A reason to always choose organic produce

There are lots of reasons to choose organic produce. If you want one more, here's a story about how nicotine-based pesticides damage bees, and appear to be contributing to "Colony Collapse Disorder". If we lose bees, a lot of our food supply is going to disappear. Not a good thing.  The main reason to choose organic is not just that it's healthier for you and your family (which it is) but that it's A LOT healthier for the whole environment, upon which you and your family depend for food and water - and life.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/29/science/la-sci-bees-pesticides-20120330

Beatles Song Titles: Word Cloud

I made a word cloud out of all of the titles of Beatles songs. I played around with it a little and I thought this one came out nicely:

My favorite passage from Stephen King's novel 11/22/63

'For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.' (p615-616)

(Thanks to BookQuoter and her site, which helped me find the quote in the book: http://www.athousandbookswithquotes.com/2012/01/202-112263.html

When I listen to music by the band Eclyptic...

This is the song lyric that their music (taken all together) brings to mind:

"No reason to get excited,"
The thief, he kindly spoke
"There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate

What kinds of connections do you make?
PS I know the next line "So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late" is a key part of this classic lyric, but my connection to Eclyptic's music ends with the above line about fate. :)

Katharine Hayhoe: A Climate Scientist and an Evangelical Christian

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian. She makes the case that her evangelical Christianity does not conflict with her work, and in fact her faith supports and directs her work as a scientist.

She had a great response to those who question the integrity of climate scientists, which I copied below. Here's the URL if you want to see all of the questions and her responses.  This Q&A page is part of a Nova interview of Katharine (see 2nd URL below)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/secretlife/scientists/katharine-hayhoe/show/ask-katharine-your-questions/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/secretlife/scientists/katharine-hayhoe/

• Ebanning2587
   Katharine, I'm an evangelical Christian too. In 2007 I got interested enough in climate change that I read a bunch of stuff: Elizabeth Kolbert, Rob Gelbspan, and some of John Houghton's "Global Warming," (3rd ed.); I watched Richard Wolfson's (Middlebury College) DVD course from the Teaching Company three times and hosted a viewing with friends. I read what the Union of Concerned Scientists said about Exxon and cronies. When I organized a visit by Calvin College's Janel Curry to our local Christian school to tell high school students about climate change from a Christian perspective, a man who's a chemist, the father of students at the school, and an elder in a sister church in our town got angry with me ("I saw your bandwagon coming, and . . . !). He says the system for awarding grant money for research is corrupt, and that's why there's such a strong majority of climate scientists saying anthropogenic climate change is a big problem. I just had to back off because it threatened to cause strife in our community and he knows a lot more chemistry than I do. My question is this: Are you aware of anything at all in the research-grant process, political or otherwise, that gives any plausibility to the charge that the process is biased and therefore the results are biased? How would you answer my chemist friend? --Bob Banning

  
  
• 
  Katharine Hayhoe

  Hi Bob,
  
  Excellent question. I often get a variant of it, namely that scientists are making up a problem in order to get government funding. Which generally provokes in me a strong desire to smack said questioner over the head with my own tax return, as I am fairly certain I have never been accused of that by someone who makes less money than I do. There are much easier ways for smart people to make money than fabricating a problem and competing for government funds with a < 10% success rate, the vast majority of which funds are primarily used for no more nefarious purpose than to support students and buy lab equipment. Being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer immediately springs to mind. But, moving on .. :)
  
  First, there is absolutely no documented evidence that the research grant process is corrupt. Federal and State Requests for Proposals (RFPs) are entirely public, as are the full contents of the grants that were awarded in response to each RFP. If there were some corruption of the system, with the results being freely available to public scrutiny you can bet that there would be some kind of expose--books, Fox News specials, you name it. But there is none.
  
  Second, and just as importantly, funding for climate change deniers, on the other hand, is processed through numerous murky sources. For example, one of the very few scientists who speaks frequently against climate change actually withdrew his participation as a witness on a lawsuit brought by the U.S. automakers against the state of California's vehicle emission standards because he would have been required to disclose his sources and amounts of funding. I find that rather telling.
  
  The direct ties between organizations such as Exxon and the Koch brothers have been extensively documented in two recent books, which I highly recommend: Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan and Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
  
  So in the case of your chemist acquaintance, he has the shoe very much on the wrong foot. There is all kinds of evidence for biased funding in the climate denial field, and none at all in the science field.
  
  Hope this helps!
  
  Katharine

  
  

Coal's true cost is not cheap

Another analysis that shows coal's true cost is not cheap. We are paying for the "other" costs of using coal, and it's not covered by the per ton cost of coal that's reflected in the "low" cost of coal electricity. We pay it, with health problems, illness and death, not the coal companies. This is from conservative economists and is published in the American Economic Review. Take a look. Free markets can fix this problem. This is the true price of coal.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/true-cost-of-coal-power-muller-mendelsohn-nordhous.html

Excerpt:

True Cost of Coal Power - Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus

Posted on 7 October 2011 by dana1981

Skeptical Science previously examined the fact that the market price of coal power is artificially low because we do not directly pay for all of its impacts, particularly on air quality and climate change.  People who feel these effects do pay them indirectly (i.e. through increased health care costs), but since their costs are not reflected in the market price of coal power, economists call them "externalities," and view them as a major failing of the free market.  As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman put it,

"consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.

At one level, this is all textbook economics. Externalities like pollution are one of the classic forms of market failure, and Econ 101 says that this failure should be remedied through pollution taxes or tradable emissions permits that get the price right."

In short, if the people paying for coal power aren't aware of its full costs, then they can't take those costs into account when making decisions regarding how much to consume.  A new paper published in American Economic Review (a very prominent economics journal) from well-known (and somewhat conservative) economists Nicholas Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Norhaus (MMN11) seeks to quantify these externalities.  Krugman provides his analysis of the paper in the link above, and our analysis follows.

There is no such thing as Work-Life Balance

Best advice ever (from Manager-Tools.com)

This is from a Manager Tools posting: http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs001/1101184883773/archive/1108072124185.html

Go Home (from Manager-Tools.com)

At our conferences, we ask everyone to introduce themselves in part by drawing a picture that represents their life. (Don't scoff - Mike and I did until we realized how effective this was.) LOTS of people draw tornados, or see-saws, or something crazy or out of control. They then tell us they're looking for "balance" between work and family.

There is none. No balance, ever. Everyone else is NOT doing it better than you, and you're NOT the only one feeling stressed and worried about everything, and feeling like you're almost failing at both.

That's right - there's no "balance." If you're trying to achieve balance, you're going to fail. Balance isn't the answer. I often share with them that the best they can hope for is "dynamic tension."

But, there IS a way to be at peace about the work and family struggle. (Because that's what folks seeking 'balance' secretly crave - to be at peace about it.)

Here's what to do: GO HOME. Stop trying to be make two things balance that ought NOT to be in "balance." These aren't two equals.... FAMILY IS MORE IMPORTANT.

So go home. Decide now, right now, that you are going to actually LIVE your life the way you SAY you want to. (Or hush about it).

Start planning your days so that you leave at 6 pm, say. Just go home. And when you're there... BE there. Sure, maybe a little email after the kids go to bed, but that's all.

We know senior SENIOR people who go home at 6. And spend time with their families. And when they're on vacation, they check in maybe once a day, but if they miss it, it's not the end of the world. yeah, if their boss calls, they answer. But they don't stay plugged in.

This is an important subject, so I'm going to send another note next time, continuing this thread.

But for now, trust me, you CAN go home.