes-walker-as-enemy-of-middle-class
Death & Destruction Inc.
By Mark Fiore
Welcome to another sales seminar at Death & Destruction Inc. Your mission: Sell! Any questions? Watch this handy animated webinar for all your death-related defense industry queries.
https://vimeo.com/125767523
Now that the defense industry in the United States has taken a bit of a budgeting hit at home, they’re getting more aggressive overseas. Defense contractors are opening satellite offices and selling arms as fast as they can into the chaos of the Middle East.
Between the fight against ISIS and the war in Yemen, more Arab countries are getting into the act and using their arsenals. U.S. companies are supplying the planes, bombs, missiles and other weapons everywhere from Libya and Iraq to Yemen and Pakistan. We’ve got a very busy little military industrial complex these days.
It’s nothing new that the United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world, I just think it’s worth noting that we have a hand in nearly every war currently under way. What looks like crazy countries battling over religion, politics or resources far away from our shores, is closer to home when you peel back the layers to find out who is supplying those weapons.
http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/death_destruction_inc_20150423
Walker makes surprise visit to Wisconsin
By James Rowen
Don't pay too much attention to the fact that several 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls are addressing Social Security issues and Walker just punted on the matter.
What's noteworthy about this Walker's no-statement statement? That he made it in the Town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is a medium-sized American midwestern state with only ten electoral votes, and, apparently no estates belonging to David Koch, Charles Koch, Sheldon Aldeson or Donald Trump.
Walker, a probable presidential candidate, has focused his time and attention in recent months in the states with early primaries or caucuses, like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and in larger states like California, New York, Texas, and Arizona, and also in resume and credential-building foreign countries including England, France, Germany and Spain, with Israel on the horizon.
It isn't clear if more visits by Walker are scheduled in the Badger state, though he's currently polling badly in a stalled economy there and would appear intimidated if he continued to absent himself from Wisconsin.
http://m.jsonline.com/purple-wisconsin/blogs/301230621.html
Diabetes drug found in freshwater is a potential cause of intersex fish
A medication commonly taken for Type II diabetes, which is being found in freshwater systems worldwide, has been shown to cause intersex in fish -male fish that produce eggs.
A study by Rebecca Klaper at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee determined exposure to the diabetes medicine metformin causes physical changes in male fish exposed to doses similar to the amount in wastewater effluent.
In addition to intersex conditions, fish exposed to metformin were smaller in size than those not exposed, said Klaper, a professor in UWM's School of Freshwater Sciences.
The study, co-authored by Nicholas Niemuth, a researcher in Klaper's lab, was recently published in the journal Chemosphere.
more
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150424141753.htm
Anti-vaccine leader tells parents to fight immunization bill
Andrew Wakefield, the British scientist and former physician whose discredited research linking autism and immunizations helped launch a worldwide anti-vaccination movement, encouraged Californians Friday to fight back against a state Senate bill that would make childhood vaccinations mandatory.
Speaking at Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, Wakefield told hundreds of students packed into two or three classrooms that they needed to be the “pitchforks and torches” in Sacramento demanding that state legislators reject SB277.
“Your rights are being ripped from you,” Wakefield said. “Parents are no longer going to be in charge of their own children. This is the fight that has to be taken to Sacramento.”
Wakefield’s lecture, full of dark warnings of what could happen to the state’s children and families if vaccines were made mandatory, marked his first foray into California’s political movement to end personal belief exemptions, a long-standing policy that has allowed parents to opt out of school-required immunizations for any reason.
more
http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Former-doc-who-linked-vaccines-to-autism-tells-6222613.php
Washington State Turns to Neurotoxins to Save Its Oysters
Six decades ago, when Dick Sheldon first got into the oyster business, the tide flats of Washington states Willapa Bay were almost free of blight. There were no crabs (well, almost none) and Sheldon used to hike onto the mud at low tide, with a bucket for oysters. “We’d walk a mile or more, even when it was freezing outside, with the wind blowing at 50 miles an hour,” he remembers wistfully, “and then we’d stoop to the mud and start gathering them and throwing them into the buckets.”
In Sheldon’s memory, the oysters were bountiful and the mud floor was firm and pleasant to walk on. Then the shrimp arrived, and everything changed. Burrowing shrimp dig holes in the mud and live there. They pock the tide flats with a zillion holes, and today Sheldon, the 80-year-old eminence grise at his family’s small Northern Oyster Co., considers Willapa Bay a vanished world floored by “quicksand. If you’re not careful out there,” he says, “you’re up to your waist in that shit.”
The shrimp began proliferating—mysteriously, like a plague of locusts—in the early 1960s. They dominated the bay floor where oysters lived, but back then there was a simple solution: The oystermen just bombed the shrimp with carbaryl, a DDT-era neurotoxin. The shrimp, which few humans would want to eat, died. Oyster harvests were good, and along the bay, in towns like Nahcotta and South Bend and Oysterville, eight now-defunct oyster canneries flourished.
By the early 2000s, though, carbaryl had become a legal liability. Numerous researchers have linked the chemical to cancer, and in 2002 environmentalists strong-armed the Willapa/Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association (WGHOGA) into beginning a 10-year phaseout.
more
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-04-24/washington-state-turns-to-neurotoxins-to-save-its-oysters
Man arrested for landing drone on Shinzo Abe's office in nuclear protest
Source: Guardian
A Japanese man has been arrested for landing a drone on the prime minister’s office with a minuscule amount of radiation in an apparent protest against the use of nuclear power, four years after the Fukushima disaster.
Unemployed Yasuo Yamamoto, 40, who lives in Fukui Prefecture in western Japan, was arrested on Friday and charged with obstruction of official business, police said.
The maximum penalty is three years in prison or a 500,000 yen (£2,770) fine.
Media reported that Yamamoto turned himself in at a police station in Fukui and said he landed the drone as a protest against nuclear power.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/25/man-arrested-for-landing-drone-on-shinzo-abes-office-in-nuclear-protest
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