Archive for October, 2006
The agency shuts down five public libraries full of environmental data, and employees and activists question the Bush administration’s motives.
( I am going to pretty much quote the article since you have to register at Salon to read it in its entirety.)
Brownout at the EPA
The agency shuts down five public libraries full of environmental data, and employees and activists question the Bush administration’s motives.
By Petra Bartosiewicz
Oct. 30, 2006 | ‘When Verena Owen wanted to block the construction of a sludge incinerator in her hometown north of Chicago, she went to the library. At the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional library in Chicago, Owen pored through archived microfiche records and paper reports on sludge and incineration and public comments on similar projects. Owen learned that just a fraction of a teaspoon of mercury could poison a 10-acre lake — and the proposed plant would have spewed 92 pounds of mercury into the air of Waukegan, Ill., annually. Her research proved pivotal in forcing the plant to relocate and vastly reduce its mercury emissions.
At the beginning of such a project, says Owen, a veteran clean-air activist for the Illinois Sierra Club, “you don’t always know exactly what you’re looking for. These were things I just needed to see.”
But now the library where Owen did her research is closed, as are similar facilities around the country. Announcing the closings with all the fanfare of a pin drop, the Environmental Protection Agency quietly began downsizing its 35-year-old library network earlier this month, shuttering its headquarters branch in Washington and three regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo. Hours and services are to be reduced gradually in the remaining 22 regional branches in the network. The agency’s budget has been slashed by $100 million for the fiscal year beginning this month, and the libraries have lost one-third of their $6.5 million annual funding. The EPA cites its money woes and a shift to an online model as the reason for the closures, but critics charge the move will erase vital chunks of institutional memory, and is more proof that the Bush administration has no interest in letting the EPA fulfill its role as an environmental watchdog.
“This is a way to keep EPA from being an effective organization,” says a former librarian with the agency. “Take away their research ability. Cripple them.” Adds Dwight Welch, a union official who represents EPA employees, “The closures seem like part of a general trend of hostility towards science by this administration. They don’t want to hear the facts on everything from global warming to raising drinking water standards.”
The library closings have caused distress among agency employees, who see the network’s trove of technical reports and scientific data as vital to their mission of proposing and enforcing the nation’s environmental laws. “It’s as if your local fire department was getting rid of their fire trucks,” said Suzanne Wuerthele, an EPA toxicologist with 22 years at the agency, who works at the regional office in Denver. “We won’t be able to fight our court cases; we won’t be able to inform the public; we will be much less effective, certainly less efficient.” But the closures are also a problem for civilian activists like Owen, who will have greatly diminished access to records that have proved instrumental in fighting grass-roots environmental battles.
In a process the agency terms “deaccessioning,” materials at the four closed libraries are being boxed up, labeled and shipped to three repository locations, where they are to be cataloged anew and eventually digitized. The headquarters library alone includes 16,000 books, 380,000 microfiche documents, and a vast array of technical reports and research monographs. The headquarters library — once staffed with librarians and open to the public — will now be one of the three repositories used to store materials until they can be dispersed to other libraries, federal agencies or universities. EPA staffers at all the closed libraries are being transferred, and an unknown number of contract employees have been fired.
And the Bush administration hasn’t finished. In addition to shuttering these libraries, the EPA plans to close its Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances library in Washington, which contains unique holdings on pollution prevention, toxic substances and chemicals, and was used to research and craft important new regulations, such as tighter arsenic standards for drinking water in the 1990s. The closing has not yet been announced, but employees report that materials have already been boxed up and stored in the basement.
So far the EPA has been mostly close-lipped on the changes, making a stealth announcement of the headquarters closure in the Federal Register just 10 days before the doors were permanently shut.
Moreover, even as the agency touts an increased online presence, it has canceled subscriptions to online data sources such as Greenwire, an environmental news service that received 125,000 hits from EPA staff last year. When asked to confirm the Greenwire cancellation, spokeswoman Ackerman initially said, “It would be almost hilarious for us not to have Greenwire … There may be days when we’d rather not read what they say, but I can’t imagine we’d cut that.” She later confirmed the cancellation of the service.
The agency’s employees lodged a formal protest this summer. At the end of June, union officials representing just over half of the EPA’s 18,000 staffers wrote Congress to demand the library funds be restored. The closures, the letter argued, would hinder emergency preparedness, antipollution enforcement and long-term research.
October 31st, 2006
I just found out from the IntelliAdmin blog that Microsoft is going to automatically install IE7 on November 1! It is going to auto install as an automatic update. I upgraded to IE7 and I just don’t like it. The layout was just counterintuitive and just blech. It’s basically Microsoft trying to catchup to the much superior FireFox.
Now, if you don’t want to upgrade to IE7, Microsoft has a toolkit available to disable the automatic update. The fellas over at the IntelliAdmin blog also put together a utility to block the installation as well.
Another thing about IE7, it only runs on computers running WinXP or Windows 2003 server. So, if you are running Windows 2000 or any other earlier version, you don’t have to worry about this crap being installed on your machine. However, IE7 is going to the the installed browser that comes with Windows Vista systems whenever that is released.
October 31st, 2006
video://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAqZ98ucaTk
October 30th, 2006
Well, I didn’t really feel like working out again today too, but I decided that I just had to do something. I didn’t want to do another Firm, so I reached for Jari Love’s Get Ripped! I just love this workout. It is probably an intermediate level strength training DVD. I just love it because you work a lot of parts of your body, but don’t feel like you got hit by a bus when you are done.
Her warm up consists of a bunch of squats and dead lifts. You then go into a superset of squats. I just did the DVD, but I can’t remember if there was something after the squats before heading to the floor for some chest, back and leg work. Oh well. Yea, then you head to the floor and do a superset of chest presses, followed by lat and triceps work. She then has you do some inner and outer thigh leg lifts. You then stand up again and do some lunges, more dead lifts and back work. Then on to the shoulders and delts. There is a short ab segment and short stretch. The workout is about 45 to 50 minutes long, but it never feels that long whenever I do the workout. The time really goes by quickly.
I really do like Jari Love - she is so down to earth and she always has great words of encouragement to keep you going. I also like how she stresses that you should do the DVD about 3 times a week - but in order to get really “ripped” and lean, you have to make sure that you do cardio work and watch your diet. It’s actually kind of refreshing to have an instructor emphasize that the DVD is not the complete answer to your fitness goals.
It’s kind of annoying actually when you do some tapes and the instructors try to make it seem like you can get a body like theirs just from doing their workout, when that is really not the case.
October 30th, 2006
I didn’t work out the last 3 days. I sort of took them as rest days, but it was mostly because I was again wicked tired, had to copy a butt load of DVD’s for Fred and I got preoccupied with finding plugins for ths blog.
Thursday was pretty interesting though. I go to a couple of video fitness message boards everyday and I’ve learned a lot about different DVD’s from them. It’s great since a lot of people post reviews on workouts so you can get an idea whether you would or wouldn’t like a video. Of course, the boards haven’t been good to my bank account since they’ve made me want to try so many things that I would never have considered.
Anyways, there are a few people from Hawaii that regularly go to this one board and so we were going to have a get together on Thursday. I was so nervous, it was like going on a blind date! I was really hoping that there would be someone else there that was also as overweight as I am or was so I could get some advice/encouragement from someone else struggling the way I am.
But, only 1 other person showed up! :dizzy: The person organizing it changed the date to a Thursday instead of Friday so we could accommodate a person from one of the neighbor islands, but she never showed! Doh! So it was interesting to say the least. The person I met was really nice and we got to talk about our workout DVD’s. It isn’t something that you can really talk to a lot of people about. I mean, who the heck is going to be excited about getting a brand new workout DVD other than us crazy home exercisers?
The lady I met up with was really nice though and we talked for over an hour. I think we were there for about 2 hours. I was kind of proud of myself since I did pretty good. I think I am really shy and have a hard time talking to people. I never know what to say. I am usually at a complete loss in large groups because I never want to interrupt people when talking and I have this weird sense of modesty where I find it hard to talk about myself because I don’t want to seem like I am boasting - about anything.
Oh yea, and we met up at Ryan’s in Ward Center. I used to go there a lot. When I first started college, some friends and I took an aerobics class at school and we would go to Ryan’s once a week to eat their crab dip. Oh, it is soooo good. Then I would go there with various friends to drink coffee and smoke and talk about all kinds of things. (This was after the demise of Java Java and before the prevalence of Starbucks around town.) So, I have a good feeling about that place.
After the get together, I headed to Ross in yet another attempt to find a copy of Jari Love’s Slim and Lean and again, they did not have any in stock. I also didn’t see any copies of any of her other workouts, so I think that they might no longer be carried by them. It’s too bad, I think the DVD would have cost about $5 or $6, but it’s about $10 everywhere else. Oh well, I will keep looking. I might venture out Kaneohe this week, just to see if they might have it in stock.
Since I also had the car, I also decided to pick up a copy of Sublime Stitching. I had a 25% off coupon for Borders and it was only in stock in Pearl Ridge, so I headed out that way. I pretty much got the book for the patterns since it includes at least 40 pages of iron on transfer patterns. Yay! Of course, I don’t know why I had to have it since I have had the Stitch It Kit for over a year and haven’t embroidered anything yet. I then met up with Fred for coffee and just hung out for awhile.
Friday was like any other day - just tried to take over the world. I spent most of the day burning copies of stuff and tried working on the router again. Aww screw it with the router, I am taking it back tomorrow and getting a NetGear router instead. I just can’t figure out why the damn router is not getting an internet connection. I’ve tried it with and without firewalls, upgraded the firmware, tried it on various computers, and NOTHING! No connection. I can ping the router when a computer is hooked up to it and if I have my laptop on, I can see the home network, but neither of the computers would be able to connect to the internet. It’s just weird.
I wanted to try to do something creative Friday night so I decided to finally try some embroidery out. I mean, heck, I just got the new book and have all of the supplies, so why the heck not? The Stitch It Kit came with a couple of “tea towels” - which I think are just stripped down versions of dishcloths and therefore, I do not know what the actual purpose of a tea towel is - and since I didn’t have access to an iron, I traced a pattern onto the fabric. It didn’t really take that long to do either, which is cool.
I just used a simple backstitch and I think I did a pretty good job for my first attempt at embroidery.
October 30th, 2006
Previous Posts
