MindMover
MindMover's JournalNew Keystone XL Route: Out of the Sandhills, but Still in the Aquifer
Nebraska landowners say their primary goal to protect the region's water supply was forgotten in the focus only on the Sandhills.
It wasn't that long ago that the people of Holt County, Neb. thought they had made a real impact on national policy.
Their opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline led project owner TransCanada to move the pipeline out of the Nebraska Sandhills, a fragile ecosystem that overlies the Ogallala aquifer. The company's release of the new route last week seemed to solidify that victory.
But some local landowners are feeling far from celebratory. They say their primary goal was to protect the Ogallala aquifer, but somewhere along the way, people became so intent on protecting the Sandhills that the true objective was lost.
"Water has always been first and foremost in our mind," said Tom Genung of Hastings, Neb., who owns ranchland in Holt County. "We were promised everything would be okay if [the pipeline] got out of the Sandhills ... but it's not."
TransCanada's new route is currently just a "corridor"—a 2,000-foot wide path that will eventually be whittled down to a narrower route. It is among several possible routes identified in a 54-page report that TransCanada submitted last week to Nebraska's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the state agency in charge of the pipeline's environmental review.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120426/keystone-xl-nebraska-sandhills-ogallala%20aquifer-heineman-transcanada?
Boehner On White House Government Shutdown Threat: ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah’ (VIDEO)
House Speaker John Boehner isn’t taking a key Obama administration veto threat seriously. At least not yet.
In a letter delivered last week, the White House warned congressional appropriators that the president will not sign legislation to fund the federal government if the bill or bills cut overall spending below the level the parties agreed to during last summer’s fight over raising the national debt limit.
In other words: It’s those spending levels, or a government shutdown.
At a his weekly press conference, I asked Boehner to respond to that letter.
“Blah blah blah blah blah, alright, so?” Boehner joked.
That’s the official response?
“Yes.”
Republicans say they want to cut more money out of domestic programs, and the House GOP even set a cap on spending that’s both under the top line figure, and shifts yet more money out of domestic programs, back into defense spending.
But when pressed further, Boehner declined to stake out a firm position on whether Republicans will ultimately dig in on cutting below the debt limit agreement — risking a government shutdown fight — or whether they’ll reverse course to avoid a dangerous election season drama.
“My goal is to move appropriation bills through the House and hopefully work with our Senate colleagues to move appropriation bills on their own,” Boehner said. “I am — worked last year to try to rebuild the appropriations process. It’s one of the essential responsibilities of the Congress to spend the American people’s money wisely. I think we do that best when we move individual bills. … When we get to September we’ll have a discussion then about how many bills have become law, what isn’t finished and what else needs to be done.”
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/boehner-on-white-house-government-shutdown-threat-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-video.php
Peres: No Need to 'Wave Swords' When it Comes to Iran
President Shimon Peres said on Thursday that there is currently no need to threaten Iran with an attack on its nuclear facilities.
Peres, who was interviewed by both Channel 2 and Channel 10 in honor of Israel’s Independence Day, emphasized the fact that there are other ways to deal with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
“There is no need to attack Iran at any cost,” Peres told Channel 2. “There are other options to address this issue and other ways to solve it, other than a military operation.”
Peres added, “I fully trust the American president” when it comes to Iran.
In the Channel 10 interview, the president warned against “waving swords” and added that he did not approve of the comparison between the Iranian threat and the Holocaust. He was thus hinting at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent speech at the AIPAC convention.
“I'm not impressed by the comparison between the Iranian threat and the Holocaust,” Peres said. “I’ve seen serious existential threats and have heard desperate voices. We are today in our strongest situation ever.”
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155186#.T5noLS_w2So
Thinking can undermine religious faith, study finds
Those who think more analytically are less inclined to be religious believers than are those who tend to follow a gut instinct, researchers conclude.
Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicates that belief may be a more malleable feature of the human psyche than those of strong faith may think.
The cognitive origins of belief — and disbelief — traditionally haven't been explored with academic rigor, said lead author Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
"There's been a long-standing intellectual tradition of treating science as one thing and religion as separate, and never the twain shall meet," he said. But in recent years, he added, there has been a push "to understand religion and why our species has the capacity for religion."
According to one theory of human thinking, the brain processes information using two systems. The first relies on mental shortcuts by using intuitive responses — a gut instinct, if you will — to quickly arrive at a conclusion. The other employs deliberative analysis, which uses reason to arrive at a conclusion.
Both systems are useful and can run in parallel, the theory goes. But when called upon, analytic thinking can override intuition.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-religion-analytical-thinking-20120427,0,5374010.story?
U.S. lawmakers defend slew of corporate tax breaks
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) - If a congressional hearing on Thursday is any indication, U.S. lawmakers will have a hard time breaking the stand-off over where to trim the fat in the federal tax code.
Nearly every lawmaker who testified at a panel on the individual merits of $35 billion in tax breaks came out in favor of making their pet provisions permanent.
Tax breaks - ranging from a popular corporate research credit to a subsidy for Puerto Rico that critics say benefits big rum producers - were the topic before a tax-writing subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
It was "members' day" when congressmen and women have the chance not only to defend the policies they like, but also to attack those they deem no longer useful.
"For too long Congress has simply rubber stamped the extenders package" without regard to economic development, job creation or other potential benefits, said Rep. Pat Tiberi, the Republican chairman of the House panel reviewing the breaks.
Still, most of the testimony was in favor of the breaks.
Republican Geoff Davis of Kentucky said he backs broad-based tax reform but insisted that some tax breaks were vital to the country's economic health and job creation. He defended the research tax credit.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/26/us-usa-tax-breaks-idUSBRE83P1F020120426?
93% of all new income between 2009 & 2010 went to the top one percent.
2010: Recovering from the Great Recession
In 2010, average real income per family grew by 2.3% (Table 1) but the
gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.6% while bottom 99%
incomes grew only by 0.2%. Hence, the top 1% captured 93% of the income
gains in the first year of recovery. Such an uneven recovery can help explain
the recent public demonstrations against inequality. It is likely that this uneven
recovery has continued in 2011 as the stock market has continued to recover.
National Accounts statistics show that corporate profits and dividends
distributed have grown strongly in 2011 while wage and salary accruals have
only grown only modestly. Unemployment and non-employment have
remained high in 2011.
This suggests that the Great Recession will only depress top income
shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top
income shares that has taken place since the 1970s. Indeed, excluding
realized capital gains, the top decile share in 2010 is equal to 46.3%, higher
than in 2007 (Figure 1).
Looking further ahead, based on the US historical record, falls in
income concentration due to economic downturns are temporary unless
drastic regulation and tax policy changes are implemented and prevent
income concentration from bouncing back. Such policy changes took place
after the Great Depression during the New Deal and permanently reduced
income concentration until the 1970s (Figures 2, 3). In contrast, recent
downturns, such as the 2001 recession, lead to only very temporary drops in
income concentration (Figures 2, 3)
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf
Obama Stunner: Climate Change Will Be A Campaign Issue, We Need to Do Much More To Combat It
By Joe Romm on Apr 25, 2012 at 12:29 pm
In a Rolling Stone interview published today, President Obama broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change. He made some remarkable statements, including his belief that the millions of dollars pouring into the anti-science disinformation campaign will drive climate change into the presidential campaign.
Earlier this year the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address. And he (or the White House communications team) edited it out of his Earth Day proclamation.
But in this interview, Obama was actually the first to bring up climate change, noting it was one of many big issues he’s had to deal with and then slamming the GOP for moving so far to the right on the issue.
The big news was that the President expects climate change to be a campaign issue:
Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices. In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way. That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation – that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent. That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Yes, Romney etch-a-sketched himself to the far right on this issue in late October:
My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.
But I doubt Romney will want to talk about climate change since that statement is a major flip-flop aimed at the Tea Party extremists who now help decide GOP primaries. Also Romney’s team presumably knows what team Obama doesn’t:
Every poll makes clear that in the general election, climate change, clean energy, and cutting pollution are some of the defining wedge issues of our time (see Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent and links below).
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/25/470940/obama-stunner-climate-change-will-be-a-campaign-issue-we-need-to-do-much-more-to-combat-it/
Climate Change Has Intensified The Global Water Cycle
Climate Central | April 26, 2012 12:01 p.m.
Climate scientists have been saying for years that one of the many downsides of a warming planet is that both droughts and torrential rains are both likely to get worse. That’s what climate models predict, and that’s what observers have noted, most recently in the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, released last month. It makes physical sense, too. A warmer atmosphere can absorb more water vapor, and what goes up must come down — and thanks to prevailing winds, it won’t come down in the same place.
The idea of changes to the so-called hydrologic cycle, in short, hangs together pretty well. According to a new paper just published in Science, however, the picture is flawed in one important and disturbing way. Based on measurements gathered around the world from 1950-2000, a team of researchers from Australia and the U.S. has concluded that the hydrologic cycle is indeed changing. Wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier. But it’s happening about twice as fast as anyone thought, and that could mean big trouble for places like Australia, which has already been experiencing crushing drought in recent years.
http://news.opb.org/article/climate_change_has_intensified_the_global_water_cycle/
Poll Question: How long before human migrations start due to water shortages caused by climate change?
I guess spontaneous remission would be classified as well as 12 step
or "hey wake the up speech" as being effective......
because you are absolutely correct that people change only when they want to change....
no matter what the program....
and thank your relatives for getting clean and staying clean.....
Actor Sean Penn receives award for work in Haiti
Source: AP
CHICAGO (AP) -- Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn gave an emotional speech Wednesday urging the world community to help Haiti as he accepted an award from a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates for his humanitarian work in the earthquake-ravaged country.
"It's an overused phrase I know, but I trust you know its genuine today, I am humbled. I'm trembling and I like it," Penn said after accepting the 2012 Peace Summit Award from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was joined on stage by the Dalai Lama and former Polish President Lech Walesa.
Penn has become a major player in efforts to rebuild Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the island nation, flattening thousands of buildings, killing more than 300,000 people and leaving at least 1.5 million homeless.
He used his speech at the 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates to urge the world community to remember Haiti and invest in the country's future and President Michel Martelly, who took office in May 2011.
Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NOBEL_SUMMIT_PENN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Profile Information
Member since: Sun Jul 31, 2011, 05:36 PMNumber of posts: 5,016
