Society's ChildS


Magnet

Second Canadian train derailment within a week

Image
© Deborah Goble/CBC
No one was injured when three CP Rail cars carrying coal tipped over and went off the CN railway tracks near Burnaby Lake in B.C.'s Lower Mainland Saturday morning.

Burnaby RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Baier said police got a call about the derailment just before 11 a.m. PT and arrived at the intersection of Cariboo Road and Government Street to find three out of 152 rail cars tipped over, with the contents spilling out.

"The only contents of the car was coal," he said. "There's been some of the contents have fallen in a nearby stream. We've got a hold of the Ministry of Environment that oversees that issue, and I believe they are responding."

Baier said there was obvious damage to the rail tracks, cars and the immediate surroundings but that no one was hurt and the derailment posed no further risk.

"There is no safety concern to the general public," he said.

Comment: It's must have become increasingly more difficult to blame only local factors with a straight face, as it has become apparent that the phenomena of train derailments has skyrocketed all over, these last years.


Laptop

Cyberbullying: Why women aren't welcome on the Internet

Image
© Pacific Standard
I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. "Amanda, this twitter account. Freaking out over here," she wrote. "There is a twitter account that seems to have been set up for the purpose of making death threats to you."

I dragged myself out of bed and opened my laptop. A few hours earlier, someone going by the username "headlessfemalepig" had sent me seven tweets. "I see you are physically not very attractive. Figured," the first said. Then: "You suck a lot of drunk and drug f****** guys c****." As a female journalist who writes about sex (among other things), none of this feedback was particularly out of the ordinary. But this guy took it to another level: "I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for 'manslaughter', I killed a woman, like you, who decided to make fun of guys c****." And then: "Happy to say we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head." There was more, but the final tweet summed it up: "You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this."

My fingers paused over the keyboard. I felt disoriented and terrified. Then embarrassed for being scared, and, finally, pissed. On the one hand, it seemed unlikely that I'd soon be defiled and decapitated at the hands of a serial rapist-murderer. On the other hand, headlessfemalepig was clearly a deranged individual with a bizarre fixation on me. I picked up my phone and dialed 911.

Arrow Down

MSNBC: December Jobs Report Is 'Awful,' 'Very Bad,' And 'Ugly'


MSNBC admitted that the December jobs report was dismal Friday.

CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera announced the newly released report number. Only 74,000 jobs were created in December, a number that fell significantly short of the 200,000 anticipated created jobs.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough commented "That's a horrific number" and said that the newly added jobs number is the lowest seen in years.

Caruso-Cabrera confirmed Scarborough's statement, saying that the newly added jobs number is in fact the lowest since January of 2011 and the number was "very, very bad."

Book 2

Best of the Web: Amiri Baraka, poet, playwright, activist and author of 9/11 poem, dies at 79



Amiri Baraka, a poet and playwright of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others, died on Thursday in Newark. He was 79.

His death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, was confirmed by his son Ras Baraka, a member of the Newark Municipal Council. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Baraka had been hospitalized since Dec. 21.

Mr. Baraka was famous as one of the major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and '70s, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena.

Among his best-known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995; the play Dutchman; and Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a highly regarded historical survey.

Mr. Baraka, whose work was widely anthologized and who was heard often on the lecture circuit, was also long famous as a political firebrand. Here, too, critical opinion was divided: He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised, particularly in the racially charged political landscape of Newark, where he lived most of his life, or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s.

Comment: He seemed like a soul searching for truth, no matter where it led. May he continue. Here is a link to the full text of his 9/11 masterpiece, "Somebody Blew up America."


Yoda

Best of the Web: The George Carlin Experiment: how did you react?

George Carlin
© Unknown

You could say I grew up watching George Carlin.

He was always my favorite rhetoric-ist. The most logical. The most reasonable. He was in effect my only access to what I now know as the Trivium.

In my first 25 years of life, George Carlin's material truly made me laugh at what could only be defined as Carlin's hyper-realistic perspective stand-up routine. It was the most harsh and abusive form of truth intervention for the entire human species - and yet it was masked brilliantly as comedy.

At around age 25, I attended an event in Las Vegas that was the beginning of my own transformation and incremental arrival into the over-exposure of hyper-reality Carlin spewed. This event was George Carlin, live at the Bally's Casino resort. How wondrously excited I was to see up close and personal one of my few Idols in life. And the show went on...

But something was different.

Something just didn't feel right.

George wasn't the problem, for he was delivering his material just as rehearsed-ly as he always had, mentally re-ciphering eerily associative memory poems with endless lists of material and anecdotal stories with an almost autistic flair.

No, the problem laid elsewhere... It was the crowd. And it was myself.

Pills

U.K.: High on mephedrone, student cut his own penis and stabbed his mother

methedrone
Police described both as stable after they were rushed to hospital with life-threatening – and in the teenager’s case, apparently self-inflicted – wounds
A 19-year-old student has cut off his own penis and stabbed his mother while high on the party drug mephedrone, it was claimed yesterday.

Emergency services rushed to a house in Haywards Heath, West Sussex and apparently found the man hanging from a bedroom window with blood pouring from wounds to his groin.

Police confirmed they entered the house in the early hours of Sunday 29 December and found the 46-year-old mother, who had phoned 999. Both were rushed to hospital with what were described as life-threatening - and in the man's case, self-inflicted - wounds.

Arrow Up

Food prices rose 5.8% in Armenia in 2013, expected to jump another 10% in 2014

meats and veggies
Meats and vegetables are getting more expensive by the month

Food prices in Armenia went 5.8% up in 2013, the National Statistical Service reports.
According to the statistical report, 2.3% increase in prices was recorded in December against November 2013, mainly due to 4.3-24.2% rise in prices for fruits, vegetables and potatoes.

Prices for potatoes and vegetables rose by 1.7% in December 2013 against the same month of 2012 and by 24.2% against November 2013.

Comment: See also: Food prices in Armenia may jump ten percent this year

You can start canning both your meats and vegetables so you can be prepared for the rough times ahead.


Ice Cube

Food price rises in U.S. blamed on cold weather

meat prices USA
Frozen sprinklers, an iced over fountain, and smoke from a heater working overtime.

These are all signs of the deep freeze that took over the CSRA this week.

But is this cold weather causing food prices to rise at your local grocery store?

Ricky Volpe, Research Economist at the USDA says, "Any sort of weather anomaly, unusually hot or cold or dry or wet weather is going to cause problems for the agricultural sector. So it certainly makes sense that we're going to see a short term bump in costs."

Comment: Have you been canning?


Stock Up

Food prices to rise by up to 8% in Czech Republic

egg prices
© CTK Prices of eggs are also expected to grow
Czech food producers expect that food prices will grow by 5 to 8 percent starting from January 1 as a result of forex interventions launched by the Czech National Bank (CNB), Food Chamber spokeswoman Jarmila Stolcova told CTK Tuesday.

The weakening of the crown currency following the central bank's interventions is criticised above all by those producers that import a large part of commodities for their production, such as smaller producers of sweets and some meat processors, Stolcova said.

Growing costs are forcing food companies to cut margins, but a number of them cannot afford further reduction. Some producers even fear they will have to restrict production and cut staff numbers, according to Stolcova.

Comment: People might want to start canning their meats and lard right now, so that they are able to have proper nutrition when meat products become a luxury item affordable only for the very few. Czech food prices grew nearly 7 percent in 2012, which was the fastest rate in the EU, and the trend continues.


Nuke

Mainstream Media Blackout: Maine Second State to Pass GMO Labeling Law

maine No to gmo
Maine joined Connecticut this week as the second state in the nation to sign a genetically modified food labeling law, but you may not have heard much about it because the mainstream media hasn't really said anything about it.

Do a basic news engine search and you'll see that no mainstream media outlets have reported anything on this story. In fact, at the time of writing this, the most I could find was Washington Post Blog and Grist (with a ridiculously biased title).

No MSNBC. No CNN. No ABC.

No other major news outlets are touching this story. Why?

Comment: See also:

'Army of lobbyists' led by Monsanto helped neuter GMO labeling law in Connecticut
Monsanto's Top 7 Lies About GMO Labeling and Proposition 37
The GMO labeling scam