Mister Midnight
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Beginning of the End of CA Drought, But Whats Next?
Source: Climate Central
By Andrea Thompson
January 13th, 2017
After a week of being walloped by major storms that have dumped copious rain and snow on the state, California is finally emerging from a deep, years-long drought.
Ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada mountains are flush with snow, while key reservoirs have filled back up. On Thursday, the U.S. Drought Monitor erased all drought in Northern California from the map and dialed back the severity over the southern half of the state.
A plow clears snow after a heavy winter storm in Tahoe City, Calif.
There are, of course, still major deficits in groundwater levels that could take decades to replace and lingering ecological impacts, several experts said, but they agreed the situation had much improved.
I think overall weve gotten through this drought amazingly well, Jay Lund, a water resources analyst at the University of California, Davis, said.
Read more: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/end-of-california-drought-but-whats-next-21054
Okay! Problem solved! Now let's party with carbon!
I thought "woohoo let's party with carbon" made that clear, but, apparently not.
Trudeau's 'phase out' oilsands comments spark outrage in Alberta
Source: CBC (Canada)
By Kyle Muzyka, CBC News Posted: Jan 13, 2017 12:13 PM MT Last Updated: Jan 13, 2017 3:29 PM MT
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked immediate anger among Alberta politicians on Friday by suggesting Canada should "phase out" the oilsands.
Speaking at a town hall in Peterborough, Ont., Trudeau was asked about his government's approval of pipelines and his commitment to the environment.
"You can't make a choice between what's good for the environment and what's good for the economy," Trudeau said. "We can't shut down the oilsands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.
"That is going to take time. And in the meantime, we have to manage that transition."
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/justin-trudeau-oilsands-phase-out-1.3934701
Why would oilmen be angered by this? He said quite explicitly that oilsands production would continue for the immediate future. Hmph! I guess Alberta Province really is the Canadian Texas.
Some U.S. House Republicans doubtful ahead of vote to begin Obamacare repeal
Source: Reuters
By Susan Cornwell | WASHINGTON
The U.S. House of Representatives moved toward a Friday vote to begin dismantling Obamacare despite anxiety among some Republicans they were rushing into a major step without knowing the budget consequences or having a firm idea of how they would replace the healthcare law.
The Republican-led Congress, under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump to act quickly, made the first move toward scrapping Obamacare on Thursday as the Senate voted to instruct key committees to draft legislation to repeal it.
The House plans to vote on the measure on Friday, Speaker Paul Ryan said. Some Republican lawmakers said on Thursday they were not sure how they would vote.
"I don't want to vote for this and say it’s the first step (toward repeal), and find out that there are some long-term budget consequences," said Republican Representative Mark Amodei.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obamacare-idUSKBN14W0MC
If we can't stand up to these wusses, we might as well pack it all in!
Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for credibility of report's author
Source: The Guardian (UK)
Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding
Thursday 12 January 2017 13.01 EST
His denials at least some of them were emphatic, even by the standards that Donald Trump has come to be judged by. The dossier, he said, was a confection of lies; he compared it to Nazi propaganda; it was fake news spread by sick people.
At his press briefing on Wednesday, the president-elect dared the worlds media to scrutinise the 35 pages of claims, before throwing down a challenge wheres the proof? Nobody had any. Case closed.
But in the rush to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had Americas intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself?
And the answer to that lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/12/intelligence-sources-vouch-credibility-donald-trump-russia-dossier-author
+ his name is Steele, for Pete's sake!
Maybe This IS How Democracy Ends
By Mike Lofgren, Moyers & Company
The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate historical precedents to be certain.
Runciman is correct; as an admirer of Karl Popper, I believe that there is no such thing as historical determinism, either in the form of the Marxist dialectical process, or in the guise of its mirror image, the invisible hand of laissez-faire. Accordingly there is no surefire way to tell in advance whether Trump, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders would spell the end of democracy as we have known it. History, as Popper would tell us, is an open system, full of contingency. Waterloo, the Battle of Britain and Stalingrad were all close-run things.
That said, Runciman may in fact be too optimistic. He makes much of the evidence that post-election violence in America was scattered and relatively minor. There were no pitched battles in the streets on the scale of Berlin in 1932, no tanks on the Washington Mall and no generals appearing on television to announce a curfew or to say that order has been restored. But that establishes an awfully easy test for Trump to prove he is harmless, especially as he had not even assumed office at the time of the author’s writing. We do not know what the next four years have to offer, particularly when Trump begins to dismantle government programs on which people rely for subsistence, or when he ignites a trade war with China and downscale consumers, the archetypal Walmart customers, suddenly discover either that the shelves are empty or that their cost of living has increased by 45 percent.
If we look at Russia in the age of Vladimir Putin, we also see no tanks in the streets, bloody battles between opposing factions or generalissimos restoring order. Elections there proceed in an orderly manner, as they did last September. This is what managed democracy looks like. Runciman may argue Russia was never a mature Western democracy, and he would be right. But it also shows that an absence of chronic civil unrest or domestic military intervention is not a benchmark for deciding whether a country remains in the camp of liberal democracies. Even countries visibly undemocratic by Western standards can maintain a façade of civil order and normality. Hungary, an EU member since 2004 after 84 percent of the electorate approved accession, is undeniably regressing toward a one-party, authoritarian state under Brussels’ very nose.
http://billmoyers.com/story/maybe-democracy-ends/
Long read, but worth it.
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