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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 April 2013

Mother Jones

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I only got one photograph of Domino this week. That’s because, as usual, as soon as she saw the camera she immediately perked up and walked over. Luckily, it was a pretty good picture, so I didn’t need any more.

This morning we got our carpet cleaned. Two hours later, it’s covered by multiple trails of cat paw prints. It’s like we have a blanket of fresh snow in the house.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 April 2013

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Toxic algae is wiping out Florida’s manatees

Toxic algae is wiping out Florida’s manatees

Florida has the world’s largest population of manatees, around 5,000 of the adorable, curious, endangered sea cows. In 1996, a red algae bloom killed 151 of them. Until this year, it was the most lethal red tide on record. But Florida has outdone itself this time.

So far this year, 241 manatees have been killed by a red algae bloom off the southwestern coast of the state. All across Florida, at least 463 manatees have died from a variety of causes, “more deaths than had been recorded in any previous comparable period,” reports The New York Times — more than 9 percent of the population in just over three months.

Susie Cagle

Red tides are an annual occurrence in Florida, but this one’s been particularly terrible, killing countless fish and sickening beach-goers back in January. The algae clings to animals’ food sources, and contains a nerve toxin that can kill those that ingest it. Instead of swimming away from all that poison, Florida manatees have been attracted to the artificially warmed water outflows of coastal power plants, which has kept them in the algae’s way.

More from the Times:

Experts are uncertain why this year’s algae bloom was so lengthy and toxic. Phosphorus runoff from fertilized farms and lawns may have contributed, because algae thrive on a phosphorus diet. The Caloosahatchee River, which runs through rural Florida farmland, empties into the ocean at Fort Myers.

But [aquatic biologist Pat] Rose and Dr. Martine DeWit, a veterinarian with the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, say a major cause may be an unfortunate coincidence of weather and timing.

That “unfortunate coincidence” was a mild winter and not much wind. This is beginning to sound a whole lot like climate change, with a little help from our friends in industrial farming.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Toxic algae is wiping out Florida’s manatees

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Watch: Alan Lomax’s Treasures Land on Ebay

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If you’re a fan of American roots and blues music, you owe Alan Lomax a big thank you. Lomax spent a lifetime, beginning in the 1940s, traversing the American south—not to mention England, the Caribbean, and many other places—armed with a tape recorder. His quarry: Folk music that had never been recorded before. In the course of his research, he discovered some of our most important folk musicians: Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Son House, to name a few. In time, these pickers and singers would go on to inspire everyone from the Beatles to Kurt Cobain to Jack White.

For decades, Lomax worked out of a suite of offices tucked into an ugly blue warehouse behind New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. When he died in 2002 at the age of 87, his office became the Alan Lomax Archive, home to his vast collection of recordings, records, correspondence, and equipment. Most of his field recordings now live at the Library of Congress, but the archive still holds his personal caches. Now, the building is being sold and the archive is being forced to move across town to a smaller space. Director Don Fleming is faced with the difficult and delicate task of deciding what to keep—and what to put up for sale.

Additional production by James West

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Watch: Alan Lomax’s Treasures Land on Ebay

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I Am Stumped By This Music Review

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In the LA Times today, classical music critic Mark Swed reviewed Yuja Wang’s performance of Scriabin’s Sixth Sonata. He says Wang played it for “beauty and thrills”:

But she also raced through the sonata, treating it as something to be so fully mastered that it might lose its power to corrupt the spirit with its huge portions of musical decadence.

I love this. Not just because I don’t understand a word of it. That’s to be expected since I know essentially nothing about music. I love it because I can’t even conceive of how someone might come up with that particular string of words to describe a musical experience. Where did they come from? What was going through Swed’s mind when he put them down on paper? Did this thought occur to him naturally, or did he have to work hard on that sentence to make it express the way he felt? And did he really feel that the tempo of Wang’s performance was somehow motivated by a desire to cut through the sonata’s “power to corrupt the spirit”?

I have no idea. It’s like reading Ulysses. Or perhaps a description of a cricket test. The words are demonstrably in English, and the syntax makes sense, but nothing else does.

Anyway, you can probably tell by now that I’m having trouble coming up with anything to write about today, so at this point I’m just blathering. But I sat down on the sofa with the newspaper a few minutes ago and then Domino jumped onto my lap. I didn’t want to toss her off right away, so I gave her a few minutes of snoozing by reading the whole entertainment section,1 including Swed’s review. And it just stonkered me, especially the sentence above. But let’s give this post a veneer of seriousness anyway by turning it into a teachable moment. For those of you who know music better than me (a lot better, hopefully), read the review and discuss in comments. What should I have taken away from it?

1Nickel version: Jack Nelson was a great reporter; Lil Wayne’s new album has a few good moments; the architecture of the new Perot museum in Dallas is “cynical”; American Idol needs some changes to reverse its declining fortunes; and next year’s Oscars telecast will be on March 2.

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I Am Stumped By This Music Review

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Marketing Campaigns and Immigration Reform

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Republicans have released a report explaining why they lost in 2012 and what they need to do about it. Are you ready?

Among the report’s 219 prescriptions: a $10 million marketing campaign, aimed in particular at women, minorities and gays; a shorter primary season and earlier national convention; and creation of an open data platform and analytics institute to provide research for Republican candidates.

Hmmm. I guess a $10 million marketing campaign might work, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Everything else aside, that’s a pretty puny budget for a national campaign aimed at boosting sales of consumer packaged goods—and what are political parties if not packaged goods?

So how about some actual changes in policy to go along with that? Slapping “New Formula!” on the box only gets you just so far, after all. But according to the Washington Post, the report included only one “major foray into policy”: immigration reform. And sure enough, Senate Republicans are making progress on a bipartisan plan:

The nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants would have to wait a full decade for a green card but could earn citizenship just three years after that, under a provision being finalized by a bipartisan group of eight senators working to devise an overhaul of immigration law, several people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Taken together, the two waiting periods would provide the nation’s illegal immigrants with a path to United States citizenship in 13 years, matching the draft of a plan by President Obama to offer full participation in American democracy to millions who are living in fear of deportation.

The arrangement would shrink the amount of time it takes to become a naturalized citizen, to three years from five years. But in an appeal to Republicans, it would also extend to 10 years, from 8, the amount of time that illegal immigrants must wait before receiving permission to work in the United States permanently.

That’s some compromise. The only question now is whether they can sell it to their CPAC-ified colleagues in the House. The packaged bads, you might call them. Wait and see.

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Marketing Campaigns and Immigration Reform

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Elizabeth Warren Goes After NRA, Big Banks, GOP

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Since joining Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been fighting to penalize bad banks, expand consumer protections, and confirm Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped create in 2011. Yesterday she took her message to the Consumer Federation of America. “I know I’m preaching to the choir,” Warren told the group’s members, “but it is time for Washington to stop protecting a handful of the big guys.”

Warren said the 43 Senate Republicans who sent a letter to President Obama demanding a change of structure at the CFPB were trying to weaken the agency, and she called the NRA’s attempts to limit data gathering on gun violence “dangerous.”

Watch a portion of the speech, and read her full prepared remarks below.

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Elizabeth Warren CFA Remarks – March 14, 2013 (PDF)

Elizabeth Warren CFA Remarks – March 14, 2013 (Text)

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Elizabeth Warren Goes After NRA, Big Banks, GOP

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Domesticated and wild bees are both in trouble

Domesticated and wild bees are both in trouble

It’s tough times for bees. Over the past few years, colony collapse disorder has wiped out some entire beekeeping operations, and scientists don’t understand or agree on the cause. In Europe, respected scientists and agencies are declaring some popular pesticides too dangerous for bees. Stateside, it’s another story.

On Tuesday, the U.S. EPA hosted a bee summit to talk about the problem. “The EPA has been working aggressively to protect honey bees and other pollinators,” the agency says. “The 2013 Pollinator Summit is part of the agency’s ongoing collaboration with beekeepers, growers, pesticide manufacturers and federal and state agencies to manage potential pesticide risks to bees.”

The summit highlighted some sobering details on the scope of the problem, but it also gave a platform to Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto — companies that make the very kinds of pesticides that have been linked to bee deaths. This week, Bayer also announced a “bee care tour” and new efforts to “minimize the impact” of neonicotinoid pesticides that mess with bee brains.

Meanwhile, scientists say domesticated honeybees aren’t the only ones having a terrible time lately. Wild bees are even more important for the pollination of certain crops, according to new research, and they’re in trouble too.

The Summit County Voice reports:

The study, recently published in Science, focused on understanding whether the ongoing loss of wild insects impacts crop harvest. The researchers compared fields with abundant and diverse wild insects to those with degraded assemblages of wild insects across 600 fields at 41 crop systems on all continents with farmland. In areas where less wild insects visited crop flowers, the proportion of flowers setting seeds or fruits, was considerably lower, they concluded.

The addition of beehives helps improve pollination, but not dramatically. Variation in honey bee abundance improved fruit set in only 14 percent of the crop systems they served.

Wild insects pollinate crops more effectively because an increase in their visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation. A high abundance of managed honey bees supplemented — but doesn’t substitute [for] — pollination by wild insects.

If I were a bee, I’d be drinking pretty hard these days, too.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Domesticated and wild bees are both in trouble

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Negotiating With….Republicans

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Republicans have been demanding action on the deficit practically from the minute Barack Obama was inaugurated. Over the past couple of years they’ve finally gotten it. Spending has been slashed, the federal deficit is declining steeply, and the 10-year deficit projection has been reduced by $4 trillion. So now, having gotten so much of what they wanted, does this mean Republicans are ready to soften up a bit on their deficit mania? You jest, of course. Jon Cohn rounds up the latest news:

Paul Ryan is about to unveil a new proposal for how the government should spend its money. According to multiple media accounts, it will look a lot like the budget plans he’s produced before, the ones that famously called for radically downsizing the government. The main difference? The cuts in this proposal will be even bigger.

….With this new budget, Ryan doesn’t appear to be offering new concessions. On the contrary, it looks like he’s making new demands. And plenty of Republicans seem to think this is the right thing to do. That’s perfectly within their rights: They believe it’s best for the country. But it’s a reminder that Republicans aren’t sincerely interested in compromise for its own sake—or in taking more moderate positions on the issues. Yes, the voters delivered a pretty devastating verdict about this agenda just a few months ago. But if the number two guy on the ticket doesn’t seem to care, why should the rest of them?

This comes as no surprise. When Ruth Marcus asked Ryan a few days ago if Republicans were planning to give us all a breather and avoid a showdown over the upcoming debt ceiling cliffhanger in April, he was unmoved: “Not this time,” he said, “We’re not leaving this session of Congress until we have a down payment on the problem.”

So apparently conservatives are right: appeasing fanatics doesn’t work. It just makes them determined to demand even more. Perhaps it’s time to listen to them and adopt a new strategy.

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Tea Party Group Behind Saturday’s Gun Rallies Under Fire

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On Saturday, gun rights advocates will be organizing at least 121 rallies across the country in a “day of resistance” to President Obama’s gun violence prevention proposals. But some tea party activists are questioning the credentials of the group organizing the rallies, a Mesa, Arizona-based outfit called TheTeaParty.net that’s been criticized as a data-harvesting operation designed to vacuum up contact information and credit card numbers from unsuspecting and largely clueless conservative activists. They’ve complained that the group raises tons of money under the tea party name but doesn’t spend much to further the movement, and they’re skeptical of its move into the gun debate.

Robin Stublen, a Florida tea party activist and gun owner, is suspicious of the Day of Resistance event. “All my life I have been around guns of some sort,” he says. “Some are truly works of art. I respect them. I would never think of using them as the next political toy to make a fast buck. I seriously doubt if any of these so-called ‘leaders’ could tell the business end of a gun, let alone take them apart and clean them. They are opportunists and should be ignored.”

TheTeaPary.net was founded by Todd Cefaratti, an Arizona man who is the CEO of a “lead generation” company for the reverse-mortgage industry and who has inserted himself into tea party politics in recent years. In 2011, TheTeaParty.net sponsored a truck at NASCAR’s Camping World Truck Series, and it made a big splash by sponsoring a tea party “unity rally” at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, last year. It’s been a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in DC this year and last, raising its profile among conservative activists.

Originally called Stop This Insanity Inc., Cefaratti’s outfit has gone through a series of iterations and spinoffs, variously advertising under the name JointheTeaParty.us, the Tea Party News Network, and recently, its leadership fund has been advertising on TV as Tea Party Demand, complete with an 800-number:

Now, it’s hosting the Day of Resistance website. And the group has had an ever-changing cast of characters associated with it, including Judson Phillips, the founder of the Tea Party Nation, who’s come under fire for making racist comments and for his efforts to make a buck off the movement by scoring an appearance by Sarah Palin at a for-profit tea party convention. Donna Wiesner Keene, the wife of NRA president David Keene, also worked briefly for the group.

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In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

Secretary of State John Kerry, the man ostensibly charged with yaying or naying the Keystone XL pipeline permit, gave his first major speech in his new position this morning at the University of Virginia. I say “ostensibly” because any final decision on Keystone will come from the president, of course. And if you didn’t know the speech was coming from John Kerry, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was coming from the president, too.

State Dept

The sign language interpreter offers her critique of Kerry’s speech.

As indicated in his prepared remarks [PDF], Kerry articulated what he sees as America’s core diplomatic values: security and stability, human rights, health and nutrition, gender equality, education. He then noted the biggest challenge facing the world at large:

We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.

And let’s face it — we are all in this one together. No nation can stand alone. We share nothing so completely as our planet.

When we work with others — large and small — to develop and deploy the clean technologies that will power a new world, we’re also helping create new markets and new opportunities for America’s second-to-none innovators and entrepreneurs to succeed in the next great revolution.

So let’s commit ourselves to doing the smart thing and the right thing and truly commit to tackling this challenge.

Because if we don’t rise to meet it, rising temperatures and rising sea levels will surely lead to rising costs down the road. If we waste this opportunity, it may be the only thing our generations are remembered for. We need to find the courage to leave a far different legacy.

This is a slightly different spin on climate and energy than what Kerry said during his confirmation hearing, when he forcefully argued that America was being left behind in the expanding renewable and clean energy marketplace. Here, Kerry seems to call not just for investing in business ventures but in infrastructure upgrades that would help us function in a warmer world.

Kerry is certainly aware that people like myself will be sifting his words for evidence of how “he” might decide on the pipeline. Which is a futile exercise — even if he’d dropped an unintentional clue, the State Department and White House would swiftly deny giving any such suggestion.

What we learn from Kerry’s words then isn’t much. He remains committed to climate change; he values public investment to ameliorate its effects. Kerry’s first speech in many ways follows naturally from one of former Secretary Clinton’s last. Her determination that the U.S. recognize the role of energy in international diplomacy syncs nicely with Kerry’s call that we advocate for clean solutions.

The Hill suggested that Kerry “came out swinging on climate change.” Not really. It would have been impossible for him not to broach the subject given his boss’s recent advocacy. So he noted its significance, without suggesting much about how it might be addressed. Those looking for him to check that box will be pleased. Those looking for signs of independent boldness will not.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

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