Academia's fetish, John Hopkins & Co. join "The War on Fracking."

Academia is a strange place. Whatever the The Right supports there will be a study or dissertation about it - not to support it, but to disprove the confidence of those that support it. Take for instance UPenn Religious Studies professor, Anthea Butler, who calls Ben Carson "coon of the year." Butler's UPenn profile reveals even more telling information about her research interests.

Professor Butler's forthcoming book, The Gospel According to Sarah: How Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are Galvanizing the Religious Right will be published by The New Press in 2014.

I also had a sociology professor whose interests included studying the "Christian Right." Granted, she was a lesbian, so it was to little wonder. Let's go back to UPenn. Sociology doctoral candidate Francis Prior. In his student biography he states the following -

His research interests include the sociology of crime and punishment, urban sociology, the sociology of race and ethnicity, and the sociology of social movements.  Currently, Francis is doing participant observation and interview research on service provision in prisoner reentry organizations and clients’ experience of release from incarceration.  For his master’s thesis, Francis did participant observation and interview research on organizers’ management of rank and file participants’ collective behavior in the Tea Party movement.  Before joining the sociology department, Francis received a BA in philosophy from Villanova University, with an emphasis on hermeneutic and critical approaches to historical and contemporary social and political thought.

I'll probably actually purchase his thesis in order to see what he writes about. I'm rather curious of his findings and his methodology since I feel he's approaching the Tea Party movement with post-modern lenses, painting the group as some extreme nutbags with highly questionable values. Too bad he didn't do an entire paper focusing solely on #BlackLivesMatter or Occupy Wall Streets (OWS). Oh no, that would be plain weird because such groups totally don't have questionable motives or backers. His personal website lists more information about his academic interests.

PUBLICATIONS

2014. “Quality Controlled: An Ethnographic Account of Tea Party Messaging and Action.” Sociological Forum 29(2).

UNDER REVIEW

"New American Populism: Tea Party and Occupy in Ethnographic and Rhetorical Comparison." with Shantee Rosado at Mobilization

ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS

Panel at Eastern Sociological Society 2011: “The Tea Party Movement: Frames and Micromobilization”

But what about the semi-humans babies?

What's the tactic of leftists and liberals to slowly burrow their opponents into obscurity and to malign them? "Studies have shown ... "

This is all in the name of science, empirical evidence and "proof."

See here.

Expectant mothers have a lot to be concerned about, but those living near fracking sites have even more to fear, an expanding body of evidence shows. Most recently, a data review of more than 10,000 pregnancies has linked living in heavily fracked areas with a higher risk of premature births.

In the study, published Sept. 30 in the journal Epidemiology, scientists at Johns Hopkins University, Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, analyzed data from the 10,496 pregnancies of 9,384 mothers in nearly 700 communities in Pennsylvania from 2009 to 2013. At the same time, they tracked shale gas drilling, fracturing and production in a 12.4-mile radius of each woman.

What they found was that mothers who had higher exposure to these operations and infrastructure -- in essence, those who had more drilling and fracking sites in the vicinity of their homes -- were 40 percent more likely to give birth to premature babies. They were also 30 percent more likely to have high-risk pregnancies, the researchers found.

"Any form of energy extraction that harms the well-being of infants and pregnant women has no place in society," Sandra Steingraber, a biologist with the organization Americans Against Fracking, who was not involved in the study, said in response to the new findings. "These data show that a ban on fracking is good prenatal care."

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of injecting millions of gallons of sand and chemical-laced water into gas-rich shale below the earth to allow gas to be released from the rock. Those liquids are then brought back to the surface of the earth. Previous studies have linked living near fracking sites to infertility, miscarriages and birth defects. Researchers have blamed the increased risk of exposure to toxic chemicals and even radioactive materials.

More than 15 million people in the U.S. were living within one mile of a fracking well, Al Jazeera reported in 2014, as the practice has increased significantly in the U.S. in recent years. Advocates say fracking helps communities by creating jobs, while critics argue it can be detrimental for human health and to the environment.

Of course, if respectable institutions like John Hopkins, Brown, Berkely and U of SanFran say so, then we must not question their findings and must follow their warnings.

John Hopkins Hospital said no to transgender surgery yet the medical world and the LGBT activists and libertines gleefully ignored such warnings, but I bet this fracking news - accurate or not - will be picked up and used as ammo to both shutdown fracking and play the Big Oil card, in hopes to drive more money into solar energy.