Author Archives: roz3edl

There’s a lot of confusion at the Department of the Interior, and it’s not just about doors.

by roz3edl Posted on March 9, 2018

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There’s a lot of confusion at the Department of the Interior, and it’s not just about doors.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 December 2013

by roz3edl Posted on December 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here it is, our final quilt of the year. The design is a “blooming nine patch.” (The nine-patchy nature of the quilt might not be obvious at a distance. Click here for a close-up. If you look carefully, you’ll see that every other square is 3×3 nine-patch.) It’s machine pieced and machine quilted, and it’s the only quilt Marian has designed specifically to coordinate with our house. (It matches the drapes.) And since this is our final quilt, it’s fitting to spotlight the person responsible for this year’s quiltfest. In this year’s final catblogging picture, Marian is doing her best to get Domino to cooperate with the camera, and as you can see, she succeeded admirably.

And now for one more year-end pitch. The most important part of Mother Jones isn’t this blog, it’s the serious investigative reporting we do. As the PEN Award judges put it, we’ve become an “internationally recognized powerhouse…influencing everything from the gun-control debate to presidential campaigns.”

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 December 2013

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China officially abandons its pursuit of “growth at all costs”

by roz3edl Posted on November 19, 2013

China officially abandons its pursuit of “growth at all costs”

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How did China grow its GPD by 10 percent every year for more than three decades, from a virtual standing start, rising to become the world’s second-largest economy?

Through a simple, horrendous policy: growth at all costs.

In other words, forget about public health, screw happiness, trample justice, and fuck the environment. Just go out there and make as much damned money as you can.

But as the country begins grasping the environmental and social carnage that unchecked growth has inflicted, its leaders are realizing that “growth at all costs” is no way to live.

“A subtle shift in China is under way,” Scotiabank commodity market analyst Patricia Mohr said during a recent mining conference. “They are no longer determined to have economic growth at any cost; they want economic growth which meets their objectives.”

China’s development strategy for 2011 to 2015 notes goals in such non-economic realms as the environment, energy efficiency, and education. And the strategy, technically called the country’s 12th five-year plan, lowers economic growth aspirations to 7 percent per year. “China’s leaders are now prioritising strategies and measures to ensure long-term prosperity for the entire nation,” noted KPMG [PDF] in its analysis of the plan after it was published in 2010.

And now that subtle shift in strategy has led to a new formal policy — one that abandons the notion of growth at all costs.

Details of the policy change were outlined in economic and social reforms published last week by the ruling Communist Party. (The same document also announced an easing of the country’s one-child policy — and further reforms might be on their way, potentially allowing all families to have two children.) From Reuters:

[T]he ruling Communist Party said it would put more emphasis on environmental protection when assessing officials, and would also hold local authorities directly responsible for pollution. …

With public anger mounting over a series of scandals involving hazardous smog, contaminated soil and toxic water supplies, China has identified the environment as one of the biggest potential sources of instability. …

The new policy document said China would “correct the bias towards assessing (officials) on the speed of economic growth and increase the weight placed on other indicators such as resource use, environmental damage, ecological benefits, industrial overcapacity, scientific innovation, work safety and newly-added debt.”

China already assesses local officials on the way they handle the environment, but with the economy still considered the priority, local authorities stress their green credentials by building ostentatious national parks, wetlands or reforestation projects rather than address the cause of pollution and risk revenues and jobs.

The dumping of “growth at all costs” is a positive development for people living in China, where brown skies and swine-laden rivers are testament to environmental quality in free fall. It’s also a positive development for the rest of us, because China’s greenhouse gas emissions have been rising along with its economic output, spiking at a time when American and European emissions are in slight decline.

Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency / European Commission’s Joint Research CentreClick to embiggen.

Zhou Lei of Nanjing University, who studies the impact of business on the environment, argues that the reforms don’t go far enough and appear to be “typical Chinese lip service.” Here’s hoping he’s wrong.


Source
To tackle pollution, China to drop pursuit of growth at all costs, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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China officially abandons its pursuit of “growth at all costs”

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Chris Christie’s Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

by roz3edl Posted on November 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Former New Jersey governor Tom Kean is apparently pretty annoyed with Chris Christie, partly for personal reasons and partly because Christie failed to help any other Republicans get elected to the state legislature. Dave Weigel:

The full failure of Christie’s “coattails” campaign is only now being known. Christie had wanted to win the state senate, cutting ads and campaigning for key candidates. None of his challengers unseated any Democrats. The total Republican gain in the Assembly appears to be… one. That’s better than 2011, when Democrats gained a seat, but even if you factor in the gerrymander that protects Democrats, Kean and other Republicans are amazed that Christie could win by 21 points and carry almost nobody along with him.

OK, but isn’t there another way of looking at this? It shows just how popular Christie is personally even in a state that shows no sign whatsoever of warming up to Republicans. That’s fairly remarkable.

I’ll admit this a slatepitchy kind of argument to make, and I don’t know if I really even believe it. Weigel is certainly right that this leaves Christie in the unenviable position of having to scrape and compromise with Democrats for the next few years, something that’s unlikely to help his presidential ambitions much. If his compromises succeed, he’s a sellout. If they fail, he’s a guy who can’t get anything done. That kind of sucks.

Still! His personal brand is obviously pretty sky high. That has to count for something.

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Chris Christie’s Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

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The Arctic Hasn’t Been This Hot for 44,000 Years

by roz3edl Posted on October 25, 2013

Photo: NASA / GSFC / Suomi NPP

Global warming is heating the planet, and the Arctic is getting the worst of it. Polar amplification means that the temperature in the Arctic is rising faster than anywhere on Earth and destabilizing the coast. All that excess heat is also melting ice and snow. While we’ve known that the Arctic is getting warm, according to new research, the weather in the northern regions is actually the warmest it’s been in the past 44,000 years, Christa Marshall reports at Climate Wire.

The average summer temperature in the Arctic over the past 100 years, say lead author Gifford Miller and his colleagues, is “now higher than during any century in more than 44,000 years, including peak warmth of the early Holocene,” a time known as the Holocene thermal maximum.

Getting actual temperature records going back that far is, of course, impossible. Instead, the scientists looked at the plants in the area. By looking at the plants that are emerging from beneath the thawing ice, the scientists can figure out when the ice last melted back this far. Miller and co.:

The ancient rooted plants emerging beneath the four ice caps must have been continuously ice-covered for at least 44 [thousand years]. However, because the oldest dates are near the limit of the radiocarbon age scale, substantially older ages are possible. Based on temperature reconstructions for ice cores retrieved from the nearby Greenland Ice Sheet, the youngest time interval during which summer temperatures were plausibly as warm as present prior to 44 [thousand years] is ~120 [thousand years], at, or near the end of the Last Interglaciation. We suggest this is the most likely age of these samples.

Regardless of the absolute age uncertainties, it remains clear that these four ice caps did not melt behind our collection sites at any time during the Holocene, but did do so recently, indicating that summer warmth of recent decades exceeded that of any interval of comparable length in >44 [thousand years.]

Marshall:

The fact that certain ice caps did not melt during the Holocene Thermal Maximum, despite the extreme warmth at the time, suggests that today’s unusual warming period can only be caused by greenhouse gases, Miller said.

“Nothing else out there can explain it,” Miller said.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Everything You Need to Know About Arctic Sea Ice Melt, in One 10-Second Animated Gif

A Warming Climate Is Turning the Arctic Green

Stunning View of Arctic Could Be Last of its Kind

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The Arctic Hasn’t Been This Hot for 44,000 Years

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Environmental and animal-rights advocates decry farm bill amendment

by roz3edl Posted on October 14, 2013

green4us

Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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Codex: Adepta Sororitas – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b […]

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Index Chaotica: Garden of Nurgle – Games Workshop

The Plague Father’s realm within the Warp includes the nauseating putrescent of the Garden of Nurgle. A tangled forest of noxious plants and rotting souls the garden is crisscrossed with winding paths and stinking bogs, each one leading to another terrible part of Nurgle’s personal domain. About This Series: Though the Chaos Space Marines were once heroic de […]

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Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 2 – J.D. Lenzen

Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 2 (PFT-V2) is the second installment in the paracord fusion ties book series and another stunning achievement by author J.D. Lenzen. Like Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 1, PFT-V2 reveals innovative and stylish ways of storing paracord for later use. So once again you’ll find crisp, clear, full-color photographs (over 1,000 i […]

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Warlords of the Dark Millennium: Ahriman – Games Workshop

Once a favoured sorcerer of the Thousand Sons Legion, Ahriman was responsible for the Rubric, an powerful spell that turned almost every Space Marine in his Legion to dust, trapped forever in their animated suit of power armour. Now, Ahriman seeks knowledge above all else, and has spent his lifetime seeking out the entrance to the mysterious Black Library. A […]

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Warhammer 40,000: The Rules – Games Workshop

There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR. In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of destruction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravening aliens and threatened from within by Warp-spawned entities and heretical plots. Only the strength of the immortal […]

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Codex: Adepta Sororitas (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b […]

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Codex: Space Marines (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Space Marines are the chosen warriors of the Emperor, and the greatest fighting force of the Imperium. Each Space Marine is a genetically enhanced super soldier, easily a match for a dozen lesser men, armed with some of the deadliest weapons in the galaxy and encased in formidable power armour. This codex explores the formations and Chapters of the Space […]

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Munitorum: Rail Rifles – Games Workshop

The Tau are masters of advanced technologies and weapons system, like their fearsome rail technology that can accelerate rounds to supersonic speeds. Against attacks from a rail weapon even the heaviest armours are little protection, the shots punching through plasteel and ferrocrete with equal ease. About this Series: Weapons are the tools of war and with t […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Environmental and animal-rights advocates decry farm bill amendment

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