http://www.joelcage.com/

Here’s something kinda cool …

Neil Young hosts a website entitled Living With War Today.  Along with articles regarding the assorted military conflicts in which our country is embroiled, songwriters are encouraged to post links to anti-war tunes they have penned.  I posted  “No Peace In Dying”  a few months back and it was entered onto the list of – now – 3,256 tunes. As I have monitored this page I see that No Peace changes in it’s position on the chart, a result of, what I can only imagine, represents the number of times people have listened to the tune.

No Peace current resides at #240 – not bad out of 3200+ tunes.    So I ponder – if all you guys go to:

http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwsongspage.html

find No Peace In Dying,  and give it a play,
if it won’t begin to climb higher on the chart…
who knows, maybe even propel it into the Top 10!
What benefit this is to me or anyone else I know not,
but it sounds like fun.

Give a poke and let’s see what happens.

So I’m online the other day, watching Hulu (Studio 60 – cool show) and an ad for Verizon FiOS comes on. The exceedingly typical looking announcer-guy proudly boasts that along with high speed internet you also get access to 16,000 movies.

.. an awesome year – sitting and watching 16,000 movies nonstop. WAY worse than eating at MacDonald’s for a month – maybe there should be a movie about THAT.

There have been times when, for the most part,  no-one really understood rock-n-roll, computers, the internet, file sharing, the grab your ankle dance, reality shows, the $500 concert ticket …  these are now all thoroughly accepted concepts.

The point is, we have got to be careful, the ideas we spill into the mainstream, because they become the mantras of our time .. and while the thought that watching tv nonstop for full year might seem absurd at this moment, the sequence is quite predictable:

Hey, what do I care? It won’t happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my son, whom I feel the tendency to discourage from having children so that he doesn’t feel the terrible dismay that I do when I imagine the world in which he must face his future.

It is important to recognize absurdly destructive ideas when they are introduced into the mainstream, and to violently reject them in your thinking – acknowledge not only the absurdity of the idea but of ALL those responsible for its dissemination, from the one who thunk it, to those whose efforts aid and abet its syringe-like injection into the blank unsuspecting minds of those who soak it all up and believe everything they see and hear in the media.

Freedom of speech is a great thing but it requires responsibility on our part to reject the bullshit and acknowledge & support that which we believe to be true, and I just don’t see that happening.  If a guy can look me in the eye through a TV screen and say, in all earnestness, that to watch TV non-stop for a year would be awesome, there must be present the belief that certain viewers will agree … and that simply should not be.

Time to wake up… again.

The massive iceberg that recently split off from Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier in the Australian Antarctic Territory might be a driver of future climate change. The Luxembourg-size iceberg broke off from the larger glacier, which is a massive floating ice tongue that drains ice from the larger East Antarctic ice sheet. The iceberg — 78 kilometres long with a surface area of roughly 2,500 square kilometres, broke off the Mertz Glacier after being rammed by another iceberg, 97 kilometres long.
While the world’s climate experts can’t say for sure that the event is linked to climate change, they believe that it could eventually affect ocean circulation. Satellite images show that the recently-calved Mertz iceberg is moving into the Adélie Depression, a coastal basin situated between the Mertz Glacier and the French Antarctic station of Dumont D’Urville to the west. This depression one of the major sites of dense water formation which drives the world’s deep ocean circulation and the distribution of heat.

The Metz Glacier region is of high biodiversity and food concentration for birds and marine mammals, in particular emperor penguins the only birds to reproduce during winter in Antarctica. The emperor colony at Pointe Géologie, next to Dumont d’Urville, is closely dependent on the ocean resources. Significant modifications in the marine environment may have large consequences, not only on the local biodiversity but also on this penguin colony made famous in Luc Jacquet’s movie “March of the Penguins”.

original source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/

 by: Ewen Callaway

Texas health officials secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies’ blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database, a newspaper investigation has revealed.

According to The Texas Tribune, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out.

But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009.

Now the Tribune reveals that wasn’t the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymised blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database.

This came to light after repeated open records requests filed by the Tribune turned up documents detailing the mtDNA programme. Apparently, these samples were part of a larger programme to build a national, perhaps international, DNA database that could be used to track down missing persons and solve cold cases.

Jim Harrington, the civil rights attorney who filed the blood spot lawsuit (pdf) last year on behalf of five Texas parents and who directs the Texas Civil Rights Project, suggests to the Tribune that the DSHS settled with the parents to avoid risking a court case that might have revealed the DNA database. “This explains the mystery of why they gave up so fast,” he says.

Email exchanges (pdfs here and here)  between state officials and Texas A&M, obtained by the Tribune, point to attempts to conceal efforts to use the DNA for any kind of research. The university had hoped to issue a press release detailing such efforts, but it acceded to the state’s request to keep quiet.

Why did the DSHS want to keep it a secret? The Tribune quotes one Texas health official’s explanation:

“Genetic privacy is a big ethical issue & even though … approval is required for use of the spots in most situations and great care is taken to protect the identity of the spots, a press release would most likely only generate negative publicity.”

The fear of a negative reaction is understandandable. Concerns over genetic privacy are growing – for example a recent study found that even anonymous collections of DNA can potentially be traced back to individuals. However, the DSHS appears only to have handed over mitochondrial DNA, which is next to impossible to trace to individuals.

Handling public fears about genetic privacy is certainly tricky, but concealing such an affair is not the answer – and only increases public mistrust.

original source: http://www.newscientist.com/