Hey Bush! Did you miss Global Warming, too!

Greenland Shows Giant New Crack

Hey President Bush, did you miss a little something on your very own planet? What does it take to get you to stop warring on people and do war against Global Warming?
I know, I know, I could have and should have asked the same question of your Father and even Reagan when he removed the solar cells from the White House.
Are all Republicans cement heads, or just the rich ones?


By SETH BORENSTEIN

,

AP

posted: 23 HOURS 47 MINUTES AGO

comments: 5

filed under: Science News, World News

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WASHINGTON (Aug. 22) - In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.

Eddie Evans
Biohazard Cleanup

The Stupidity of Nuclear Power

I wonder how many times that I've tried to explain why nuclear power is a stupid source of energy.
The risks of terrorism, accidents, waste disposal, and simply losing this stuff over the tens of thousands of years are quite high, quite likely. Whose going to ensure that warning signs can be read by those without today's English in 200,000 years?

Then, of course, there's Mother Nature's twitching and jumping about -- EARTHQUAKES.

I'll keep this article handy for my New York references relating to nukes.

Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleanup

The pH Scale and Cleaning

Eddie Evans on the pH Scale and Cleaning

There are many reasons to understand the pH Scale. I won't go into them, but for below.


The motivation for sharing this blog grew from a conversation I shared with two men who were restoring an apartment after a drug bust. I was explaining that preparing a concrete floor for tile might be done with muriatic acid. I also explained that "neutralizing" the acid after it etched the concrete was important. Hence, the pH Scale came up when I tried to demystify the acid and neutralizer. If anyone is interested in a color coded version of this writing, click here.

If anyone reached this point, I'm impressed by their drive to stay focused in the midst of tedious verbiage. I promise to add more information about cleaning real soon.

The pH Scale is a way to measure the acidity or alkalinity of matter. This idea is all important to professional cleaning. When it comes to decontamination, deactivating, and simply lifting soil from fabrics, knowing about the pH level of a surfactant makes a difference.

If you recall the "number line" from high school algebra, there is a zero (0) in the middle of the line. Every number to the left of this line is a negative number. Every number to the right of this line is a positive number. It's kind of like turning on the hot water (left) to warm the cold water (right) when taking a warm shower. There is a blend of the two opposites, heat and cold to warm.

Well, the same kind of idea works on the pH Scale. Think of the number line's zero. It happens that pure water is like a zero on the pH Scale's number line. The difference is that the number line uses a zero (0) and the pH Scale uses a seven (7) for its middle point. So pure water is a 7 on the pH scale.

So, on the pH Scale, everything to the left of 7 is an acid. Everything on the right of 7 is an alkaline. And pure water exists right between acids and alkaline as a 7. (Did you know that lemon juice is on the acid of the of pH Scale? What side of the pH Scale do you think soda water will be on? What about Clorox Bleach and Dove dishwashing soap?) Where do you think the human body measures on the pH Scale? (stay tuned!)

Just like on the number line, mixing negatives (acids) with positives (alkalizes) will cancel something out.

Get this: If more acid is added to pure water than alkaline, the pure water will become more acidic. If more alkaline is added to pure water than acid, the water will become more alkaline.

If equal parts of acid and alkaline are added to pure water, then we should expect the two to cancel each other out. As a result, our pure water should remain the same on the pH Scale. But, what if the acid material is more powerful than the alkaline, or vice versa? What if we add one gallon of an acid like pure lemon juice to one gallon of pure water? Right, the pure water is now on the acid side of the pH Scale and no longer in the middle.

Now, what if we add one gallon of ocean water to one gallon of pure water? Right, the pure water becomes more alkaline.

And now, what if we add one gallon of pure lemon juice to one gallon of pure water, and then add one gallon of ocean water to this mix? As we might guess, the resulting mixture will be on the acidic side of the pH Scale. This is so because the one gallon of pure lemon juice is much more powerful than the one gallon of alkaline ocean water. What is in ocean water that places it on the alkaline side of the pH Scale? Right, salt. So salt is an alkaline, not an acid. What about pepper, where do you think that it will be found on the pH Scale? Right, on the acid side of the scale.

Again, when we mix a negative, acid, with a positive, alkaline, Acidic and basic are two extremes that describe a chemical property chemicals. Mixing acids and bases can cancel out or neutralize their extreme effects. A substance that is neither acidic nor basic is neutral.

The pH Scale measures how acidic or basic a substance is. The pH Scale ranges from 0 to 14. A pH of 7 is neutral. A pH less than 7 is acidic. A pH greater than 7 is basic, and we may call basic alkaline.

The pH Scale is logarithmic and as a result, each whole pH value below 7 is ten times more acidic than the next higher value. For example, pH 4 is ten times more acidic than pH 5 and 100 times (10 times 10) more acidic than pH 6. The same holds true for pH values above 7, each of which is ten times more alkaline (another way to say basic) than the next lower whole value. For example, pH 10 is ten times more alkaline than pH 9 and 100 times (10 times 10) more alkaline than pH 8.

Pure water is neutral. But when chemicals are mixed with water, the mixture can become either acidic or basic. Examples of acidic substances are vinegar and lemon juice. Lye, milk of magnesia, and ammonia are examples of basic substances.

What is blood's pH level? "The normal pH of human arterial blood is approximately 7.40 [normal range is 7.35-7.45), a weak alkaline solution. Blood that has a pH below 7.35 is acidic, while blood pH above 7.45 is alkaline." (From Wikipedia)

Suskind Reveals Bush Admin Ordered Iraq-9/11 Fakery

None of this should be new to those of us following alternative sources of information

TODAY'S DEMOCRACY NOW!:

* After Ron Suskind Reveals Bush Admin Ordered Iraq-9/11 Fakery, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers Opens Congressional Probe *

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us for part two of an interview on his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. While much of the attention on the book has focused on the forged letter, Suskind also reveals that the Bush administration and the British government knew prior to the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We also speak to Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating some of the explosive findings in Suskind's book.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/14/after_ron_suskind_reveals_bush_admin


* Headlines for August 14, 2008 *

Jimmy Carter Was Right

Jimmy Carter was right -- and so too were millions of Americans who said that the current way of doing things in the USA is not sustainable.

"Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense-I tell you it is an act of patriotism."

None of this makes Carter a "green" in the true meaning of the term. This way of thinking makes Carter a conservationist and a thinking person. Carter had the good of the country in mind, not Mr. Money Bags and all of his/her money at any cost crowd.

As a consequence of Reagan's market approach, which it really wasn't when the subsidies are factored in, the next generation of Americans are going to be losers in a mighty big way, resource wise and pollution wise.

Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleanup

Politics and Ecology - Aldous Huxley

I made a copy of the following while using the graduate library at California State Fullerton. My idea is that it appeared in the quarterly publican (If memory serves me) of The Institute for Democratic Studies, Santa Barbara, CA. This "think tank" is way long gone at this writing. Huxley's essay was hard to find in those days, and I suppose that it is harder today. I am a bit scared to learn the truth of it.

I know Murry Bookchin's Social Ecology shows a wealth of development compared to these words. Nonetheless, Huxley has done a great job etching a platform to note. He was as can be judged here, a liberal and libertarian. I place his comments
here for posterity and The Cause - - Political Ecology. Keep in mind that he is writing in the 60s. Prince Propotkin aside, Huxley's words are cutting-edge for his time and place, considering that he too was captured by his own time and culture.
Eddie Evans

I hope someone chooses to copy it from here and pass it along.

"Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prison in which they are now confined. Some day ... And may that day come soon! For, thanks to our rapidly advancing science and technology, we have very little time at our disposal."

"IN politics, the central and fundamental problem is the problem of power. Who is to exercise power? And by what means, by what authority, with what purpose in view, and under what controls? Yes, under what controls? For, as history has made it abundantly clear, to possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it. In mere self-preservation we must create and maintain institutions that make it difficult for the powerful to be led into those temptations which, succumbed to, transform them into tyrants at home and imperialists abroad. For this purpose what kind of institutions are effective? And, having created them, how can we guarantee them against obsolescence? Circumstances change, and, as they change, the old, the once so admirably effective devices for controlling power cease to be adequate. What then? Specifically, when advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-established relationship with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination, what ought we to do? What can we do?

Very briefly let us review the situation in which we now find ourselves and, in the light of present facts, hazard a few guesses about the future.

On the biological level, advancing science and technology have set going a revolutionary process that seems to be destined for the next century at least, perhaps for much longer, to exercise a decisive influence upon the destinies of all human societies and their individual members. In the course of the last fifty years extremely effective methods for lowering the prevailing rates of infant and adult mortality were developed by Western scientists. These methods were very simple and could be applied with the expenditure of very little money by very small numbers of not very highly trained technicians. For these reasons, and because everyone regards life as intrinsically good and death as intrinsically bad, they were in fact applied on a world-wide scale. The results were spectacular. In the past, high birth rates were balanced by high death rates. Thanks to science, death rates have been halved but, except in the most highly industrialized, contraceptive-using countries, birth rates remain as high as ever. An enormous and accelerating increase in human numbers has been the inevitable consequence.

At the beginning of the Christian era, so demographers assure us, our planet supported a human population of about two hundred and fifty millions. When the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore, the figure had risen to about five hundred millions. We see, then, that in the relatively recent past it took sixteen hundred years for the human species to double its numbers. Today world population stands at three thousand millions. By the year 2000, unless something appallingly bad or miraculously good should happen in the interval, six thousand millions of us will be sitting down to breakfast every morning. In a word, twelve times as many people are destined to double their numbers in one-fortieth of the time.

This is not the whole story. In many areas of the world human numbers are increasing at a rate much higher than the average for the whole species. In India, for example, the rate of increase is now 2.3 per cent per annum. By 1990 its four hundred and fifty million inhabitants will have become nine hundred million inhabitant A comparable rate of increase will raise the population( of China to the billion mark by 1980. In Ceylon, Egypt, in many of the countries of South and Central America, human numbers are increasing at an annual rate of 3 per cent. The result will be a doubling of that present populations in approximately twenty-three year On the social, political, and economic levels, what is likely to happen in an underdeveloped country whc people double themselves in a single generation, or even less? An underdeveloped society is a society with adequate capital resources (for capital is what is left over after primary needs have been satisfied, and underdeveloped countries most people never satisfy the primary needs); a society without a sufficient force of trained teachers, administrators, and technicians; a society with few or no industries and few or no developed sources of industrial power; a society, finally, with enormous arrears to be made good in food production, education, road building, housing, and sanitation. A quarter of a century from now, when there will be twice as many of them as there are today, what is the likelihood that the members of such a society will be better fed, housed, clothed, and schooled than at present? And what are the chances in such a society for the maintenance they already exist, or the creation, if they do not exist of democratic institutions?

Not long ago Mr. Eugene Black, the former president of the World Bank, expressed the opinion that it would be extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, for an underdeveloped country with a very rapid rate of population increase to achieve full industrialization. All resources, he pointed out, would be absorbed in the task of supplying, or not quite supplying, primary needs of .its new members. Merely to stands to maintain its current subhumanly inadequate standard of living, will require hard work and the expenditure all the nation's available capital. Available capital be increased by loans and gifts from abroad; but in a world where the industrialized nations are involved power politics and an increasingly expensive armaments race, there will never be enough foreign aid to make difference. And even if the loans and to underdeveloped countries were to be substantially increased, any resulting gains would be largely null by the uncontrolled population explosion.

The situation of these nations with such rapidly increasing populations reminds one of Lewis Carroll's parable in Through the Looking Glass, where Alice and the Red Queen start running at full speed and run for a long time until Alice is completely out of breath. When they stop, Alice is amazed to see that they are still at their starting point. In the looking glass world, if you wish to retain your present position, you must run as fast as vou can. If you wish to get ahead, you must run at least twice as fast as you can.

If Mr. Black is correct (and there are plenty of economists and demographers who share his opinion), the outlook for most of the world's newly independent and economically non-viable nations is gloomy indeed. To those that have shall be given. Within the next ten or twenty years, if war can be avoided, poverty will almost have disappeared from the highly industrialized and contraceptive-using societies of the West. Meanwhile, in the underdeveloped and uncontrolledly breeding societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America the condition of the masses (twice as numerous, a generation from now, as they are today) will have become no better and may even be decidedly worse than it is at present. Such a decline is foreshadowed by current statistics of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In some underdeveloped regions of the world, we are told, people are somewhat less adequately fed, clothed, and housed than were their parents and grandparents thirty and forty years ago. And what of elementary education? UNESCO recently provided an answer. Since the end of World War 11 heroic efforts have been made to teach the whole world how to read. The population explosion has largely stultified these efforts. The absolute number of illiterates is greater now than at any time. The contraceptive revolution which, thanks to advancing science and technology, has made it possible for the highly developed societies of the West to offset the consequences of death control by a planned control of births, has had as yet no effect upon the family life of people in underdeveloped countries. This is not surprising. Death control, as I have already remarked, is easy, cheap, and can be carried out by a small force of technicians. Birth control, on the other hand, is rather expensive, involves the whole adult population, and demands of those who practice it a good deal of forethought and directed will power. To persuade hundreds of millions of men and women to abandon their tradition-hallowed views of sexual morality, then to distribute and teach them to make use of contraceptive devices or fertility-controlling drugs-this is huge and difficult task, so huge and so difficult that it seems very unlikely that it can be successfully carried out, within, a sufficiently short space of time in any of the countries where control of the birth rate is most urgently needed. Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire for better things which has been called "wantlessness"-the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot. But extreme poverty, when it is combined with the knowledge that some societies are affluent, breeds envious desires and the expectation that these desires must of necessity, and very soon, be satisfied. By means of the mass media (those easily exportable products of advancing science and technology) some knowledge of what life is like in affluent societies has been widely disseminated throughout the world's under- developed regions. But, alas, the science and technology which have given the industrial West its cars, refrigerators, and contraceptives have given the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America only movies and radio broadcasts, which they are too simple-minded to be able to criticize, together with a population explosion, which they are still too poor and too tradition-bound to be able to control by deliberate family planning. In the context of a 3, or even of a mere 2 per cent annual increase in numbers, high expectations are foredoomed to disappointment. From disappointment, through resentful frustration, to widespread social unrest the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest, through chaos, to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist party, more probably of generals and colonels. It would seem, then, that for two-thirds of the human race now suffering from the consequences of uncontrolled breeding in a context of industrial backwardness, poverty, and illiteracy, the prospects for democracy, during the next ten or twenty years, are very poor. ROM underdeveloped societies and the probable political consequences of their explosive increase in numbers we now pass to the prospect for democracy in the fully industrialized, contraceptive-using societies of Europe and North America. It used to be assumed that political freedom was a necessary pre-condition of scientific research. Ideological dogmatism and dictatorial institutions were supposed to be incompatible with the open-mindedness and the freedom of experimental action, in the absence of which discovery and invention are impossible. Recent history has proved these comforting assumptions to be completely unfounded. It was under Stalin that Russian scientists developed the A-bomb and, a few years later, the H-bomb. And it is under a more-than-Stalinist dictatorship that Chinese scientists are now in process of performing the same feat.

Another disquieting lesson of recent history is that, in a developing society, science and technology can be used exclusively for the enhancement of military power, not at all for the benefit of the masses. Russia has demonstrated, and China is now doing its best to demonstrate, that poverty and primitive conditions of life for the over whelming majority of the population are perfectly compatible with the wholesale production of the most advanced and sophisticated military hardware. Indeed, it is by deliberately imposing poverty on the masses that the rulers of developing industrial nations are able to create the capital necessary for building an armament industry and maintaining a well equipped army, with which to play their parts in the suicidal game of international power politics.

We see, then, that democratic institutions and libertarian traditions are not at all necessary to the progress of science and technology, and that such progress does not of itself make for human betterment at home and peace abroad. Only where democratic institutions already exist, only where the masses can vote their rulers out of office and so compel them to pay attention to the popular will, are science and technology used for the benefit of the majority as well as for increasing the power of the State. Most human beings prefer peace to war, and practically all of them would rather be alive than dead. But in every part of the world men and women have been brought up to regard nationalism as axiomatic and war between nations as something cosmically ordained by the Nature of Things. Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even when they are free to vote, are inhibited by the fundamental postulates of the frame of reference within which they do their thinking and their feeling from decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations. As for the world's ruling minorities, by the very fact of their power they are chained even more closely to the current system of ideas and the prevailing political customs; for this reason they are even less capable than their subjects of expressing the simple human preference for life and peace.

Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prison in which they are now confined. Some day ... And may that day come soon! For, thanks to our rapidly advancing science and technology, we have very little time at our disposal. The river of change flows ever faster, and somewhere downstream, perhaps only a few years ahead, we shall come to the rapids, shall hear, louder and ever louder, the roaring of a cataract.

Modern war is a product of advancing science and technology. Conversely, advancing science and technology are products of modern war. It was in order to wage war more effectively that first the United States, then Britain and the USSR, financed the crash programs that resulted so quickly in the harnessing of atomic forces. Again, it was primarily for military purposes that the techniques of automation, which are now in process of revolutionizing industrial production and the whole system of administrative and bureaucratic control, were first developed. "During II," writes Mr. John Diebold, "the theory and use of feedback was studied in great detail by a number of scientists both in this country and in Britain. The introduction of rapidly moving aircraft very quickly made traditional gun-laying techniques of anti-aircraft warfare obsolete. As a result, a large part of scientific manpower in this country was directed towards the development of self-regulating devices and systems to control our military equipment. It is out of this work that the technology of automation as we understand it today has developed."

Why I went to college

draft

Being here sick, tired, weak, unable to continue serving humanity's cleaning needs until well, I briefly remembered why I went to college, really remembered.

I wanted to know. I wanted to know the power questions and the power answers. I wanted to know what the "knowers" thought. I knew from socializing with college graduates while in foreign lands that there was much more worth knowing and I did not know much if any of it. I knew there was a language within English that was so different, more powerful than the language I was using, although it was the same language. Now I understand that this is an "intellectual" side of the English language. (Now I'm overheating from fever. Funny words following.)

So I went to college and studied hard and then not so hard, and then hard again, and then went on my own path to "college." I was a maverick, reading outside the curriculum, which turned out to be the best idea. I had a couple good role models, it turns out. I did not do well, but I did what I wanted to do. I did explore ideas, people, nature, events, and on and on.

I remember MEAL, an acronym for metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. I remember studying each as discrete subjects, and then as related, and then finding the axis of it all, social and physical ecology. That's where it lead.

"Art, religion, philosophy, science, social affairs," these terms, too, the American Pragmatist Santayana claimed to be the "realm of being." I suppose there's more between the words, but like MEAL, these words help to place the full of it into some perspective. Well done George!

Now I am writing about suicide because I clean the remains of suicides. I sometimes wonder the "why?" of suicide. Then I remember Durkheim's book, Suicide. Ah, I wanted to know, and Durkheim helped. Education is a good thing. I never thought that I would learn about suicide while in college.

I remember sitting in foxholes at night, fighting the urge to sleep, to fall into a deadly void for moments. Ah, to sleep, to relax, to extend myself into the a dreamland void of non-wake, non-suffering. Sleeplessness is suffering, I have learned. And soldiers suffer so much. I believe that it actually hurt, staying awake that way. I believe that I wondered how different it would all become with the passage of a 7.62 lead ball from an AK 47 through my brain. I may have even wondered if sending a smaller, maybe more deadly 5.62 round through my head might achieve the same peaceful affect as sleep. How could I continue to stay awake?

I staid awake because "Charley" lived well in the dark and he wanted to kill me, and he wanted to kill me real bad, even at the risk of his own life. His friends were just as bad. Sometimes they tried, and because they tried, I learned the skill of staying awake. Staying awake, I learned to think the deep thoughts during the night. I thought the small thoughts too, the thoughts from daylight hours when I watched ants march across the bottom of my foxhole.

These were the "low land" ants. Then there were the "high land" ants, those marching across the parapet in singular order, silent to all but their opposing ant armies. Little did they know or want to know their brethren below gained a much less useful perspective of the World. Their lowland brethern were bound by the limits of their horizon, 4 cliffs, dirt walls surrounding their line-of-march. Occasionally dirt and clods of dirt fell upon them or in front of their line-of-march. They marched on, anyway. What a big difference in perspective they experienced. Perspective would give me big thoughts and little thoughts with more words and a greater ability to nuance ideas, events, and nature.

My thoughts lead to my own perspective of the World as I sat there watching the clouds gather in the sky, way off. As hours passed, as I took my own two hour sleep breaks (If one can sleep for 2 hours in a rice paddy or rain forest.), those "way off" clouds made a slow march of their own to my tiny foxhole below. "How different the World looked from up there" I often wondered.

From the clouds, I might be able to see for miles and miles around. I might see from Saigon to Beinhoe, from War Zone D to the Happy Valley. Maybe I could see Charley?

I sat, legs and feet dangling over the edge of my foxhole many dark nights. I could sometimes see comrades to my left and right, sometimes to my rear, sometimes forward of me. I could see trees, vines, maybe a trail or two. I saw the sky, the clouds, and the stars. I saw the stars a lot. I had not grown up watching the stars. In Vietnam, I watched the stars from my foxhole. The sky stood out so clearly. The Big Dipper and Little Dipper were often subjects of conversation among my foxhole companions, whenever I had one, and I usually did. I will not, cannot forget them, stars, comrades, or Charley.

So I learned the skill of staying awake for inordinate amounts of time and during night time hours when I should have been asleep. I also learned the skill of juxtaposing nature for a more meaningful view of the World and its inhabitants. During these times I thought the big thoughts with my small collection of words, words that I wanted to add to when I could go to college some day. I had not thought of college before, but now it was something to think about. "Why did people go there" and maybe I need to go there and see what is going on. "After this, why not?"

"MEAL would bring more meaning to what I thought those nights in my foxhole.

It is so ironic, too, how "Charley" may have influenced my decision to go to college more than any other character in my life's short story.
I will close for now and perhaps resume this thread at a later date, when I feel better.