IT'S CONFIRMED!

The North Slope oil spill is the biggest ever! You read it here!

Scientists suggest that China is killing its ocean waters; Forbes publishes its report of the world's richest people.

INTEREST RATES RISING WORLDWIDE

This from the Meltdown people: Japan is about to raise its interest rates, following the Europeans... I have no idea how serious this stuff is...

OCEANS GET SICKER

Wired has it all, courtesy of The Fall of Humanity and Out of the Mountains...

DATA MINING WON'T STOP TERRORISM

Just as torture won't provide the government with real information, data mining won't stop terrorism...

LA TIMES FINALLY COVERS OIL SPILL

Show's over, folks, you can all go home now... the Times article claims that "At least 20,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled from a corroded pipeline near Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska..." whereas the news in Anchorage is that whistleblower Chuck Hamel is saying the spillage is closer to 798,000 gallons...Notice a discrepancy? The LA Times didn't, though it did quote Chuck Hamel.

Today's relevant comic, thanks to The Seattle P-I and Bizarro...

OIL SPILL IN ALASKA: SHUTTING OFF BOTH OIL AND MEDIA SPIGOTS

(from the website of KTVA in Anchorage)

It's worthy of note that this barely-covered story only popped up in the blogosphere around now. Many of the headlines suggest that the quantity of spilled oil is "unknown"... the Sierra Club has more complete news, apparently, than any of the "mainstream" media on this one. The story can't be found in any of the major newspapers, though the Anchorage Daily News imagines this spill to be "the sixth-largest oil spill ever on the North Slope, and the size is likely to increase once cleanup workers fully assess the extent of the spill." The story did make it onto ABC News, however. This is what Common Dreams found... further discussion can be found on the Daily Kos... and that's what you find on a story that was available last Thursday. Amazing. I guess the powers-that-blab don't want to tell you about oil spills amidst a rising panic about "peak oil" and all that.

FOR (SOUTH DAKOTA) LOVERS --
Getting the number 1 listing on Google's blogsearch (type in "abortion" in the search engine) is a blog called Molly Saves The Day, which, if you scroll down a bit, offers a manual on how to perform an abortion. Practical advice for South Dakotans, and probably also folks in a number of other states...

COLLEGE WON'T GET YOU A JOB OR A BETTER LIFE

From the Los Angeles Times -- it should have been obvious to everyone from the get-go that all education will do is place you in front of someone else in the queue for the limited supply for good jobs. And if the supply of good jobs is getting shorter and shorter because nobody is doing anything about outsourcing, then there's little point in buying an expensive degree so you can spend your life in debt, right?

FEELING THOSE CANCER RATES?

You've got rocket fuel in ya! Why, I guess you'll just have to adapt to it through natural selection!

NATURE BLOGS: check out check out niches...

SAY GOODBYE TO THE WILD BONOBO

from CNN.com...

At last -- here is the original AccuWeather "Is America Facing Another Dust Bowl?" column... everyone else on the blogosphere appears to be quoting the "Morris Daily Herald," definitely not a major source...

Anyone who has read "Rebekah Nathan's" recent popular book My Freshman Year , which is basically an anthropological study of college life, will observe the endemic lack of interest in academic life among the college students "Nathan" studies. They like college, sure enough, but, as it turns out, they like everything about college except academic life, except classes, except academic study.

Compare this with the piece in the Daily Kos about schooling today -- "teacherken" complains that life in schools, by which he means early childhood education, has become too academic.

Is it any wonder that our young adults are uninterested in academics if we bludgeon them with the stuff from a very early age?

The academic "pushing" of children, such as what David Elkind criticized in his books, is education on what Paulo Freire called the "banking model." The "banking model" is where teachers set themselves up as "bankers" and conceive of themselves as "making deposits" into children.

Almost all formal education is done according to this banking model. The result of it is, apparently, that you have in the United States the country with the world's best educational resources and a public largely uninterested in learning anything academic.