February 25, 2021

I was abused back in the early '50s apparently

If you read it to the end, only then will you get the punch line! Here I thought i could sue because I ended up too short to be a flight attendant, but what's a mother to do when formula in cans wasn't yet invented with all the right stuff, I suppose.
And now I'm ticked off!

https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-information/fda-advises-parents-and-caregivers-not-make-or-feed-homemade-infant-formula-infants?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

February 24, 2021

Audience
Parents and other caregivers of infants who make their own homemade infant formula using a recipe.
Product
Homemade infant formulas
Purpose
The FDA is advising parents and caregivers to not make or feed homemade infant formula to infants. [snip]

You have to read to the end to discover what's really the problem. My mom got a recipe from our family doctor, I'm quite sure, back in the day, but I don't think THIS was ever in her recipe!!!!

February 23, 2021

My old girl died last night

Possibly a power supply issue.

February 9, 2021

Another "emergency" situation - Humanity Is Flushing Away One of Life's Essential Elements

We broke Phophorous


First is was loss of topsoil, then it was how much better cover crops would suck up CO2 than switching from fossil fuels; here's the newest "scarcity" in the rebuilding of farm fields in which we grow our foods

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/phosphorus-pollution-fertilizer/617937/

In a field of sugar beets outside Cambridge, England, Simon Kelly stands above a narrow trench gouged into the rusty earth, roughly 15 feet deep and 30 feet long. “Welcome to the pit,” says Kelly, a bespectacled, white-bearded geologist in a straw hat and khaki shirt. “You’re seeing something that hasn’t been seen in a long time.”

The rock layers exposed in the trench date back more than 100 million years, to when England lay submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea. Kelly—a researcher at a nonprofit geology consultancy—specializes in marine fossils of that era (“Dicranodonta vagans!” he exclaims when I find a stone pocked with the impressions of tiny clam-like shells, which he asks to keep). That’s why he had an excavator dig this trench in 2015, and why he has spent countless hours since then sifting through its trove of treasures. “Going out to Simon’s hole, are you?” Kelly’s wife deadpanned when I picked him up on the morning of my visit.

I had come because “Simon’s hole” also contained objects of more recent historical significance: dull, round pebbles that once helped feed the United Kingdom. By the 1800s, centuries of cultivation had sapped Britain’s soils of nutrients, including phosphorus—an essential element for crops. At the time, manure and bones were common sources of phosphorus, and when the country exhausted its domestic reserves, it looked elsewhere for more.

“Great Britain is like a ghoul, searching the continents,” wrote Justus von Liebig, the German chemist who first identified the critical role of phosphorus in agriculture. “Already in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipzig, of Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations.” [snip]

February 9, 2021

I just want to say thank you to those that sent those hearts my way! eom/

February 3, 2021

ICIJ nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for combating dark money flows

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/icij-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize-for-combating-dark-money-flows/?utm_source=ICIJ&utm_campaign=8a8e2f82a8-20210202_WeeklyEmail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_992ecfdbb2-8a8e2f82a8-83351998&ct=t()

By Ben Hallman
Image: Bernhard Ludewig
February 1, 2021

Three Norwegian lawmakers have nominated the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice for a Nobel Peace Prize, citing the organizations’ “success in building global alliances” to increase transparency in the global financial system.

“The outstanding work of the ICIJ to expose illicit flows, and the mammoth achievement of the GATJ to build national and international pressure for accountability and fair taxation — warrants attention, recognition and support,” the letter says. “They are, independently and by different means, trailblazers in creating a world where financial incentives for conflict, wars, human rights abuses and violence are non-existent. These courageous journalists and civil society organizations play a critical role in documenting corruption and Illicit flows, often while putting their lives in peril in the process.”

ICIJ, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit newsroom that works closely with global media partners to report on corruption and other abuses of power. The nomination recognizes nearly a decade of ICIJ investigations that have revealed widespread abuses of offshore havens by oligarchs, political elites and criminal groups, and the role that global banks and other Western institutions play in enabling money laundering and tax dodging.

These include FinCEN Files, which published in September with BuzzFeed News and other media partners in more than 80 countries, and Panama Papers, ICIJ’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, which sparked new laws and criminal investigations around the world.

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