Composting makes our cities more like ecosystems and less like they actually are, feedlots
  • A. Atelier/Shutterstock
  • Composting makes our cities more like ecosystems and less like they actually are, feedlots
Tomorrow Begins Seattle's Ban on Trashing Food: What you must keep in mind when tomorrow arrives is an important change in the law. From that day on, throwing food in the trash will no longer be legal within the city. This law hopes to make Seattle more in tune with the environment. Though we like to think of cities as ecosystems, they are, as the urban planner Bill Rees has pointed out, really more like feedlots. The more we recycle, the more we become like ecosystems. A true and mature ecosystem captures and reuses energy for a long period of time. With cities, this is not true; with cities, massive flows of energy and resources enter and exit quickly.
Urban planner Bill Reese says anthills, feedlots, and cities share the same characteristics.
  • Ints Vikmanis/Shutterstock
  • Urban planner Bill Reese says "anthills, feedlots, and cities share the same characteristics."

Eight People in Edmonton Gunned to Death: The police say the murders happened in a "family setting" and that two of the victims were kids. The police also say the killer killed himself. One member of the police department says he has never seen anything like it in his 39 years of service. This police officer lives in Canada.

Woman Who Was Shot By Her Two-Year-Old Son With Her Own Gun In an Idaho Walmart Is Said to Have Been a Loving Mother: It appears that people are more concerned about the reputation of the dead woman than future of the boy who killed her.

Washington Only Had One Police Officer Die in the Line of Duty in 2014: The one line-of-duty death of a police officer that our state experienced this year resulted from a shoulder injury caused by a scuffle the officer had in 2011 with a man who resisted arrest.

Some Blaming the Crash of AirAsia 8501 on Poor Safety Standards in the Region: Indonesia, a country of 250 million (most of whom follow Islam), apparently scored very low in a recent test of its airworthiness. The problem is the industry's rate of growth is not matched by its rate of improvements. But last night in a bar, I heard a theory that seemed interesting enough. A woman, who is an entertainment lawyer by profession, stated to me that in developing or newly developed countries, there tends to be greater reliance on computers (autopilot) over basic manual mastery of a plane. The reason for this is its cheaper to train pilots to simply mind a plane's computer systems rather than to train them for a high level of competency in mechanical flying. How often do you need mechanical competency? The US is lucky, she further explained, because the military trains a lot of our pilots in the old and expensive way. This is just a theory I heard in a bar. The death rate from plane crashes in Indonesia is currently one per million passengers. That figure is 25 times higher than the rate for the US. The other countries that do poorly in safety assessments are "Bangladesh, Barbados, Curaçao, Ghana, India, Nicaragua, Saint Maarten and Uruguay."


Gambian President Returns After Coup Attempt: Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh returned to his country after a failed coup. He had been in Dubai doing something private. But now he is back and ready to take care of business. Expect heads to roll and roll.

Rush Limbaugh Is All Upset about the Possibility of a Black Bond: The very idea of Idris Elba, a black Brit with African roots, replacing Daniel Craig as James Bond, has made Limbaugh go totally bonkers. Limbaugh: "He was white and Scottish, period. That is who James Bond is... I know it's racist to probably even point this out." Racist? Maybe. But I can offer this as an answer to the black Bond question: