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Sunday, September 28, 2014

Third Quarter 2014 News Factoids

More Americans now die from prescription painkillers (16,000 per year) than from heroin and cocaine combined — per C.D.C. {Notice also that deaths from marijuana each year is still zero.}

Back in May, the White House announced completion of a new rooftop solar system, saying that every component was made in America and it would pay for itself in energy savings over the next eight years.

Since Republicans are oblivious to the difference between the freedom of actual democracy and America's current totalitarian fascist government, maybe I should write a book called "Fascism For Dummkopfs".

India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.

Republican Party dirty tricks returned to New Mexico in August, with a fake mailing from 'NM Dems' delivered on Saturday the 9th telling voters that political events on Sunday the 10th were cancelled.

According to Publishers Weekly in June 2014, Amazon sells 41% of all new books that are sold in America; it also sells 65% of all books purchased online, whether digital or print – and yet, books constitute only seven percent of Amazon's total sales.

The latest analysis by the factcheckers at PunditFact says that Fox News hosts and personalities speak 60 percent 'mostly or outright false' information, while MSNBC is 46 percent.

ECONOMIC NEWS
The July trade deficit drained $40.5B from the U.S. economy, mostly due to goods purchased from China.

Chicken prices rose to record highs recently because G.M.O. roosters had the side effect of 25 percent less fertility; producers hope to replace them by Fall. — per TIME Magazine

DROUGHT NEWS
The snowpack in California's mountains shrank by 86% in just one year.

WILDFIRE NEWS
Since 1985, the size of the average wildfire on federal land has QUADRUPLED. Of the top ten biggest burn years on record, NINE have happened since 2000.
— per National Interagency Fire Center

GLOBAL WARMING NEWS
Things are indeed heating up at Yellowstone National Park. In July, underground thermal changes melted the asphalt of one of their roads, which has been closed to tourist traffic.

Hurricane Marie on the west coast of Mexico in late August caused flooding of several low-lying streets in Seal Beach, California, as well as in neighboring Long Beach. Surfers were pleased at the larger waves.

DEBUNKING ANOTHER MYTH:
SUSTAINABLE ENERGY CUTS COAL INDUSTRY JOBS

“At the end of the 1970s there were more than 250,000 coal miners in America. Since then, however, coal employment has fallen by two-thirds ... because most coal now comes from strip mines that require very few workers. At this point, coal mining accounts for only one-sixteenth of 1 percent of overall U.S. employment; shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9 ... The real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And coal workers lost.”
— Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 2014

NEW WORRY: CELL PHONE INTERCEPTS
As if there is not already enough to worry about, Popular Science Magazine has found 17 'fake' cellphone towers across the southern half of the United States. Well, not really fake because they connect to your cell phone, then drop 4G service to 2G service, turn encryption to OFF, and listen to your call and-or deliver spyware to your handset. The actual discoveries were by Nevada security firm E.S.D. while demonstrating their ESD CryptoPhone 500 device (for sale at $3,500 each). Unable to confirm ownership of these towers, the various authors and interviewees conclude that it is NOT the N.S.A., because the Feds already have direct access thru your cellphone carrier. So if not the U.S. government, then who is hijacking & infecting cellphones as they pass thru these geographic cells (almost all near military bases)?
Copyright 2014 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

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