- Education

Dr Michio Kaku - Fukushima and the Future

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:41:18 -0600

Former World Bank Chief On The West-East Wealth Transfer, And The Africa 'Problem'

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:01:01 -0700

Irish Social Workers Are Horrified By Their Ruthless English Counterparts

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:39:16 -0700

The scourge of the oppressive state is an encroaching reality in all of our lives, from the mundane to the sacred, state has infiltrated everything, even children are pawns of power. We desperately need to revert to our humanity, seeing each situation with fresh eyes, with a hunger for actual justice, not simply a perceived justice but an actual human justice. We are going to have to come to terms with our humanity at some point, in each of our lives no matter how different they may be, the loss of freedom will come, and it will emerge from many directions - mostly economic - for I can almost promise that the children noted below by the author are in all likelihood not from wealthy families, but from families of the poor, or near poor. There is perceived justice, where humans are treated as elaborations of some government plan and there is actual human justice, where the good of the human being is the act of justice, not the rigid structure of government dictate.

Source: The Telegraph - February 19, 2012

Such is the reign of terror now being imposed on innocent English families by social workers that scores of parents have been fleeing with their children to Ireland to escape their clutches. I have followed a dozen such stories over the past two years, and in all of them two things stand out. One is that the English social workers seem prepared to stop at nothing to get the children back. The other is the extraordinary contrast between them and the Irish social workers, who again and again have satisfied themselves that the children are at no risk from their loving parents and are astonished by the ruthless behaviour of their English counterparts.

Several of these stories I have reported more than once and they do not have happy endings. A mother and baby were pursued to Ireland by six social workers and police, who sat in Dublin for 10 days of court hearings, until a judge ruled in their favour (with the social workers seen giving “high fives” on emerging from the court). When the mother again escaped to a remote cottage, she was violently knocked down by a policeman, so that her baby could be taken back to England.

Vicky Haigh, a former racehorse trainer, managed to escape to Ireland before her daughter was born. But then she was brought to England to be quite bizarrely punished, in a case relating to her beloved older daughter, with a three-year prison sentence – leaving her baby to be looked after in Ireland.

A 14-year-old boy lived happily with his mother in Ireland for six months until, after an equally bizarre judgment based on evidence neither he nor his mother were allowed to see, he was deported miserably back to care in England.

Last week, another such story came my way. It concerns a respectable family which was hit with disaster last summer, after the semi-autistic 8-year-old son –who tends to make things up – had lashed out at his 13-year-old sister, leaving bruises. When these were investigated, the boy told the police that his father had done it. The girl denied this – and the boy admitted in video evidence what had really happened – but the police stuck with his earlier story and arrested the father. Although he was never charged, the interventions of social workers became so menacing that, last October, the family escaped to Ireland, where the father has his roots.

Continue reading "Irish Social Workers Are Horrified By Their Ruthless English Counterparts"

The Monoculture Media Mind

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:06:48 -0700

America’s One and Only Personal Rapid Transit System

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:30:00 -0600

Source: Governing.com - July 2011

Morgantown, W.Va., looks like your typical college town in the Northeast, with church towers piercing the skyline and clusters of brick buildings and tree-lined streets abutting a large university. But as you drive down the road and head toward the campus, something unusual emerges: a modest-sized elevated roadway that skirts the Monongahela River and winds its way through West Virginia University (WVU) for several miles. Then a small box-like car, painted in WVU’s blue and yellow school colors, zips overhead and you realize it’s not an elevated road at all, but something very different.

Welcome to America’s one and only personal rapid transit (PRT) system, serving downtown Morgantown and the WVU campus. Though other transit systems may claim they are PRTs, Morgantown’s is the only one in the world where riders can hop into cars and travel directly from point to point without stopping at other stations along the way.

On a typical fall and spring semester day, 15,000 passengers will travel between the five stations along an 8.7-mile track, riding in 71 self-propelled cars that travel at speeds of up to 30 mph. It’s easy to see why the people mover, as it is sometimes called, is so popular. With a wait time of just five minutes or less, as many as 20 passengers at a time pass the traffic congestion on the narrow streets below.

In fact, the PRT is part of the reason why WVU went from a student enrollment of approximately 10,000 in the late 1960s to nearly 30,000 today, according to Haven Sions, a mechanic supervisor who has been working on the system for 34 years. “In the pre-PRT days, we relied on shuttle buses to move students,” he recalls. “Because of traffic, the university had to schedule classes as much as two hours apart so the students wouldn’t be late.” Once the PRT was built, schedules tightened up considerably, making it possible to schedule more classes, which meant enrolling more students.

The Morgantown PRT began in 1975 as a transportation research project funded by the federal government and developed by Boeing. The project cost $120 million and relied on computer technology that can be described as primitive by today’s standards. However, virtually every aspect of the PRT was original when it was built. Consider the four-wheel steering system for each vehicle (the cars run on rubber tires), or the special heating system, powered by four boiler plants that pumps a mixture of chemicals and hot water through pipes to clear the guideway of snow and ice during the winter.

Boeing got out of the transit business a long time ago, so the iconic people mover basically has to fend for itself in terms of maintenance and repairs, says Arlie Foreman, WVU’s associate director of transportation. A crew of 55 keeps the system operating six days a week, working constantly to repair the aging cars and guideway, scrounging for hard-to-find parts. According to Foreman, the university spends $5 million annually to operate it.

In 1995, the computer control system was upgraded and now work is under way to modernize the individual control and propulsion systems in each of the 71 cars that remain in service. The PRT maintenance crew is proud of the fact that of the 80 million passengers who have ridden on the PRT since its start, no serious injuries or fatalities have occurred.

As afternoon traffic builds on the local streets, slowing movement to a crawl, the PRT vehicles continue to glide past quietly and efficiently. “The Morgantown PRT stands as an example of how cities can better cope with pollution, traffic and environmental demands,” Foreman says.

A Generation Of Homeless Children

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:36:26 -0600

Chris Hedges: "Dying cultures always sever themselves from reality, because reality becomes so difficult to face"

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 20:34:33 -0600

Sweden's Gender-Neutral Preschool

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:13:23 -0600

Source: AP/Yahoo - June 27, 2011

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

Egalia doesn’t deny the biological differences between boys and girls — the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct. What matters is that children understand that their biological differences “don’t mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities.”

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward. Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

Egalia’s methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. But director Lotta Rajalin says that there’s a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.

...

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.

Nearly all the children's books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no "Snow White," "Cinderella" or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.

BBC HARDtalk: Jim Rogers Interview

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:22:15 -0600

Disney College

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 18 May 2011 10:21:19 -0600

Source: Guernica - May, 2011

At Disney World, labor is meant to have an almost invisible quality. Except for the name tags, nothing distinguishes interns for the visitor; in certain parts of the park, at certain times of day, they comprise more than 50 percent of staff. Their work is identical to what permanent employees do, and there’s no added supervision, training, or mentoring on the job. The internship’s educational component is a three- or four-hour class each week, offering some of the easiest college credits in the land. Students are also encouraged to obtain credit through networking, distance learning, and “individualized learning opportunities.” Many interns do nothing scholastic, given that Disney doesn’t require it and that twelve-hour shifts are exhausting enough.

Like other employers, Disney has mastered how to rebrand ordinary jobs as exciting opportunities. “We’re not there to flip burgers or to give people food,” a fast food intern told the Associated Press. “We’re there to create magic.” Should the magic fail, the program at least seems to promise professional development and the prestige of the Disney name. Yet training and education are afterthoughts: the kids are brought in to work. Having traveled thousands of miles and barely breaking even financially, they find themselves cleaning hotel rooms, performing custodial work, and parking cars in the guise of an academic exercise. A small number of College Program “graduates” are offered full-time positions at Disney. The housing is designed to scale the program to massive proportions, where the savings of not employing full-timers, who demand benefits and have unions, kick in. Mandatory communal housing, the cost of which is deducted from their paychecks, may make the experience fun and memorable, like college, but it also looks like a term of indenture: living on company property, eating company food, and working when the company says so.

In its scale, the Disney program is unusual, if not unique. Although technically legal, the program has grown up over thirty years to become an eerie model, a microcosm of an internship culture gone haywire. The word “internship” has no set meaning, but at Disney World it signifies cheap, flexible labor for one of the world’s best-known companies—magical, educational burger-flipping in the Happiest Place on Earth.

Disney would not respond to these charges or comment on anything else for this piece, despite repeated requests. Like many a corporate titan, Disney likes to give the impression it’s in the education business. Disney University, born in 1955 as the company’s training division, predated McDonald’s Hamburger University, Motorola University, and others, prefiguring what Andrew Ross has called “the quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation.” Since 1996, the Disney Institute has charged “millions of attendees representing virtually every sector of business from every corner of the globe” for the privilege of learning about Disney’s “brand of business excellence.” The Disney Career Start Program attracts high school drop-outs and graduates, promising a custom-designed “learning curriculum.” The Disney Dreamers Academy targets 100 high school students each year. Interns are not the only ones on the receiving end of a dubious Disney degree. The company has every demographic, every part of the life cycle, covered.

...

Nonetheless, many interns love their experience. Free access to the parks and employee discounts are more than enough for some of these Disney kids who have grown up to be Disney interns and may yet become Disney parents. “I’m a Disney slave and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” tweeted one intern proudly.

Norway's Humane Prison Experiment

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 16 May 2011 10:58:25 -0600

Source: The Daily Mail - May 8, 2011

As we chug ever nearer, and the outline of an old church steeple rises above a backdrop of pristine pines, it becomes clear that Sigurd is absolutely right. Slowly, the idyllic sight of what appears to be a quaint Norwegian village reveals itself, complete with cosy cottages, dirt roads and even horses and carts.

The first person we see on the island, on a wooden verandah outside a modern bungalow, is a man in swimming trunks stretched out on a sun lounger. Nils is 36. He was given a 16-year sentence for shooting dead a fellow amphetamine smuggler over an unpaid debt. Now he's relaxing between his shifts as a ferry worker.

'I spent eight-and-a-half years in a closed prison before moving here nine months ago and I'm much happier now,' he says, stating the obvious.

'I immediately trained to be a ferry worker. I'm going on a maritime course at university. I want to be a commercial captain when I get out. Normally all you leave prison with is two bin bags of clothes. It's like your life has been on pause. You just go on with all the bad habits you had before you went in.'

For many of us in Britain the idea of allowing a convicted murderer the freedom to work and mix openly with non-criminals is anathema. It offends our deeply ingrained ideas about prisons as a place of punishment and as a deterrent to possible offenders.

When he recently claimed of offenders that it was 'just very, very bad value for taxpayers' money to keep banging them up and warehousing them in overcrowded prisons where most of them get toughened up', our current Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke was widely harangued for his progressive views.

A recent opinion poll showed the British public wants harsher prison conditions; they don't agree with the Government's response to over-population and reoffending by pushing through far-reaching reforms which emphasise shorter sentences while placing prisoners in a working environment.

And yet, an extensive new study undertaken by researchers across all the Nordic countries reveals that the reoffending average across Europe is about 70-75 per cent. In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the average is 30 per cent. In Norway it is 20 per cent. Thus Bastoy, at just 16 per cent, has the lowest reoffending rate in Europe.

...

'Both society and the individual simply have to put aside their desire for revenge, and stop focusing on prisons as places of punishment and pain. Depriving a person of their freedom for a period of time is sufficient punishment in itself without any need whatsoever for harsh prison conditions.

'Bastoy takes the opposite approach to a conventional prison where prisoners are given no responsibility, locked up, fed and treated like animals and eventually end up behaving like animals.

'Here you are given personal responsibility and a job and asked to deal with all the challenges that entails. It is an arena in which the mind can heal, allowing prisoners to gain self-confidence, establish respect for themselves and in so doing respect for others too.'

...

From Monday to Friday, he says, inmates are responsible for getting up in time to have breakfast, make themselves a packed lunch and be at their place of work by 8.30am. The working day ends at 2.30pm and 'dinner' is then served at 2.45pm in the main hall. The inmates are then free to do whatever they like until 11pm when they must be back in their living quarters.

The angry whine of chainsaws grows steadily louder as we pull up outside Bastoy's team of six forestry workers busily chopping logs for sale on the mainland. Sigurd explains that prisoners generally choose their area of work, which can be based on previously learned skills or the desire to acquire new ones.

The range of jobs available includes farming animals and crops, ferry working, fishing, DIY, laundry, mechanics and rubbish collecting; the prisoners are paid an average of 57 kronas (£6.50) a day.

Peter, 28, a Dutch truck driver sentenced to six years for smuggling 150kg of hashish in his lorry from the Netherlands, takes a break from his work as the team's tractor driver.

'In closed prison I was locked up for 23 hours a day, so I'm really happy with this job. I am treated very well here and in return I will treat them very well also. Of course it's never nice being in any prison but it could be much, much worse.'

With 120 inmates and 70 staff (35 of whom are guards) Bastoy is Norway's largest low-security prison but it is one of four others dotted around the country. The governor claims that it is his goal of self-sufficiency that both creates jobs for prisoners and provides them with a common purpose.

'The prison is self-sustaining and as green as possible in terms of recycling, solar panels and using horses instead of cars. It means that the inmates have plenty to do and plenty of contact with nature - the farm animals, wildlife, the fresh air and sea. We try to teach inmates that they are part of their environment and that if you harm nature or your fellow man it comes back to you.'

He adds that a significant advantage of the ecological approach is that due to low staffing levels and producing their own food and fuel, Bastoy is actually the cheapest prison to run in the whole of Norway.

'We have a price for each prison bed in this country and we are much cheaper to run than a conventional closed prison.'

Continue reading "Norway's Humane Prison Experiment"

The University of Texas Takes Delivery Of Almost $1 Billion In Gold Bullion

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:36:49 -0600

Source: Bloomberg - April 17, 2011

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board.

The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University’s endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake last year, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment’s chief executive officer. The holdings are worth about $987 million, based on yesterday’s closing price of $1,486 an ounce for Comex futures.

The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said at its annual meeting on April 14. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.

“Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services,” Bass said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”

Gold reached an all-time high of $1,489.10 an ounce yesterday in New York as sovereign debt concerns boosted demand for the metal as a store of value. Gold has climbed 28 percent in the past year on Comex.

The endowment, which oversees funds held by the University of Texas System and Texas A&M University, has 6,643 bars of bullion, or 664,300 ounces, in a Comex-registered vault in New York owned by HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), the London-based bank, according to a report distributed at the meeting in Austin.

Soil Scientist Dr. Don M. Huber Warns Of New Plant Pathogen Linked To Glyphosate Use

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:19:44 -0600

Source: GM Watch - March 29, 2011

After weeks of silence about the Don Huber letter to the USDA that exposed some troubling preliminary research about Roundup and/or Roundup Ready GMOs [see http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12899; http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12925], there is some news. It came in the form of a long and detailed write-up by Steven McFadden on his blog, The Call of the Land (McFadden has a book out by the same name). You can find the original blog post by McFadden here but I have reposted it, with his permission, below. Note what he says below, that Huber's letter was NOT intended to go public, and it was leaked. When it was leaked, Huber was unavailable for answering questions or interviews with the media due to a heavy travel schedule. It looks like he'll now be more available and outspoken.

EXCERPTS: He [Huber] asserted that glyphosate compromises plant defense mechanisms and thereby increases their susceptibility to disease, that it reduces the availability and uptake of essential nutrients, that it increases the virulence of pathogens that attack plants, and that it ultimately reduces crop vigor and yield (Yield Drag).

Most dramatically, Huber reported on what he described as a newly discovered pathogen. While the pathogen is not new to the environment, Huber said, it is new to science. This pathogen apparently increases in soil treated with glyphosate, he said, and is then taken up by plants, later transmitted to animals via their feed, and onward to human beings by the plants and meat they consume. The pathogen is extraordinarily small. It can be observed only via an electron microscope operating at 38,000 power of magnification. It has yet to be phenotyped or named, though that work is almost complete and will be announced in a matter of weeks...

GMO feed grown on glyphosate treated fields tends to irritate the stomach of livestock, such that many farm animals are fed daily rations of bicarbonate of soda in an attempt to sooth their stomach lining. Huber showed a slide bearing images of dissected hog stomachs; one from a hog fed GMO feed and the other conventional feed. The GMO hog had a rudely inflamed mass of stomach and intestinal tissue.

Latter-Day Luther Nails Troubling Thesis to GM Farm & Food Citadels
© 2011 - by Steven McFadden

After trucking across the high plains for five hours, and casting my eyes over perhaps 100,000 acres or more of winter's still deathly gray industrial farmland, I came face to face with the newly famous Dr. Don M. Huber in the cave-dark meeting room of the Black Horse Inn just outside the American Heartland village of Creighton, Nebraska.

On the morning of March 24, along with about 80 farmers and Extension agents, I listened as Huber discoursed with erudition and eloquence upon industrial farming practices that may be impacting nearly every morsel of food produced on the planet, and that subsequently may also be having staggeringly serious health consequences for plants, animals, and human beings.

Huber is emeritus soil scientist of Purdue University, and a retired U.S. Army Colonel who served as an intelligence analyst, for 41 years, active and reserves. In Nebraska, he stood ramrod straight for three hours with no notes and spoke with an astonishing depth and range of knowledge on crucial, controversial matters of soil science, genetic engineering, and the profound impact of the widely used herbicide glyphosate upon soil and plants, and ultimately upon the health of animals and human beings.

Dressed in a conservative dark suit and tie, Huber set the stage for his presentation by observing that he has been married for 52 years, and has 11 children, 36 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild on the way. He then began his formal talk framed by a PowerPoint slide bearing a Biblical quote: "All flesh is grass." - Isaiah 4:6. With this he emphasized the foundational reality that the biotech grains we eat, as well as the biotech grains eaten by cows, hogs, and chickens, are grown in vast herbicide-treated fields.

...

At the conference, Huber's talk was highly technical, yet he had easy command of voluminous technical detail. For many, it must have sounded like an alien language as he spun out the esoteric terms: zwitterion, desorbtion, translocation, rhizosphere, meristemic, speudomanads, microbiocidae, bradyrhizobium, shikimate, and more.

Huber spoke about a range of key factors involved in plant growth, including sunlight, water, temperature, genetics, and nutrients taken up from the soil. "Any change in any of these factors impacts all the factors," he said. "No one element acts alone, but all are part of a system...When you change one thing," he said, "everything else in the web of life changes in relationship."

That brought him to the subject of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide, most commonly recognized in the product named Roundup®. Because it is so widely used, Huber said, it is having a profound impact upon mega millions of farm acres around the world. More than 155 million acres of cropland were treated with glyphosate during the 2008 growing season, and even more by now. Subsequently, Huber said, this chemical is having a sweeping impact on the food chain.

He asserted that glyphosate compromises plant defense mechanisms and thereby increases their susceptibility to disease, that it reduces the availability and uptake of essential nutrients, that it increases the virulence of pathogens that attack plants, and that it ultimately reduces crop vigor and yield (Yield Drag).

Most dramatically, Huber reported on what he described as a newly discovered pathogen. While the pathogen is not new to the environment, Huber said, it is new to science. This pathogen apparently increases in soil treated with glyphosate, he said, and is then taken up by plants, later transmitted to animals via their feed, and onward to human beings by the plants and meat they consume. The pathogen is extraordinarily small. It can be observed only via an electron microscope operating at 38,000 power of magnification. It has yet to be phenotyped or named, though that work is almost complete and will be announced in a matter of weeks.

Huber warned that ignoring these emerging realities may have dire consequences for agriculture such as rendering soils infertile, crops non-productive, and plants less nutritious. It could also, and apparently already is, he said, compromising the health and well-being of animals and humans.

The Stratosphere of Controversy

What propelled Huber, glyphosate and biotech crops into the stratosphere of public attention earlier this year was a pending decision on alfalfa (hay) by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The "queen of forages," alfalfa is the principal feedstock for the dairy industry. The USDA was being asked to approve unrestricted use of genetically engineered alfalfa seeds, which could result in as many as 20 million more acres of land being sprayed with up to 23 million more pounds of toxic herbicides each year.

Because alfalfa is pollinated by bees that fly and cross-pollinate between fields many miles apart, the biotech crop will inevitably contaminate natural and organic alfalfa varieties.

Dr. Huber wrote a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack asking for a delay in making the decision, and for the resources to do further research. In his letter, Huber raised questions about the safety of glyphosate. Huber's letter also warned of the new pathogen, apparently related to the use of glyphosate, which appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. He said laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of the organism in pigs, cattle and other livestock fed these crops, and that they have experienced sterility, spontaneous abortions, and infertility.

"I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high-risk status," Huber wrote. "In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency." Vilsack set Huber's letter aside for later consideration, and on January 27 he authorized the unrestricted commercial cultivation of genetically modified alfalfa. Immediately thereafter, the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the USDA, charging that the agency's approval of genetically engineered alfalfa was unlawful.

While Huber's letter of warning was not intended for public consumption, it was leaked and immediately went viral on the Internet. In a matter of days Huber became a lightning rod, attracting intense attention from both the scientific community, and the general public, which is understandably concerned about the genetically engineered food it has never wanted and - since GM food is unlabeled - never been able to identify. The prospect of a new and virulent pathogen sweeping through the food chain was profoundly unsettling

Meanwhile, researchers were deeply upset that they were not first notified by Huber of the new pathogen - as is customary - before the matter became public knowledge. They felt they had been blindsided. Huber says that his letter to USDA Secretary Vilsack was leaked, and thus its publication was not his doing.

Huber became the focus of tremendous pushback. His message of urgent concern and the need for delay until more research was completed was unwelcome in many corporate and university citadels, and was deemed heresy by some vested in the multi-billion dollar industry of GMO crops.

Continue reading "Soil Scientist Dr. Don M. Huber Warns Of New Plant Pathogen Linked To Glyphosate Use"

Former CIA Officer Robert Steele Tells It Like It Is

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:24:34 -0600

19,000 California Teachers To Receive Layoff Notices

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:07:36 -0600

Source: MSNBC - March 15, 2011

School districts in California have issued nearly 19,000 layoff notices so far to teachers amid uncertainty over the state budget, the California Teachers Association estimated Tuesday.

The union announced its estimate of preliminary notices on the day school districts must let employees know they could lose their jobs.

Some districts had yet to fully report how many warnings had been distributed as they prepare for worst-case budget scenarios. The union said it expects to have a final count Friday.

Its early estimate includes almost 500 school employees in San Francisco, 540 in Oakland, nearly 900 in San Diego, and about 5,000 educators in Los Angeles.

The situation is not unique to California. School districts throughout the country are warning of cutbacks involving teacher and other employees, as state legislatures seek to close massive budget shortfalls by cutting education spending.