Tag Archives: short

Stop It

Mother Jones

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Now you guys are just messing with me. On Saturday I wrote a short post complaining that another short (and insignificant) post had become my most widely-liked post of all time. Now Saturday’s little gripe has 12,000 Facebook likes.

I hate you all.

This article – 

Stop It

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One Good Thing to Come Out of California’s Drought Is This Luminous Book

Mother Jones

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What if, contrary to current El Niño predictions, California never again catches a break from drought? Such is the world imagined by Mojave Desert-bred Claire Vaye Watkins in her electrifying debut novel Gold Fame Citrus.

Watkins was born in Bishop, California, a small city in the Sierra Nevada’s eastern foothills, and grew up in parched territory nearby. She first made waves with her short story collection, Battleborn, which won the Dylan Thomas prize and the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Vogue called Watkins “the most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx.”

Gold Fame Citrus opens with young couple Luz and Ray eking out an existence in a vacant mansion in what was once Los Angeles, during a “drought of droughts,” under the “ever-beaming, ever-heating, ever-evaporating sun.” Bronzed Luz, wafer-thin and grimy, traipses around the mansion in a starlet’s old robes, dodging rats and scorpions and living as “basically another woman’s ghost,” while Ray, usually shirtless with long, unbound curls, attempts to turn the villa into a survival bunker.

In this vision of the not-so-distant future, the West has run dry. Its citizens, who had once crowded California in search of “gold, fame, citrus,” are now referred to as Mojavs and are all mostly banned from the more lush parts of the country. Water is rationed in paltry jugs at precise points of the day.

While attending a demented raindance festival, Luz and Ray encounter a strange girl they call “Ig,” who clings to the couple and soon thrusts herself into their lives. Afraid of the vagabonds who might come looking for Ig, the improvised family flees Southern California in a search for more fertile territory, passing nomads, forest graveyards, and anthropomorphized sand dunes along the way.

Watkins’ prose sizzles, her pen morphing sentences into glimmering new arrangements. While surrealist fiction is often striking for the fantastical scenery it conjures, Gold Fame Citrus haunted me with its references to objects I now take for granted. In a passage describing the only fruit still available in Luz and Ray’s world, Watkins writes:

Hard sour strawberries and blackberries filled with dust. Flaccid carrots, ashen spinach, cracked olives, bruised hundred-dollar mangos, all-pith oranges, shriveled lemons, boozy tangerines, raspberries with gassed aphids curled in their hearts, an avocado whose crumbling taupe innards once made you weep.

Just as she turns a familiar landscape into a mysterious and foreboding geography, Watkins breathes new life into words we thought we knew well. Gold Fame Citrus will hypnotize you like a dream, and make you want to take a big swig of the water we have left.

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One Good Thing to Come Out of California’s Drought Is This Luminous Book

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Hair Update: Short Wins By a Landslide

Mother Jones

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So what does the commentariat think on the hair front? Here’s a smattering of comments from folks who like my new, shorter hair:

DM: Makes you look quietly studly and stoic.

JS: The short look, with the T-shirt, is hot. You’ll just have to get used to the idea that you’re going to turn female heads when you walk into a restaurant.

EVC: Even without the tattoos, you look so much more hip and bad-ass. It’s a good look.

CLD: It’s like Johnny Depp in Black Mass, it’s the new look.

SG: Clean, cool, contemporary. And it makes you look ten years younger.

RS: As a personal finance professor, I like that you can have your wife cut it with at home electric hair clipper package; it’s easy at that length!

LD: It’s more interesting, less like an insurance salesman from the ’50’s.

And here’s a smattering of comment from the one person who likes my old, longer hair:

JD: Your old hair is so cute. And you might as well enjoy it while you can, because, face it, the day will come when it will all go away anyway. Dad did not have much hair at your age.

Well….but Dad didn’t have much hair by the time he was 30, either. I plan to take after my maternal grandfather, who kept his hair into his 90s. In any case, the new hair wins by about 487 to 1. But let’s face it: the vote was rigged from the start. Nobody was going to vote for that old hair. Besides, if I were sporting a polka-dot mohawk you guys would all vote for it. Don’t lie. You know you would.

So that’s that. Short hair wins. However, it turns out that none of your votes counted anyway. Marian voted for the new hair, and she outvoted all of you. Funny how that works.

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Hair Update: Short Wins By a Landslide

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Who’s going to pay these companies to suck CO2 out of the air?

Who’s going to pay these companies to suck CO2 out of the air?

By on 15 Jul 2015commentsShare

So let’s say we massively botch this save-humanity-from-imminent-doom thing and end up  on an irreversible path toward a planet that warms by more than 2 degrees Celsius (that terrifying point beyond which we all spontaneously combust, or something). Hell, maybe we’re already on that path. Or maybe 2 degrees is actually too high to be safe. Or maybe this is all just too depressing to think about. Regardless, wouldn’t it be nice to have some way to just reach up and grab some of that CO2 right out of the atmosphere — just to be safe?

That’s the motivation behind a growing number of startups working on direct carbon capture and sequestration technology, but according to The Guardian, these companies aren’t getting much love from government officials:

Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks all sprung up during the mid-to-late-2000s, when it looked as if the world’s governments might take aggressive action to curb climate change. Mostly, they haven’t. Since then, the three startups have been refining their technology, raising capital and very gradually bringing CO2 capture closer to a commercial reality. …

But until governments are willing to pay for carbon removal and storage, the three air-capture startups will need commercial customers that can keep them afloat in case they are needed, potentially decades from now, as a climate solution. All are aiming to make low-carbon fuels, using recycled CO2 and renewable energy to power the process.

With government funding, the scientists behind these technologies could, in theory, just start burying CO2 in the oceans or underground (after making sure it’s safe to do so, of course). But right now they have to rely on the free market, for better or worse:

The open question for all three startups is whether any can raise enough money – and sustain enough cashflow – in the short term for their efforts to matter in the long term.

The CEO of Warner Music has been Global Thermostat’s biggest bankroller so far, The Guardian reports, but the company is about to announce a multimillion dollar investment from a U.S. energy company. Carbon Engineering, led by Harvard geoengineering researcher David Keith, has so far received funding from Bill Gates, and Climeworks has done some early work with Audi on a “zero-carbon e-diesel.”

But what if that cashflow runs dry? The U.S. government acknowledged in February that direct air capture and sequestration is worth investigating, so maybe they should just pony up the cash. Sure, funding the science of the future has never been easy (except maybe for Elon Musk), but this never-ending struggle between what works in the short term and what’s best in the long term is getting old.

Source:
Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

, The Guardian.

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Who’s going to pay these companies to suck CO2 out of the air?

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I Have Great Lungs

Mother Jones

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In addition to the whole multiple myeloma thing, regular readers may recall that about a year ago I suddenly developed breathing difficulties. Things have improved since then, but I still have regular spells of shortness of breath. In fact, I’m going through one right now, which is likely contributing to all my other woes.

I mention this because today was the last of my pre-stem-cell-transplant workups, which happened to be a lung test. And just as always, I passed with flying colors. It even included a blood draw directly from an artery, which confirmed that my hemoglobin count is outstanding and the oxygen content of the blood in my extremities is normal or even a little above normal. And my lung volume? Better than 100 percent, whatever that means.

So the mystery continues. My lungs are getting plenty of air; they’re producing plenty of oxygen; my heart is pumping perfectly; and the oxygen content of my blood is just peachy. Almost by definition, it sounds like there can’t be anything wrong. Except that there is. Go figure.

In any case, all my tests are complete, and as far as I know there were no red flags. Next Wednesday I spend the day at City of Hope getting oriented. On Friday I get a nice big bonus round of chemotherapy, after which I spend a week injecting myself with a drug that stimulates white cell production. Then I get a Hickman port installed in my shoulder. Following that, I spend three or four days at City of Hope, where they draw blood through the port, centrifuge it, keep the stem cells, and send the rest back. When they have enough stem cells, they process and freeze them and send me home for a week of rest.

Then comes the stem cell transplant itself. I get a gigantic blast of chemotherapy that kills everything in its path—which includes all the remaining cancerous cells in my bone marrow but also all my non-cancerous plasma stem cells. That would kill me too, so the next day they unfreeze my stem cells and pump them into my body. Then I spend several weeks recuperating.

That’s the short version. More later. Despite everything, it appears that all systems are go.

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I Have Great Lungs

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Missouri Is About to Execute a Man Who’s Missing Part of His Brain

Mother Jones

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Cecil Clayton, 74, who had parts of his brain removed after an accident 40 years ago, is scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday. He was convicted of first-degree murder after killing a cop in 1996. Unless Missouri’s Supreme Court, a federal court, or Republican Gov. Jay Nixon accepts the evidence that Clayton is mentally unfit for capital punishment, his execution will proceed.

Missouri law states that a person cannot be executed if, as a result of mental disease or defect, he or she is unable to “understand the nature and purpose of the punishment about to be imposed upon him.” However, state law offers no mechanism for the defendant to set up a competency hearing after trial. The fact that Clayton was tried and sentenced before receiving an evaluation is complicating efforts to save him from the executioner, and creating what his lawyers call a “procedural mess.”

In 1972, Clayton was a sober, religious husband and father working at a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri. One day, a piece of wood flew from his blade, piercing his skull and entering his brain. Doctors eventually had to remove nearly one-fifth of his frontal lobe—the part of the brain that is crucial to decision making, mood, and impulse control. Clayton was completely transformed: His IQ dropped to 76, and he developed serious depression, hallucinations, confusion, paranoia, and thoughts of suicide. He relapsed into alcoholism, and his wife divorced him.

Clayton was officially diagnosed with chronic brain syndrome in 1983, which includes psychosis, paranoia, depression, schizophrenia, and decreased mental function. The severity of his condition rendered him unable to work. In 1979, a doctor said he was “just barely making it outside of an institution.” In 1984, another doctor found him to be “totally disabled” and the government placed him on disability benefits.

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Missouri Is About to Execute a Man Who’s Missing Part of His Brain

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Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

Sorry, Sardines

Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

By on 11 Mar 2015commentsShare

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The Pew Charitable Trusts

What do you see in that picture above? Squids. Whales. Sharks. Salmon. Some form of mysterious seabird with fashion-forward water wings (gonna guess a murre). Do you know what we don’t talk about? That delicious bait ball in the center that keeps all your precious charismatic megafauna ALIVE. I’m talking sardines: Nature’s real heroes.

I say this for reasons that go beyond how they taste on a bed of kale with piquillo peppers and cucumber and a shit-ton of squeezed lemon. Pacific sardines and their protein-rich, sexy-sounding bait balls are a foundation for both the Pacific food web and a vibrant West Coast fishery. But maybe not for long: Scientists’ project sardine stocks will fall from 2007’s height of 1.4 million metric tons to under 150,000 metric tons by July 1 of this year. That’s enough to potentially close the fishery and seriously imperil all those whales and sharks — which, by the way, don’t taste half as good when grilled to crisp perfection with a crème brûlée torch. Here’s more from Pew:

If the new assessment holds up to scientific review, fishery managers should follow through in April on their harvest guideline protocols and suspend fishing on sardines for the 2015 season. Doing so would give the population a chance to recover as ocean conditions improve.

The sardine fishery has historically been a major source of revenue for California’s commercial fishing fleet, dating back to the era chronicled in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece Cannery Row in 1945. Still, it would not be fair to blame the current collapse on fishing.

We’re not exactly sure why this saintly, smelly fish is in serious decline. Some scientists blame a naturally occurring climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which flushes colder, nutrient-rich water along the West Coast (good for squid, bad for sardines). But this ongoing crash has fishermen and biologists alarmed. In the short term, some charismatic megafauna might be fine switching to abundant anchovies. But the sardine bust will eventually have negative impacts on their populations anyway — and on my salads, where anchovies are a piss-poor stand-in for the one true baitfish, at least as far as this charismatic megafauna is concerned.

Source:
Bad News on the West Coast: Pacific Sardines Are Collapsing

, Pew Trusts.

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Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

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E.U. Greenhouse Gas Deal Falls Short of Expectations

The varied energy needs and capacity of member nations led to concessions and compromises that experts say watered down an agreement that was hoped to pressure other countries at climate talks in 2015. See the original article here:   E.U. Greenhouse Gas Deal Falls Short of Expectations ; ; ;

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E.U. Greenhouse Gas Deal Falls Short of Expectations

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Ted Cruz: Conservative Darling. Grandstanding Senator. Campaign-Finance Reform Ally?

Mother Jones

For the first time since the McCutcheon v. FEC decision, the Supreme Court’s latest ruling further rolling back restrictions on the flow of money in American politics, members of the Senate on Wednesday tackled the onslaught of “dark money” washing through 2014 races and the future consequences of McCutcheon. (Short answer: More wealthy Americans pumping more money into political races in 2014 and beyond.)

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens headlined Wednesday’s hearing, organized by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). Stevens took a decidedly progressive tack in his remarks, declaring that “money is not speech” and calling on Congress to write campaign-finance rules that “create a level playing field” for all political candidates. But perhaps the more revealing set of comments came from an unlikely source: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the self-styled populist always trying, as he reminds us, to “make DC listen” to the little guy.

In short, Cruz, who’s as conservative as they come, may have more in common with the campaign-finance reform crowd than he realizes.

He raised eyebrows, for instance, as he described his vision for America’s campaign finance system. “A far better system,” he said, “would be to allow individual unlimited contributions to candidates and require immediate disclosure.” The unlimited contributions part of that statement is standard conservative fare: If billionaires like Tom Steyer or Sheldon Adelson or Michael Bloomberg want to underwrite their preferred candidates with bottomless dollars, go ahead and let them. But the latter half—”require immediate disclosure”—is significant. It’s a break from GOP leaders including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus who’ve soured on the idea of disclosure. Angus King later said he was so struck by Cruz’s comments that he’d scribbled them down. Might Senate Democrats have an unlikely ally in Cruz if and when the DISCLOSE Act gets another vote?

At the hearing, Cruz went on to assail his fellow members of Congress for caring more about hanging onto their seats than pursuing real legislative solutions. “Our democratic process is broken and corrupt right now because politicians in both parties hold onto incumbency,” he said. “We need to empower the individual citizens.” Funny thing is, that’s what Democrats who support the Government By The People Act and other fair elections programs want as well. Fair elections backers say candidates spend too much time raising money from wealthy individuals, which not only shrinks the field of people who can run for office but arguably makes those candidates who do run more receptive to well-heeled funders. Give candidates a reason to court lots of small donors—say, offering to match donations of $150 or less with six times that in public money—and you expose them to a diverse array of people. Meanwhile, your Average Joe, without his Rolodex full of well-to-do friends, can now mount a competitive bid for office. If Cruz wants to “empower the individual citizens,” fair elections is one way to do it.

Not that Cruz hung around long enough on Wednesday to hear these kinds of ideas. He high-tailed it out of the hearing after delivering his remarks. Maybe he had a fundraiser to get to.

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Ted Cruz: Conservative Darling. Grandstanding Senator. Campaign-Finance Reform Ally?

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

Mother Jones

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Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has been on the brink of closure since 2012, when state legislators passed a law specifically designed to shut it down. On Monday, abortion rights advocates will argue before a federal court in a final attempt to block the law and keep Mississippi from becoming the first state in 41 years—since Roe v. Wade—to be without a single legal abortion provider.

And the odds don’t look good.

The law, HB 1390, requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital or face criminal penalties. Obtaining admitting privileges, however, poses an impossible burden, since most of Mississippi’s providers travel to Jackson from out of state and local hospitals have all refused to be associated with abortion.

Abortion rights advocates have managed to keep the doors of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization open since 2012 through a series of court battles. In summer 2012, a judge blocked the law’s penalties from going into effect while providers begged local hospitals to give them admitting privileges. In April 2013, after all seven local hospitals turned the clinic’s doctors down, a federal judge blocked the relevant part of the law, saying that it would “result in a patchwork system where constitutional rights are available in some states but not others.”

But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is hearing arguments from lawyers for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is likely the end of the line. Short of intervention from the US Supreme Court, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit will have the final word on whether Mississippi’s law will take effect.

And the court has not been friendly to abortion rights in the past. The Fifth Circuit is the same venue where a three-judge panel upheld a very similar Texas law, made infamous by state Sen. Wendy Davis’s filibuster, in March. Appeals courts in the Fourth and Eighth Circuits have upheld admitting privilege laws, too.

In the years since HB 1390 passed, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization did not fail to get admitting privileges for lack of trying. (The health clinic already had a patient-transfer agreement with an area hospital for rare cases in which a patient required hospitalization.) As Mother Jones detailed in 2012:

The doctors’ applications have been rejected by every hospital they’ve approached. Two hospitals wouldn’t let them apply at all. Five others denied the applications for “administrative” reasons, before even completely reviewing the doctors’ qualifications. Their rejection letters cited their policies regarding abortion and “concern about disruption to the hospital’s business within the community.” The clinic wrote follow-up letters to make sure the hospitals understood that the doctors were only seeking privileges to comply with the new law and wouldn’t actually be providing abortions at the hospital, but no dice.

The problem isn’t just that hospitals don’t want to become targets for anti-abortion protests. Abortion clinics simply don’t admit enough women to hospitals to meet the usual requirements for admitting privileges.

“Women across the state will be plunged back into the dark days of back-alley procedures that Roe was supposed to end” if HB 1390 goes into effect, Julie Rikelman, the attorney for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said Monday. “The devastating impact of this unconstitutional law couldn’t be clearer.”

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

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