I am still a skeptic

The Associated Press has just revised their stylebook to say that both "climate skeptic" and "climate denier" are now deplored. Journalists should now say "climate change doubters" or "those who reject mainstream climate science".

Anthony Watts has said that he too will adopt AP usage.  He does generally try to maintain some respectability in establishment circles so that decision is to be expected of him.  And he may be wise to do so.

I however have zero inclination to make nice with frauds and charlatans, so will continue to call myself and similar others "skeptics".

I in fact probably deserve the title of skeptic more than almost anyone else.  My many papers in the journals attest that I am totally skeptical of the mainstream claims within my own field of political psychology and that is only my starting point.

I also don't believe in Jesus Christ, Karl Marx or Global warming.  I further don't believe in the adverse health effects of dietary fat, salt or sugar.  And I most certainly don't believe that Leftists are "compassionate".

Am I the world's most skeptical person?  Could be.  And perhaps because I am not burdened by any false beliefs, I live a very  happy life.

UPDATE:  Someone has suggested that, as well as saying what I do not believe in I should also say what I DO believe in.  And that is very easy.  I believe in all the things that Leftists consider stupid and old-fashioned:  Honesty, truth, frankness, objectivity, integrity, morality, humility, generosity, kindness, laughter, courage, justice (without adjectives) and, above all, the central importance of children and the family.  How crazy can you get? I am old now so what I think matters little but I am pleased that my mathematician son has similar values.  He even laughs at my jokes!

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Florida Child Abuse Case

Denise Hallowell
(Inverness, Florida)

A 54-year-old woman from Inverness is accused of locking a boy in a room – without access to food or water – for days at a time. Denise Hallowell, who deputies identified as a teacher, was arrested Monday.[…]

The boy told detectives Hallowell kept him locked in a bedroom with just an air mattress and a bucket for a toilet. The suspect allegedly nailed the room’s windows shut and “snowed” them out to prevent a view.

Hallowell locked the door from the outside with both a regular lock and a chain lock, according to the Sheriff’s Office. “(The victim) was without food or water for days at a time and only allowed to come out of his room to do chores, which Hallowell made him do naked,” deputies said.

OK

Arizona Mom Accused of Murdering Her Sons

Mireya Lopez
(Maricopa County, Arizona) A 22-year-old local woman, Mireya Lopez, has been accused of drowning her twin 2-year-old sons because they were not loved.

Lopez has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Lopez told investigators Sunday she drowned her twin 2-year-old sons in a bathtub at her home, according to police reports. She then swaddled them in blankets in an upstairs bedroom.

Police said Lopez also attempted to drown her 3-year-old stepbrother.

Lopez is in jail with bond set at $2 million.

Florida Woman and Daughter's Boyfriend

Heather Phillips
(Port St. Lucie, Florida) A local woman, Heather Phillips, has been accused of engaging in sex with her daughter's ex-boyfriend.

Phillips faces counts of lewd and lascivious behavior.

According to the police report, the 15-year-old boy told detectives he's been having a sexual relationship with Phillips since mid-August, about two months after he and his girlfriend broke up.

The teen even said they had unprotected sex seven times on the night of Sept. 6.

Seven times, eh? OK.

Why do we hear nothing from the Greenies about Third World cooking fires?

Using wood and cow dung to make cooking fires is widepread throughout South Asia.  It is so prevalent that much of South Asia has a resultant "brown cloud" hanging over it most of the time. It's pollution so bad that it can be seen from space. And that has been known since 2002.

Breathing in the originating smoke down on the ground is an obvious health hazard -- far worse for you than CO2 will ever be.  Just try breathing in the smoke from a cooking fire yourself if you doubt it.

So if those wonderfully "compassionate" Green Leftists who worry so much about the health impacts of global warming were actually sincere, they would be exerting great efforts to protect Asians from this scourge, don't you think?

But there is only one way to give the poor of the Third world an escape from such hazards:  Give them at least a mini version of a modern kitchen.  And that mostly means supplying them with electricity.

Horrors! say the Greenies.  We can't have that!  Generating more electricity will add to global warming.  So Greenies oppose all efforts by Third world countries to supply their people with electricity.  They even bully Western banks into not lending money for hydro-electric dam building.  Greenies hate dams too.

So let the poor of the world die of lung disease!  That is the Greenie gospel.  You see how "caring" they are.

The article below puts some numbers on the problem. Over 3 million people die from the smoke each year.  But note that the study  only covers outdoor cooking.  But a lot of Third world cooking is indoors, which obviously gives much more exposure to smoke.  So many millions more must be the overall death toll -- JR

The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale

J. Lelieveld et al.

Abstract

Assessment of the global burden of disease is based on epidemiological cohort studies that connect premature mortality to a wide range of causes1, 2, 3, 4, 5, including the long-term health impacts of ozone and fine particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5)3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It has proved difficult to quantify premature mortality related to air pollution, notably in regions where air quality is not monitored, and also because the toxicity of particles from various sources may vary10. Here we use a global atmospheric chemistry model to investigate the link between premature mortality and seven emission source categories in urban and rural environments. In accord with the global burden of disease for 2010 (ref. 5), we calculate that outdoor air pollution, mostly by PM2.5, leads to 3.3 (95 per cent confidence interval 1.61–4.81) million premature deaths per year worldwide, predominantly in Asia. We primarily assume that all particles are equally toxic5, but also include a sensitivity study that accounts for differential toxicity. We find that emissions from residential energy use such as heating and cooking, prevalent in India and China, have the largest impact on premature mortality globally, being even more dominant if carbonaceous particles are assumed to be most toxic. Whereas in much of the USA and in a few other countries emissions from traffic and power generation are important, in eastern USA, Europe, Russia and East Asia agricultural emissions make the largest relative contribution to PM2.5, with the estimate of overall health impact depending on assumptions regarding particle toxicity. Model projections based on a business-as-usual emission scenario indicate that the contribution of outdoor air pollution to premature mortality could double by 2050.

"Nature", 2015

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Louisiana Foster Mom Accused of Killing Toddler

Trenique C. Faciane
(Covington, Louisiana) A 41-year-old foster mother, Trenique C. Faciane, has been accused of second-degree murder in the death of a 22-month-old girl.

She is accused of beating Madison Parrott with a hairbrush, shaking her, and dropping her into a bathtub on May 21.

Parrott died at Children's Hospital in New Orleans the next day.

Faciane's bond was set at $1 million.

Oregon Woman Accused of Attempted Assault on Officer

Deanna Solinger
(Coos Bay, Oregon) A 42-year-old local woman, Deanna Solinger, has been accused of disorderly conduct after she "fought against the deputy’s efforts to arrest her."

Solinger proceeded to kick the back of the patrol vehicle and when the deputy tried to prevent her from hurting herself or damaging the vehicle, she kicked the deputy in the chest and made other attempts to kick him otherwise, the report says.

Solinger was arrested and booked into the Coos County Jail.

Reversing the destruction of agricultural land

Viv Forbes below does not mention a relevant matter. He directs our attention to a talk by Savory which is an absolute eye-opener and we must be profoundly grateful for Savory's work.  But Savory  does justify his proposals as assisting with global warming.  That is just good politicking however.  By doing that Savory gets more people onside.  But his work is good for much more than global warming. It is truly a great leap forward in the management of agricultural land. I have always seen soil erosion as the environmental challenge that most needs attention but because the Greenies are really motivated by hatred of people rather than real care for the environment, I have yet to see concern about soil erosion from them -- JR

People send me things; lots of things - compliments, abuse, information and advice.

One correspondent is “Coochie” a wannabee grass-farmer who lives in town but reads all the latest stuff on managing grazing animals. He reads things like “Mother Earth” and “Stockman Grass Farmer”.

Coochie recently rebuked me.

“Please tell Farmer Fred that grazing animals are far better than ‘carbon neutral’. In fact they are the only hope for reversing desertification of the world’s grasslands and open forests. If managed properly, grazing herds will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reduce soil erosion, improve soil fertility and increase vegetative cover. They should earn ‘carbon credits’.”

I was all ears.

“You and Fred should study the work of Allan Savory. Allan is an observant honest ecologist who has spent his life worrying about desertification, which can be both a cause and a result of climate change. Initially, he hated grazing animals – he thought they were causing desertification and destroying his beloved wildlife.

“But a life-time of study of the whole system showed him it was neither the cloven hooves nor the animal numbers that caused desertification. The problem was how they grazed – how long, how intense. When hard-hoof animals are concentrated on small areas of land for short periods of time, they break up the hard crust and cover it with litter, dung and seeds. Then, when the herd moves on to seek new clean pastures, the abandoned areas recover quickly with improved soil and replanted pasture. This process restores the health of grasses and soil, returning much life-supporting carbon to the soil in the process.

“What turns grasslands into deserts is constant grazing by a few animals. Herds must be concentrated and moving.”

I insisted that Fred come over and listen to Alan Savory, telling us "How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change"



After he listened to it, Fred was stunned. He was always sceptical of our “funny ideas” on rotational grazing but suddenly he understood.

“Well, my boy” he said. “So much for all that rot from your Professor mate attacking us graziers and lauding soft-footed animals. It makes sense – soft-footed rabbits spread everywhere and destroyed everything with their constant nibbling; but one or two massive moving herds of bison, bunched and harassed by wolves and Indians and assisted by occasional fires, created the marvellous grasslands of the Prairies.

“Our cattle and sheep can be much more than grass harvesters and providers of periodic protein for people and predators. They can cultivate soil, prepare seed beds, spread seeds and mulch, and fertilise our grasslands and pastures in just one pass; but only if we concentrate them properly, and then give the pasture a decent rest-and-recovery period.”

“This Un-Savory chap will probably be expelled from the Deep Green Brotherhood for such blasphemy.”

Coochie was ecstatic: “With plenty of plant-sustaining emissions from coal in the skies, and soil-sustaining emissions from cattle in the soils, then coal and cattle can paint the grasslands green again.”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Florida Babysitter Accused of Sexual Battery

Stephanie Pensado
(Miami, Florida) A 24-year-old local babysitter, Stephanie Pensado, has been accused of sexual battery for engaging in sex with a teenage boy.

Reportedly, Pensado had sex with the victim at her home eight times.

Pensado faces eight felony counts of sexual battery.

Colorado Woman Accused of Felony Child Sex

Ranada Jo Tate-Wood-Balletta
(Grand Junction, Colorado) A 34-year-old woman, Ranada Jo Tate-Wood-Balletta, has been accused of felony child sexual assault for abusing a young boy.

The boy — interviewed multiple times by investigators after child welfare workers in Montrose alerted police — described years of forced mutual touching, oral sex on the boy, and the use of sex aids between both of them.

The boy and another child also described times when Tate-Wood-Balletta forced them to take overtly sexual photos of herself, photos later posted to Internet sites and directly sent to other people, according to the report.

Tate-Wood-Balletta faces counts of sexual assault on a child, sexual assault on a child as a pattern of abuse, and sexual assault on a child from a position of trust.

The vanishing island (?)


The excerpt below is part of a big and colorful feature in the Sydney Morning Herald.  It claims that a small island in the Pacific is being swamped by global warming -- but gives no actual proof of that.  Since the satellites have detected no global warming for over 18 years now, that would be very difficult to do.

A careful reading of the article reveals two things:  1). It is tsunamis that are the main problem for the islanders;  and: 2). There has been a sea level rise in that part of the Pacific which is much greater than the global average.

So here comes my favorite weapon: Logic.  If the water level rise is not global, how can it be an effect of global warming?  It is clearly a local effect due to variations in ocean currents and the like.  And as a LOCAL effect, it has nothing to do with GLOBAL warming.

OK.  What I have just said is probable rather than logically entailed but there would need to be evidence of some process linking the two phenomena.  But since one of the phenomena does not even exist, that would be hard.  The SMH does not attempt one.

So what we have below is just the usual dishonest propaganda that we so often get from Left-leaning rags like the SMH.  They do pull their punches to a degree at one point but an uncritical reader would conclude that the fate of the island is tied to global warming --JR


Taro Island: a sometimes picturesque coral atoll adrift in the ocean at the north-western tip of the Solomon Islands.

Barely a kilometre long and less across and almost none of it more than two metres above sea level, it is barely a smudge on a map. Yet this smudge - with its nearly 600 permanent residents, its hospital, churches (four), school, police station and courthouse - is set to take an unwanted place in history. Though tiny, it is the capital of the province of Choiseul. Soon it may be the first provincial capital in the world to be abandoned due to climate change.

In the wash of environmental and geopolitical changes that flow from the warming of the planet, Taro is a drop in the ocean. But it is also an early marker of what lies ahead. As Peter Dutton joked with Tony Abbott about water lapping at the doors of Pacific Islanders, the people of Taro were weighing warnings that their home would be among the first - of dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of largely blameless communities swallowed by the ocean as sea levels rise.

Plans have been drawn up. The people are ready. But they have a nagging question. Who will pay the hundreds of millions needed to make it happen? They are waiting for an answer.

Roswita Nowak already knows what it’s like to abandon her home; she’s done it three times.

Shortly after 8am on April 2, 2007, the mother of eight was making the short stroll from her home at Taro’s northern end to her work in a government office when she was distracted by an unfamiliar sound. “I looked down [toward the village centre] and could see people running, and then I heard this ‘sssshhhh’, and saw the water rushing. Then there was shouting: ‘Tsunami! Tidal wave!’ Everyone started to panic, running. People were shouting, ‘We have to go, leave everything, we’re going now.’ And for the women, the first thing we thought of was our children.”

While others headed for boats on the shore, Nowak dashed for home - a slightly raised four-room house where she had left six of her kids minutes before. She calmed them best she could, and waited. “I was shaking.”

Soon her husband, Fleming, a police officer, arrived. He said, “The boat is ready, let’s go.” Their 15-year-old son, Stanislaus, picked up his five-year-old sister, Helena, and everyone ran to the beach at the atoll’s north, where a dinghy was waiting. “We got into the boat,” Nowak remembers, “and immediately the tide went out and we just sat there on the dry seafloor and had to wait for the water to come back in, not knowing what it would do.”

They were lucky. The water came back forcefully enough to lift them but not tip them out. So they headed about two kilometres east across rough seas to the Choiseul mainland and scrambled up a hill to a small camp used by a logging company.

The evacuation of Taro was messy. There weren’t enough boats so it took more than two hours of trips back and forth. Some people were dropped off on an exposed coral reef, only for the oscillating sea to return and swamp them up to their chests as they tried to walk to the shore. The town’s people relocated to the jungle logging camp for five days, largely exposed to the elements. Other parts of the country were much less fortunate. The tsunami, triggered by an earthquake about 160 kilometres south, killed 52.

The island has been evacuated twice more since, during heavy seismic activity in a week in April last year. To some extent, this is the risk that comes with life in a low-lying area dissected by geological fault lines. But the advice from scientists and hard-headed officials is that the risk is worsening rapidly.

Satellite data suggests sea levels in the south-west Pacific are rising up to five times faster than the global average - 7.7 millimetres a year in the capital Honiara, to the south, and up to 16.8 millimetres a year in the ocean to the country’s north.....

As always, climate change driven by greenhouse gases is interacting here with natural forces. Separating the two isn’t necessarily straightforward, but scientists say the human hand is already evident.

They cannot say with confidence that tropical cyclones in the area will become more intense due to climate change, but they know that storms are heading further south. When we arrive, the people of Choiseul are counting the cost of tropical cyclone Raquel, which took at least one life and destroyed homes, palm plantations and seaweed crops at the start of July. Along Taro’s shore, recently felled trees lie in the ocean waiting to be cleaned up.

It is, by several months, the latest in the season a cyclone has hit the area - a reflection, meteorologists say, of changing atmospheric patterns and ocean temperatures being the warmest on record.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Population predictions are crap

What I want to say here is mostly 4th grade stuff but vast numbers of people don't seem to get it.

What I want to talk about is the folly of straight line projections.  People who are used to graphs should know immediately what I am going to say but people with more  literary inclinations probably will not.

Perhaps the most hilarious example of the folly concerned is the repeated prediction that we are going to run out of oil soon.  People have been making that prediction ever since oil was discovered and they have always been wrong.  Up until fracking was implemented, Greenies used to make that prediction.  But fracking has mostly silenced them on that issue.  Now they say we will run out of food!

So why has that prediction always been wrong?  Because it assumes that all the influences on the thing concerned will stay the same. In the case of oil, it assumes there will be no more discoveries.  The reasoning goes like this:  "We have reserves of 10,000 barrels of oil and we are using 1,000 barrels each year so therefore we will run out in 10 years".

It's great arithmetic but totally ignorant of almost everything in nature.  Nature is complex.  Things are always changing.  And if there is any predictability at all in nature the trend will be in the form of an ogive or some other curvilinear trend.  In an ogive, things rise for a while and then flatten out.  In statisticians' terms, they "approach an asymptote".

So it should by now be clear why all the current  predictions of future population will be wrong.  I am in fact here and now going to issue a prophecy!  Bold, I know, but it's a pretty safe one. And neither the Book of Daniel nor the Book of Revelation is involved!  So: This is my prophecy:

"In 50 years time, all the current predictions of various national populations will be shown to have been wrong"

The birthrates in various nations at the moment are very low.  So low that the straight-line wise-heads are predicting that the populations of countries like Japan, Italy and Russia will be only half of what they are now.  Why is that prediction foolish?  Because it assumes that birthrates will remain the same.  Yet anybody who remembers the world before the 1960s should know how absurd that is.

Take Italy, one of the doomed populations according to the straight-line wiseheads. Italy was once the land of large families.  Lots of Italian families had an Ottorino (eighth child).  Now, of course, one child is the norm.  So does not a change as drastic as that tell you something?  Does it not tell you that all the influences on the given phenomenon (in this case the birthrate) will NOT remain the same?  It surely should.

Let us be a little more insightful about population than doing silly arithmetic.  What caused the Italian birthrate collapse?  The same thing that has caused a birthrate collapse in most of the developed world:  The contraceptive pill. Children are expensive but up until about 1960 people had no easy way of stopping them coming.  So they kept coming.

OK.  The pill was an unexpected factor that threw out all the straight line "population explosion" projections made in the early  20th century.  Paul Ehrlich take a bow.  So what other influences could come along and ditch all the present predictions?

There is an obvious one: An evolutionary one. All the non-maternal women are currently being removed from the gene pool by reason of the simple fact that they now rarely have children. Women like them will become rarer and rarer. So all the births of the not too distant future will come from maternally-inclined women. And how many children will those women have? As many as they can afford (and then some in some cases). Some wonderful stories about maternal women here and here and here and here and here.

So the birthrates in advanced nations will recover and the  population will start growing again -- albeit off a lower base.

And there are other influences that may have an effect -- even ones that I have not thought of!  France, for instance, has long had pro-natalist government policies and that has propped up the French birthrate.  Similar policies will probably be adopted by other nations.  Russia and Singapore have already stepped up to the plate with policies of that nature.

And here's a way-out one:  It seems to have become fashionable for celebrity women to have children, multiple children in most cases.  You would not think that women who live by their looks would risk  their figures by having children, but they are in fact doing it -- the Kardashians, for instance.  Children now seem to have become a sign of affluence.  They are the ultimate luxury -- even better than big yachts and Gulfstream jets.  And lots of people DO emulate celebrities.  Many women in the near future may start having children because it is fashionable or simply because they want to show off.  One can imagine the conversations:  "I've got three.  How many have you got?"

So who knows what the future holds?

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Illinois Teacher Sentenced to Probation - Update

Chelsey Wheeler
(Savanna, Illinois) Former West Carroll High School science teacher, Chelsey Wheeler, 26, pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual abuse for having a relationship with a 17-year-old male student.

Wheeler has been sentenced to 4 years probation and must register as a sex offender for life.

* * * * *
Illinois Teacher Accused of Student Sex Assault
[Previous 4/10/14 post]
(Savanna, Illinois) A former science teacher at West Carroll High School, Chelsey Wheeler, resigned her teaching job after being arrested and charged with criminal sexual assault.

Chelsey Wheeler of Lanark, Ill. was released on bond after she was arrested on Monday, April 7, 2014.

Wheeler is accused of having a relationship with a 17-year-old student.

The Savanna Police Department is still investigating the case with help from Carroll County and the Illinois State Police.

Details of the sexual assault are unavailable.

New York Woman Pleads Guilty to Sex with Child

Latasha Mitchell
(Binghamton, New York)

In October 2014, Latasha Mitchell subjected a 7-month-old boy to sexual contact and recorded it on video with her cellphone.

On Thursday, Mitchell, 34, admitted her guilt in Binghamton’s federal courthouse and accepted a plea agreement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office on two felony counts of sexual exploitation of a child, charges that could place her in federal prison for at least 15 years.

Had the case gone to trial, prosecution witnesses, including FBI agents, and evidence would have shown that Mitchell recorded two cellphone videos of the criminal sexual acts against a child who was in her temporary care, Assistant U.S. Attorney Miroslav Lovric said.

Sentencing is scheduled for January 22, 2016.

Ohio Coach Pleads Guilty to Sexual Battery

Chelcie Gullett
(Xenia, Ohio) Former basketball coach at Bethel High School, Chelcie Gullett, 25, has pleaded guilty to sexual battery of a female player.

According to a release from the Xenia Police Divison, after an investigation, police determined that sexual acts between Gullett and the player occurred in Xenia, where Gullett lives.

Police were notified back in May after the victim’s parents reported an incident to the school.

Gullett faces a possible five years in prison.

Florida Woman Accused of Sex with Two Boys

Kimberly Hendrix
(Clearwater, Florida) A 33-year-old local woman, Kimberly Hendrix, has been arrested for engaging in sex with two boys, aged 15 and 16.

Detectives investigated.

Through their investigation it was determined that the boys were invited to a private location for a party where Hendrix provided them alcohol and engaged in sexual activity with the boys who were 15 and 16-years-old at the time.

Hendrix has been charged with lewd and lascivious battery and unlawful sex with a minor.

Kansas Woman Charged with Indecent Liberties with a Child

Stephanie Francine Brannan
(Ottawa, Kansas) A 24-year-old local woman, Stephanie Francine Brannan, has been accused of engaging in sex with a 15-year-old boy.

Brannan was arrested in Forest Park Friday on a Franklin County District Court warrant.[…]

The arrest stems from a July 12 report to the Ottawa Police Department by a woman identifying herself as is the victim’s mother.

Brannan has been charged with aggravated indecent liberties with a child.

How your tweets can betray your politics: Liberals use swear words on Twitter while those on the right discuss religion

This will be no news to conservatives who have had interactions with Leftists.  Abuse is about all they are capable of if you point out anything that undermines any of their claims.  Civil disagreement and rational argument mostly seem to be beyond them.

Like an earlier study, the study below found that profanity is much more common on Leftist social media. The earlier study of the matter found profanity to be TWELVE TIMES more common on Leftist blogs. Profanity is of course proverbially the sign of a weak mind trying to express itself forcibly.

It has to be that way.  Reality is so inimical to Leftist views  that a balanced consideration of all the evidence would make conservatives out of them.  So emotional responses to any undermining of their positions are all that is left to them. They are a sad lot -- ruled by their own hostile emotions


For many users of social media, figuring out their political stance is simple as they broadcast their views for all to see.  However, it seems it is possible to discern someone's politics purely from the language they use on Twitter.

Researchers have found liberals, like supporters of the Democrats in the US, were more likely to use swear words.

They were also more likely to use emotionally charged language and express positive emotions than Conservative and Republican tweeters, but also use language associated with anxiety.

Conservatives were more likely to discuss religion, with 'god' and 'psalm' being among their most popular words.

Dr Matthew Purver, one of the authors of the study at Queen Mary University of London, said: 'Open social media provides a huge amount of data for use in understanding offline behaviour.

'The way people talk and interact on Twitter can provide a more robust and natural source for analysing behaviour than the traditional experiments and surveys.'

The researchers studied tweets sent between 15 and 30 June 2014 by followers of either the Republican or Democrat party Twitter accounts.

As might be expected, there were clear differences in the discussion of politics and topical issues.  Liberals were more likely to discuss international news, frequently mentioning 'Kenya', where 60 people were killed in violent attacks during the time of the study, and 'Delhi' which was also regularly in the news at the time.

However, while Democrats would be expected to mention Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi regularly it was actually Republicans who talked about their opposition most.

Democrats conversely were more likely to talk about former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science One, showed Democrats were also more likely to swear, with 'f***' and 's***' in their top ten most used words after common English words were removed.

Democrats were also more likely than conservatives to use words like 'I' and 'me', while Republicans used words like 'we' and 'our'.

Previous studies have suggested liberals have a greater sense of their own uniqueness while conservatives are more likely to emphasis group identify and consensus.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

California Teacher Gets Jail in Sex Case - Update

Laura Lasek
(Marysville, California) Former Marysville teacher Laura Lasek, 27, has been convicted of statutory rape and oral copulation with a 15-year-old boy on multiple occasions.

Lasek was sentenced Monday to serve 180 days in county jail and five years probation.

* * * * *
California Teacher Accused of Sex with Minor
[Previous 2/14/15 post]
(Marysville, California) A 26-year-old teacher at Marysville High School, Laura Lasek, has been accused of engaging in sex with a student.

Lasek faces counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child 14 or 15, oral copulation with a person under 16, and unlawful sex with a minor.

While a teacher at Thomas E. Mathews Community School, Lasek allegedly engaged in sexual acts with a student who attended the school, according to Sgt. Chris Sachs.

Additional information was unavailable as the investigation is ongoing.

Lasek was booked into custody with bail set at $211,000.

California oilfield wastewater panic ignores first rule of toxicology

So oilfield wastewater sprayed on CA cops contains toxins!  How awful!  What the Greenies don't mention is the first law of toxicology:  The toxicity is in the dose.  We ingest minute amounts of toxins all the time and it does us no harm.  But even plain old drinking water can kill you if you drink too much of it.  Wastewater for crop usage is purified according to official standards and there is no evidence it does any harm.

“You can't find what you don't look for,” UC Berkeley researcher Seth B.C. Shonkoff recently told the LA Times, referring to the chemicals that state regulators don’t know to test for in the recycled wastewater the California oil industry sells for use on crops here in the top agricultural producing state in the US.

Chevron produces more than 10 times as much water as it does oil at its Kern River oil field in California’s Central Valley, for instance — 760,000 barrels of water a day versus 70,000 barrels of oil. Half of that water is treated and sold to the Cawelo Water District in Bakersfield, which mixes it with fresh water and sells it exclusively to farmers.

Nobody knows if that water contains chemicals from fracking or other extreme oil extraction techniques, because the companies aren't required to test for them before selling the water. Nobody knows what those chemicals are, anyway, because companies aren't required to make that information public.

And that’s just a fraction of the lucrative new market in recycled oil field water Chevron is pioneering as the climate-exacerbated drought gripping the American West show no signs of abating any time soon.

According to the LA Times, the company recycles 21 million gallons of produced water every day in California, selling it to farmers who use it on about 45,000 acres of cropland in Kern County, the nation’s “No. 2 crop county” since 2013.

Farmers rely on government regulators to guarantee that the recycled oil water they buy is safe, the Times reports, but given that state regulators don’t even know what those chemicals are, it can't very well be testing for them. But that could all change soon.

The California legislature passed a law in 2013 that establishes a regulatory framework for fracking, acidization and other unconventional well stimulations techniques, including mandatory air quality and groundwater monitoring and public disclosure of all chemicals used. The full regulations go into effect July 1, 2015 (six months before the scientific study and environmental impact study ordered by the law will be completed, but that’s another story).

Last month, state water authorities announced that all recycled oil field water would have to be tested for every chemical copmanies report using in the extraction process, and set a June 15, 2015 deadline for companies to report the results of those tests. Currently, the only tests required by the state are for naturally occurring toxins.

Environmental advocacy group Water Defense has already done its own test of the water Chevron is selling to California farmers, however, and says, “Our findings are appalling: laboratory analysis of irrigation water in the Cawelo Water District found not only oil, but known toxins and potential carcinogens including methylene chloride. Are these chemicals in the food we eat? We need to be investigating our waterways for the full range of contaminants that are going into them.”

David Ansolabehere, general manager of the Cawelo Water District, criticized Water Defense’s methods, per the LA Times, but at the same time announced that his agency and Chevron would voluntarily contract a third party to conduct tests in accordance with the new requirements.

The biggest question that needs to be answered in all this, of course, is whether or not there has been significant contamination of our food supply. At present, it’s not clear whether or not oil contamination in water used on crops could ever actually make its way into an almond or cherry or any other California-grown produce you might ever consume. But it certainly will help when we know what to look for.

Of course, this is just one of many issues the oil industry has with water that needs to be resolved. California oil wells coughed up some 3.1 billion barrels of water along with 200 million barrels of oil in 2014, much of it too salty or chemical-laden to be treated in a cost-effective manner.

Some 831 million barrels of that wastewater was injected into disposal wells last year, even as evidence was coming to light that California regulators had improperly allowed as many as 2,500 injection wells to operate in groundwater aquifers that should have been protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

In response to the drought — and the fact that California has only one year of water left in its reservoirs — Governor Jerry Brown announced emergency urban water use restrictions earlier this year. Those restrictions were heavily criticized for not including the oil and agricultural industries.

State regulators, meanwhile, gave oil companies another two years to continue injecting wastewater into protected aquifers while they seek the proper exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).