mindstalk | Entries tagged with environment

Yeah I'm never catching up. Time to just post stuff.

US claims to opposed Israel's illegal settlements, but also opposes doing anything about it, even mostly toothless things like a Security Council resolution.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110119/pl_afp/israelpalestinianpeaceun
Meanwhile there's been a burst of recognition of the Palestinian state: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries, joining a wide range of Mideast and African countries. I.e. no one with real weight yet, or willing to use that weight effectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_the_Palestinian_National_Authority

Spokane pipe bomb for MLK
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fbi-pipe-bomb-found-spokane-washington-mlk-parade/story?id=12642275

Amish growing at 4-5% a year; 85% retention rate
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/29/amish-population-growth-n_n_663323.html
Move over vampires: it's Amish romance time!
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-08-09-religiousromance09_CV_N.htm

Phoenix as future Detroit?
http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-i-learned-in-arid-zone.html

Boston colleges picture
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/76/Boston_area_college_town_map.png

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/gop-senator-calls-federal-laws-child-labor-unconstitutional/

ghost rockets of Sweden
http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/the-ghost-rockets/
Seattle windshield pitting epidemic
http://www.washington.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5136

new cornucopian oil bet a la Julian Simon
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/science/28tierney.html?_r=2

flaws of and changes to AP biology and history
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/edlife/09ap-t.html?ref=general&src=m
e&pagewanted=all
hey, I forget, were Whitney Young AP science (or just AP) classes
double-period?

Pakistan's young lawyers support Islamic killing of liberal politician
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/asia/11pakistan.html?pagewanted=all

law school fraud
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Senate conservatives out to make US safe for pollution
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47450.html#ixzz1AowLSPEc

Political
* Sharing and tracking net worth online
* Venn diagram of British parties. Not labeled for foreigners, but from the positions I infer that red is Labour, blue is Conservative, and yellow is Liberal Democrat. Of course,, there's stated policy and then there's raising tuition fees in coalition
* Thomas Jefferson letter advocating a 19 year limit to laws and national debts, on the grounds that one generation cannot encumber another, and that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. Life expectancy is longer now, so his calculations might extend that number somewhat.
* Socialist fast food in Venezuela. Red-shirted waiters with such slogans as "Chavez is a winner" attend the diners. Speaking as a leftist myself... he's doing it wrong. In Boliva, socialist Coca Colla
* Crisis in California's marijuana economy

Geeky
* Testing natural selection via island lizards
* Weird magnetic slopes optical illusion. And tunnel house
* PICS: Nanoha time travel fan thingy. SAN loss Fantasy physics. Doctor Who x Green Lantern. She's One of Ours!
* Element Girls
* World's largest lightning storm. link
* Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body
* Artificial light causing sleep problems?. Doing without electric light

Sadface
* Woman strip-searched, abandoned at US border.
* Bloomberg wants British-style surveillance for NYC">
* School attacks in China
* Disappearing jobs
* Hawaii vs. Birthers
* Alabama candidate denounces lie that he believes in evolution
* Arnold out to cut health programs. And The governor unveils a proposal that would cut the welfare-to-work program and reduce child care for the needy.
* Global warming and mass extinction of lizards
* Urban inequality, social mobility, and poor education
* CO2 inhibits plant uptake of nitrates
* Maine GOP searches classroom, steals labor poster.

When Clifford returned to school on Monday, he found that a favorite poster about the U.S. labor movement had been taken and replaced with a bumper sticker that read, "Working People Vote Republican."

Later, Clifford learned that his classroom had been searched. Republicans who had attended the convention called Principal Mike McCarthy to complain about "anti-American" things they saw there, including a closed box containing copies of the U.S. Constitution that were published by the American Civil Liberties Union.

BP hires private mercs to block reporters from public beaches, or at
least from interviewing workers
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/bp-hires-mercs-to-block-oily-beaches/
BP media restrictions
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060300848.html
BP cost-cut safety measures. Even Halliburton thought it was a bad idea
http://wbztv.com/national/BP.email.deepwater.2.1751358.html
oil surf (click for big)

oil bird? I can't even tell

The downtown Bloomingfoods (our local food co-op) took the choice away from us a while back, offering only paper -- or sometimes plastics that someone's donated for re-use. I'm not sure why this branch only; the other two still have plastic, pretty nice ones too (big and strong-seeming.) At least twice I've had the handle on the paper ones rip off just as I got home. Besides the threat that it could have ripped earlier, leaving me in a pickle, it also means I can't re-use the damn things.

Not, admittedly, that I'd really re-use it for much anyway... plastic bags turn into garbage bags (haven't bought any in nearly a decade) water-resistant wraps for electronics and papers when it's raining and I'm not confident of my backpack's waterproofness, and dirty-laundry storage when I travel. Paper mostly gets thrown out. BUT ESPECIALLY WHEN IT FAILS AT BEING A BAG.

And god forbid I should ever go shopping in the rain. I walk, paper'd be useless.

In California I got paper a lot more by choice... but then, my bike there had folding baskets that were just the right size for standard paper bags, so I could fill up two bags at Trader Joe's and trundle back. That bike got abandoned in LA though, and when I bought my current one the store didn't have those baskets, did have smaller fixed size ones, and I just get those... I do miss the folding ones, as I try to stuff a bunch of plastic bags into these.

Unrelatedly, FYI both Livejournal and Dreamwidth support secure logins via HTTPS, but not by default; you have to make sure to get a secure link, or type in 'https://www.livejournal.com/' by hand or bookmark. I don't think the little login button that shows up on top when your cookie expires is secure.

Well, before that, a summary of Nixon's health reform plan. Pretty similar in spirit to Obama's, but more assertively defined, and maybe further to the left in helping the poor. The country may have moved to the left on gay, women, and black rights, but well to the right on economic issues. AFAIK *Truman's* attempt would have been Medicare for all, essentially, sweeping government insurance a la Canada or Australia.

* "freshwater" economist backlash. These are the "unemployment is voluntary" types if you haven't been keeping up. Chicago school, neo-Friedmanites (more radical than Milton himself.) Followup and dissection of their rage, with brief mention of their mistakes.

* 19th century globalization: the jute industry in Dundee Scotland, using Indian raw materials.

* Even the WTO agrees that carbon tariffs are an allowable and possible essential tool. But free market fundamentalists and fetishists won't.
* Review of a biography of Keynes.

* "Memories of the Carter Administration". Actually on the macroeconomic debate in the late 1970s. Robert Lucas claiming government policies couldn't affect recession or employment, Robert Barro expressing a negative interest in contradictory data. Someone asked him how he could reconcile his model with the severe recession taking place as he spoke. “I’m not interested in the latest residual,” Barro snapped.
** John Quiggin on the same subject. And, back in 2003,

In fact, it’s striking that there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.

* Bankers are going straight back to the pay policies that contributed to the current crisis. "In this case populism is good economics." Obama, of course, gives few signs of actually being a populist.

* The low cost of saving the environment. Not a deep essay, but of interest is Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.
** The missing depth (blogs don't have word limits.) Even Greg Mankiw supports externalty (e.g. pollution) taxes.
** And more depth, graph and better explanation.

* SF geek: Animation of multiple-star systems. (From a Firefly thread.) How to show time-lagged STL comms on screen.
* Cute studies: Children of lesbian mothers less susceptible to mental illness. Take with as much salt as a single study deserves, but cute result anyway given the debates.
* Politics geek: Overseas departments of France. Unlike the American empire, or the American capital, they get representation in the legislature.
* Hope: Confucian enviornmentalism?
* Less Hope: Spain limits universal jurisdiction.
* Tech: Bicycle cars!
* Human interest: Gay Iraqi Jew Israeli who helps Palestinians.
* Current events: Honduran 'coup'. You've probably seen the standard version (military coup!), see the other side. I've been looking at bad translations of the Honduran Constitution (Google Translate is a bit less bad than Babelfish) and yeah, it *does* look like the President disqualified himself from office -- and that there's no formal impeachment mechanism. Noel Maurer
* RPG geek: 4e D&D for taking a shit
* Rainbow flag: not just for gays
* "Gayby boom": the wave of kids who've grown up with gay parents.
* How the media incorporates blogs on Iran.
* Corporate crooks: travel protection fraud. Bankrupted with health insurance.
* Freedom, Environment: now legal to collect rainwater in Colorado
* Mad Science!: hot rock projects underway, and causing earthquakes. Geo-engineering. The global ant super-colony.
* Retro-tech: 13 year old experiences Walkman.
* Interrogating Saddam Hussein
* Gay sex decriminalized in India for now. Illegal (10 years in prison) under British colonial law; Delhi High Court has overturned. Religious leaders object; case may be appealed to the Supreme Court.
* Forced marriages and Britain
* CBO analyzes plan with public option, hey, this time it works. President of the AMA comes out in support, sort of.
* Swine flu: US deaths (updated Fridays). Spread in Argentina.

Iran may have a decades-long democratic past but it's looking bad at the moment. Ahmadinejad had been polling at 40%, but the gov't claims a 60% win. Fraud seems likely given various factors, analogous to Obama winning Arizona or McCain winning Chicago.

* In other news, GOP denounces climate change plan as an energy tax. Half-right: we need a *fossil carbon* tax, to harness market forces in making people use it less. They propose

In the GOP's weekly radio and Internet address, Indiana Rep. Mike Pence said Congress should instead open the way for more domestic oil and natural gas production and ease regulatory barriers for building new nuclear power plants.

Nukes are fine (though "easing regulatory barriers" needs a wary eye), but encouraging more oil and gas production? No, that's the exact opposite of what you need in a climate-change bill. We need to replace production, not expand it.