Environmental

Defying a White House veto threat, the House on Wednesday passed legislation that extends transportation program funding through September and mandates construction of a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

All but 14 Republicans, with support from 69 Democrats, voted 293-127 for legislation that falls far short of Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) earlier plan to move a sweeping five-year, $260 billion package.

But Boehner’s retreat serves two crucial tactical and political purposes for the Speaker. It sets up talks with the Senate on the highway bill and keeps the Keystone pipeline — a centerpiece of GOP attacks on White House energy policy — front and center ahead of the November election.

Republican leaders hailed the bipartisan vote  as a rebuke of President Obama.  Two senior Democrat leaders, Reps. James Clyburn (S.C.) and John Larson (Conn.), approved the measure.

“The House is on record again in support of the Keystone XL energy pipeline — a project President Obama blocked, personally lobbied against, then tried to take credit for, and now says he’ll veto,” Boehner said in a statement. “There’s no telling where the president stands from one day to the next on Keystone, but he knows the pipeline has broad and bipartisan support in Congress and among the American people.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled first-ever regulations Wednesday aimed at reducing toxic air pollution from the natural-gas drilling practice known as “fracking.”

The regulations — which would also target emissions from compressors, oil storage tanks and other oil-and-gas sector equipment — would cut 95 percent of smog-forming and toxic emissions from wells developed with fracking, EPA said.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves high-pressure injections of sand, water and chemicals that allow natural gas trapped in rock formations to flow.

The final regulations have been the subject of an aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign in recent months, with industry groups arguing they will impose huge burdens on companies, and green groups countering that they are essential to protect public health.

EPA altered the final regulations to offer a key concession to the natural-gas industry, which had raised concerns about being able to comply with the proposed regulations issued last year.

Under the final rules, companies can comply with the standards until 2015 using flaring, which reduces harmful emissions by burning off the gases that would otherwise escape during natural-gas drilling. After 2015, companies will need to install so-called “green completions,” which are technologies that capture harmful emissions.

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Earth Day: Give Earth a Hand

Uploaded by GreenpeaceVideo on Apr 21, 2010

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Cyber Space

CISPA Illustrates Struggle Between Security and Privacy

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has admirable goals, but has privacy advocates up in arms. We need to find a balance between security and privacy that works for everyone.

By Tony Bradley, Content Works    Apr 20, 2012 6:33 AM

A new bill is pending on Capitol Hill that has privacy advocates preparing for battle. The backlash for CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is reminiscent of the uprising against SOPA and PIPA earlier this year. Whether or not CISPA passes, this probably won’t be the last clash between privacy and security.

Broader information sharing–between businesses and the government, as well as between businesses themselves–would help significantly in the war against cybercrime. In an attack, various entities may uncover different tidbits of information about the attack. Those tidbits may not mean much alone, but when combined with the information from other organizations they form a more complete picture that helps all parties understand and respond to the threat faster.

At face value, that seems to be the intent of CISPA. The problem is that the wording is vague or broad in places and ways that could be abused. Privacy advocates would like to fight cybercrime as well–they’re just not willing to surrender personal liberties to make it happen.

With hundreds of millions of individuals providing their exact location with online or mobile check-ins, or over-sharing information in social network status updates, it certainly seems that privacy has lost some of its value. It’s hard to argue for privacy while posting pictures of your kids, or sharing details of some embarrassing thing that happened on the way to work with the general public.

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Survival / Sustainability

Mr. Creekmore,
What do you think of Freeze-Dried Foods like Mountain House or the MRE’sthat are being marketed as survival food? A lot of preparedness books and web sites suggest these foods for the long term emergency food stockpile, do you think they are a viable solution? John T.

John, it’s easy to imagine ourselves waiting out the collapse of civilization surrounded by boxes of freeze dried foods or MRE’s, M1-A rifle leaning against the wall in the corner of the room, custom 1911 pistol strapped to our side and the 6500 watt diesel generator with electric start humming in the background.

These things are great, I would love to have all this and more, but cannot afford it and never will be able to. Sometimes the truth hurts, but facing it is part of growing up and once we except it we can move on with our preps and the task of doing the best we can with what we have.

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Long Term Food Storage – Urban Survival

Uploaded by envirosponsible on Feb 7, 2011

Prepping: The Emergency Food & Water Project

Uploaded by SafeArmsReview on Aug 26, 2010

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Psy – Ops

Making Monkey of Bird Flu

By John Fletcher
Food Freedom News

Raising chickens in the city is a means to support local organic food systems and to provide food security to any family. Increasing numbers of cities are changing laws to legalize raising chickens.

While these changes in law seem good as they remove conflict between communities and a local government that should be serving their interests, the public should not be “grateful.” They should remember that having one’s own source of food is a human right.

What’s more, it is clear that chickens and other poultry are an excellent means of mosquito and tick control, a large public health boon. That being so, the case for people raising chickens in cities should be settled for good and all. Raising poultry in the city then leaves only issues of doing so in a clean and quiet way but laws to cover neglect or nuisances are already on the books for many activities.

While local governments have stopped people from having this beneficial source of food available to them and a means to control insects, the federal government, without public or scientific input or any hearings, has planned to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in Florida, allegedly to kill off normal mosquitoes that might harbor diseases. Yet the fact that GMO mosquitoes could do vast unknown harm to animal and human life, and there is no way to recall them once there are released, is without doubt.

Keeping chickens which eat mosquitoes thus becomes not just a source of food but a defense against the government’s ill-conceived and involuntary biological experiment on everyone.

Once one begins to realize how beneficial poultry has been to people, and all the diverse varieties they come in, poultry seems quite a wonder. Poultry has lived in close contact with humans for millennia, being fed by people and offering food, pest control, and even company and delight, in return. The story of the goose who laid the golden egg conveys our past understanding of how valuable poultry is to humans.

But the individual raising of poultry was dealt a devastating blow by the Bush administration in its concoction of “avian flu” – a bonanza for the biotech industry and to Rumsfeld and other members of Bush’s administration with ties to it. Industrial ag (Big Pharm) used the hoax of avian flu to slaughter the birds of poor farmers across Asia, removing the competition and wiping out indigenous biodiversity in poultry. Just as they used the threat of swine flu to come in and slaughter the Haitian pigs which were the mainstay of poor Haitians. Just as hoax of swine flu itself was used to sell billions in untested and deadly H1N1 vaccines.

The avian flu hoax was even worse. Using it as the big bugaboo, a threat of the return of a pandemic that could kill millions as Bush said the 1918 flu had done (flu didn’t, a new pharmaceutical industry product did), pandemic laws were pushed through by Bush in the US that are martial law, absent any public health measures, and which can be triggered without any proof. He used a false terror, just as he used the lie of 9/11, to set in place laws for massive control.

This use of disease for totalitarian control is not new.

“Academic medicine has been and is the most important pillar of support of all dictatorships and governments which do not want to submit to written law, to constitutions, to human rights, that is, to the democratically legitimized social contract.” ~ Virologist Dr. Stephan Lanka – Interview 10.27.2005

So it is not only for the truth of the science that one must expose avian flu as a lie but for the sake of democracy, including the seemingly small but actually crucial human right to raise one’s own food (chickens, in this case). It is a right that the US government removed for millions of small farmers across Asia and in Haiti, using disease scares and “public health measures” that were anti-public health.

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Articles of Interest

Russia Stunned After Japanese Plan To Evacuate 40 Million Revealed

Posted by EU Times

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with Japan over the disputed Kuril Islands during the next fortnight states that Russian diplomats were “stunned” after being told by their Japanese counterparts that upwards of 40 million of their peoples were in “extreme danger” of life threatening radiation poisoning and could very well likely be faced with forced evacuations away from their countries eastern most located cities… including the world’s largest one, Tokyo.

The Kuril Islands are located in Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region and stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 miles) northeast from Hokkaidō, Japan, to Kamchatka, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many more minor rocks. It consists of Greater Kuril Ridge and Lesser Kuril Ridge, all of which were captured by Soviet Forces in the closing days of World War II from the Japanese.

The “extreme danger” facing tens of millions of the Japanese peoples is the result of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster that was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.

According to this report, Japanese diplomats have signaled to their Russian counterparts that the returning of the Kuril Islands to Japan is “critical” as they have no other place to resettle so many people that would, in essence, become the largest migration of human beings since the 1930’s when Soviet leader Stalin forced tens of millions to resettle Russia’s far eastern regions.

Important to note, this report continues, are that Japanese diplomats told their Russian counterparts that they were, also, “seriously considering” an offer by China to relocate tens of millions of their citizens to the Chinese mainland to inhabit what are called the “ghost cities,” built for reasons still unknown and described, in part, by London’s Daily Mail News Service in their 18 December 2010 article titled: “The Ghost Towns Of China: Amazing Satellite Images Show Cities Meant To Be Home To Millions Lying Deserted” that says:

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