PG&E leads the way with 'Bright Ideas' for renewable energy
In the fight for renewable energy, energy efficiency and education, Pacific Gas and Electric is leading the way through its Solar Schools Program – a nationally-recognized program for teaching the value of renewable energy.
Since its inception in 2004, the Solar Schools program has provided more than $8 million to support solar installations in 125 schools throughout Northern and Central California. It also has trained more than 3,000 teachers, benefitting more than 200,000 students.
N.Y. Harbor School Seeks Sea Change In Education
Murray Fisher had a dream: Take the 600 miles of New York City's coastlines and all the water surrounding it, and start a maritime high school that would teach inner-city kids about their watery world — everything from boat building and ocean ecology to oyster growing.Next year, the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School will open its doors on Governors Island, a tree-covered jewel sold to the Dutch for two axes and a necklace, lying 800 yards off the coast of Manhattan. But for now, the Harbor School is in Bushwick, in the heart of Brooklyn.
Urban Environment Meets Natural World
At the Harbor School, each student wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the school's name. Tanks burble with classroom-grown fish.
Brendan Malone teaches maritime technology — his classroom is big enough to build wooden boats.
"If you could find a place farther from any major New York water body, this is it," Malone says.
The Department of Education put the Harbor School inside the old Bushwick High School building in 2003. Here, 400 mostly black and Latino kids, most of whom knew nothing about maritime New York, now ride the subways for hours to get to waterways only a couple of miles away.
The school has sent a handful of its students on to marine specialties in college. That's the path that inspires 14-year-old freshman Daniel Bowen.
"I wanna get all types of degrees in marine biology, technology, anything marine. I love it. I try to do as many things as I can do," he says. "I mostly like being in the water. That's my favorite place. I feel more at home there."
And, of course, to be on the water, you have to sometimes get in the water. Before coming here, fewer than 1 in 5 of these kids could swim.
EcoKids dive deep into ecology
“Ecology is science. Deep ecology is ethics. It's the philosophy behind the science,” asserted Marge Kaiser, founder and executive director of the Sierra Nevada Deep Ecology Institute of Nevada City.
It's the difference between “I-it” and “I-thou,” she explained. We are not separate from Nature. We are part of Nature.
“For us to think we're separate from — and better than — Nature is not only an illusion, but dangerous to ourselves and our planet.”
Blurbflies – airborne insectoid advertising
Turkey takes over NATO command in Afghanistan
PM urges Afghan corruption effort
Afghan Heroin Kills More Than The War
The $65 billion annual trade in Afghan opium and heroin kills up to 100,000 people every year - dwarfing U.S. troop casualties and outdoing even Afghan civilan deaths from the war there - according to a new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Dangerous Side Effects of Ultra-Easy MoneyHat Tip Catherine Austin Fitts
How their language has changed
Nick Griffin was interviewed on Sky News this week over their decision to change the constitution to not discriminate against ethnic minorities.
Carnival of Socialism- Halloween Special!
Soil yourself in abject terror! For while the Godly forces of good, common sense neoliberalism feed public wealth into the hands of kindly capitalists to keep their financial houses going EVIL lefties gather and plot such horrors as -Healthcare, Welfare, Social Justice, Peace and Human Rights. Come with me on a terrifying journey into the heart of darkness of this global conspiracy that threatens bankers’ multi million dollar bonuses, every friendly arms dealer’s priceless collection of snuff porn and threatens the very business of Earth upon which we depend with its dangerous ideas of ecological ‘facts’. And remember if you hear a whisper from behind you of ‘People Not Profits’ run as if your very life depended on it and never, ever look back for no-one can gaze upon the face of Satan and live!
Who speaks for Islam?
Everyone, it seems, has a party line about who the good Muslims and bad Muslims are. Sadly, many of the dichotomies distort as much as they reveal, and use simple labels based on superficial preconceptions and over-simplifications
Islam
They all hate us anyhow
On Farmers, Activists and Scary Food Issues
I took a "field trip" out of Des Moines to a number of farms and I was struck by the conflicting feelings that the visual of miles upon miles of corn evoked in me. On the one hand, a pastoral wholesomeness that rang with my heart, though not with my head. On the other, the cliche: Children of the Corn. To be sure, while the Midwestern landscape is bereft of the overstimulation of the city and full of some of the nicest people you'll ever meet, there is also some creepy stuff going on there, namely an unhealthy amount of genetically modified corn and soy, a staggering number of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and a lot of industry influence.
Before flying out, I'd been thinking a lot, as usual, about food production and the controversies that surround it. Michael Pollan had just been lambasted in Wisconsin by what felt, to me, not unlike the anti-healthcare reform "tea parties" we saw earlier this fall. Yes, there were real people, real farmers in fact, and yes, they were likely genuinely threatened by Pollan's message, but the fact that they were reportedly organized by a Madison-based feed company to protest Pollan's appearance cost them in credibility.These were not the farmers I'd been hanging out with.
Last spring, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope, seeking to deflect blame after H1N1 appeared to have originated in a Smithfield operation in Mexico, said in an interview that family farmers stood to suffer from the massive hit the pork market took when the outbreak first occurred. While that may have been true, Smithfield's strategy of vertical integration has done more to put small producers out of business than have...well, the factory farming practices that almost surely created the breeding grounds for the swine flu.
Original Signal
Blog Critics
World Bulletin - Turkey
Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell
Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding
the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.
In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
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