Sailors on old warship dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste for years

They asked the dying Pasco County man about his Navy service a half-century before. He kept talking about the steel barrels. They haunted him, sea monsters plaguing an old sailor.

"We turned off all the lights," George Albernaz testified at a 2005 Department of Veterans Affairs hearing, "and … pretend that we were broken down and … we would take these barrels and having only steel-toed shoes … no protection gear, and proceed to roll these barrels into the ocean, 300 barrels at a trip."

Not all of them sank. A few pushed back against the frothing ocean, bobbing in the waves like a drowning man. Then shots would ring out from a sailor with a rifle at the fantail. And the sea would claim the bullet-riddled drum.


Back inside the ship, Albernaz marked in his diary what the sailors dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. He knew he wasn't supposed to keep such a record, but it was important to Albernaz that people know he had spoken the truth, even when the truth sounded crazy.


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http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/veterans/the-atomic-sailors/2157927

Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed Schools

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: December 21, 2013

COATESVILLE, Pa. — The recession may have ended, but many of the nation’s school districts that laid off teachers and other employees to cut payrolls in leaner times have not yet replenished their ranks. Now, despite the recovery, many schools face unwieldy class sizes and a lack of specialists to help those students who struggle academically, are learning English as a second language or need extra emotional support.

Donna Guy’s fourth-grade class at Caln Elementary School here is too big — 30 pupils — for the room, so some of them sit halfway into a coat closet. Across town at Rainbow Elementary School, the 36 third graders in Kristen Pleasanton’s gym class rotate on and off the bench during 25 minutes of seven-a-side soccer games, because she cannot supervise all of them playing at once.

And during social studies class at Scott Middle School, Keith Lilienfeld tries to keep control of a class of 25 students, 10 who need special education services, four who know little or no English and others who need more challenging work than he has time to give.

“I’m up there putting out fires like you wouldn’t believe,” said Mr. Lilienfeld, who used to have the help of two or three classroom aides. “There’s only one of me, and there’s a need for about five of me in there.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/education/subtract-teachers-add-pupils-math-of-todays-jammed-schools.html

Toon-When did Rick Santorum Grow A Beard?

Today's Doonesbury is for you

Sunday's Doonesbury- Time to Mature

The obesity era

As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us

by David Berreby

Years ago, after a plane trip spent reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Weight Watchers magazine, Woody Allen melded the two experiences into a single essay. ‘I am fat,’ it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?).’ It was 1968, when most of the world’s people were more or less ‘height-weight proportional’ and millions of the rest were starving. Weight Watchers was a new organisation for an exotic new problem. The notion that being fat could spur Russian-novel anguish was good for a laugh.

That, as we used to say during my Californian adolescence, was then. Now, 1968’s joke has become 2013’s truism. For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy.

And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society?

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http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/david-berreby-obesity-era/

We Feed Cows Chicken Poop

—By Brad Jacobson

Anyone who pays even scant attention to where our food comes from is likely aware that some pretty unsavory things happen between the farm and your fork (see this month’s big story in Rolling Stone, for example). But some of these farming methods are more than just unappetizing: they could be deadly. One practice in particular could allow for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the gruesome and fatal neurodegenerative disorder more commonly known as mad cow disease.

The practice in question is feeding what’s known as "poultry litter" to farmed cattle. Poultry litter is the agriculture industry’s term for the detritus that gets scooped off the floors of chicken cages and broiler houses. It’s mainly a combination of feces, feathers, and uneaten chicken feed, but in addition, a typical sample of poultry litter might also contain antibiotics, heavy metals, disease-causing bacteria, and even bits of dead rodents, according to Consumers Union (the policy and action arm of the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports).

Aside from the fact that we’re feeding our cows chicken crap, this practice is worrisome because both the excrement and uneaten pellets of chicken chow found in poultry litter can contain beef protein, including ground-up meat and bone meal. Which means—if you can follow the gruesome flow chart here—that cows could be, indirectly, eating each other.

As the US Department of Agriculture has made quite clear, cows really, really shouldn’t be doing that. Meat and bone meal containing infected bovine protein, the USDA says, is the chief culprit behind the spread of mad cow disease. (The closely related illness in humans is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.)

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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/we-feed-cows-chicken-poop

Cory Booker joins 13 other Senate Dems in bucking Obama on Iran-war bill

Did you think Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand and Richard Blumenthal were going to turn the page on blue state neoconservatism? Wonder no more. All the Democratic New York and New Jersey senators, plus Blumenthal of Connecticut and Robert Casey of PA, have signed up for the wag-the-dog bill that allows Israel to decide what war we will have next in the Middle East. The liberal Dems are allied with Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Mark Kirk (a senator who takes his orders from AIPAC, says MJ Rosenberg).

Senator Menendez released his Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, which includes broadened sanctions and a vow to let Israel decide whether there’s another American war:

Worst. Congress. Ever.

Analysis: Congress accomplishes less than than ‘Do Nothing Congress’
BY WILLIAM DOUGLAS
McClatchy Washington BureauDecember 21, 2013

WASHINGTON – Days before adjournment and the year-end holiday recess, Sen. Lindsey Graham was hardly feeling the holiday spirit.

As usual, the Senate was limping through a slow legislative slog: passing a small-scale bipartisan budget agreement that averts another federal government shutdown and softens the blow of sequestration, meandering through a defense authorization bill and trudging through a slew of judicial and administrative nominations.

...

When they wrap up their business, senators will join members of the House of Representatives in returning to their districts with a dubious achievement they'll not likely brag about to their constituents: being part of one of the least productive Congresses ever.

The 113th Congress is heading home and into the history books with a record of legislative futility. By the time the Senate finishes its business, this Congress will have passed slightly more than 57 bills into law. It’s on course to surpass the first session of 104th Congress, which passed 88 bills into law, in terms of its low productivity.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/12/21/3170586/analysis-congress-accomplishes.html

Not just the Koch brothers: New study reveals funders behind the climate change denial effort

A new study conducted by Drexel University's environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement. This study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.

Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are "dark money," or concealed funding.

The data also indicates that Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, two of the largest supporters of climate science denial, have recently pulled back from publicly funding countermovement organizations. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically.

Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, conducted the study during a year-long fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The study was published today in Climatic Change, one of the top 10 climate science journals in the world.



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http://phys.org/news/2013-12-koch-brothers-reveals-funders-climate.html