Tag Archives: which

Senators finally agreed on a deal to fund disaster relief. Is it too little, too late?

by LatashiaEdler3 Posted on February 8, 2018

Which, by the way, is melting.

“This discovery is a game-changer,” said Paul Schuster, lead author of a new study that quantified the total mercury in the Arctic’s frozen permafrost.

And it’s a lot of mercury! To be precise, 793 gigagrams — more than 15 million gallons — of the stuff is currently locked up in frozen northern soils. That’s by far the biggest reservoir of mercury on the planet — almost twice the amount held by the rest of the world’s earth, oceans, and atmosphere combined.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the permafrost stayed, well, permanently frosty. But, as previous research has outlined, it’s not.

Mercury is a toxin that can cause birth defects and neurological damage in animals, including humans. And mercury levels accumulate as you go up the food chain, which is why king-of-the-jungle species like tuna and whale can be unsafe to eat in large quantities.

As thawing permafrost releases more mercury into the atmosphere and oceans, the implications for human health are troubling. Locally, many northern communities rely on subsistence hunting and fishing, two sources of possible mercury contamination. Globally, the toxin could travel great distances and collect in distant ecosystems.

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to want permafrost to stay frozen.

Source – 

Senators finally agreed on a deal to fund disaster relief. Is it too little, too late?

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A record-breaking number of scientists are running for office this year.

by LarhondWillhite Posted on February 5, 2018

Which, by the way, is melting.

“This discovery is a game-changer,” said Paul Schuster, lead author of a new study that quantified the total mercury in the Arctic’s frozen permafrost.

And it’s a lot of mercury! To be precise, 793 gigagrams — more than 15 million gallons — of the stuff is currently locked up in frozen northern soils. That’s by far the biggest reservoir of mercury on the planet — almost twice the amount held by the rest of the world’s earth, oceans, and atmosphere combined.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the permafrost stayed, well, permanently frosty. But, as previous research has outlined, it’s not.

Mercury is a toxin that can cause birth effects and neurological damage in animals, including humans. And mercury levels accumulate as you go up the food chain, which is why king-of-the-jungle species like tuna and whale can be unsafe to eat in large quantities.

As thawing permafrost releases more mercury into the atmosphere and oceans, the implications for human health are troubling. Locally, many northern communities rely on subsistence hunting and fishing, two sources of possible mercury contamination. Globally, the toxin could travel great distances and collect in distant ecosystems.

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to want permafrost to stay frozen.

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A record-breaking number of scientists are running for office this year.

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We Really Should Not Be Encouraging a Twitter Presidency

by RickyJJBBldi Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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I suppose this is about 157th on the list of things to worry about from a Trump presidency, but I still have to wonder: Are we going to continue giving Trump’s tweets the same banner treatment that we gave to the Hindenburg disaster? Shouldn’t the press have a little more self-respect than that? If the guy won’t talk to them, and instead relies on tweets that sound like they were written by a fourth grader (“The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders.”)—well, maybe they should be given no more than the attention they deserve. Which is to say, about the amount that the press gave to Barack Obama’s tweets. Which is to say, none.

UPDATE: Here’s an idea. Instead of going crazy over every Trump tweet, maybe the Washington Post should inaugurate a regular feature: Today’s Presidential Tweets. Every day, on page A14, they could have a box that reprints all of Trump’s tweets for the previous day, along with a fact check for each of them. Something like this:

Pretty good idea, huh?

Excerpt from: 

We Really Should Not Be Encouraging a Twitter Presidency

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Powerful Photos From One of Texas’ Most Historic Black Communities

by AlissaPerkinson Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Johnny Jones
Whether singing in a choir or playing keyboards on stage Saturday nights, music is been Jones’ passion. He spent his career working on the railroad tracks that run through Tamina. Now retired, Jones devotes his time to singing and recording Gospel music.

When photographer Marti Corn moved to The Woodlands, Texas, in 1996, she found herself living next to the subject of what would become her first book: the town of Tamina.

“Literally across the tracks” from The Woodlands, as Corn says, Tamina is a small community just north of Houston. Founded in 1871 by freed slaves, Tamina (originally known as Tammany) flourished for decades, benefiting from the logging industry and a railroad that ran from Houston to Conroe. It’s the oldest freedman town in Texas and one of the last emancipation communities of its kind left in the country; descendants of the original freed-slave founders still live in town.

But in the 1960s and ’70s, affluent suburbs like Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, Oak Ridge, and The Woodlands grew, pushing up against poorer, rural Tamina . This juxtaposition is what drew Corn to Tamina. As she met its residents, she thought she could help create awareness of the town and its history through her photography. “At the very least,” Corn says, “I could gift those who live in Tamina with a book of portraits and their stories so their descendants would know where they came from.”

Consider Corn’s mission accomplished. Her book, The Ground on Which I Stand (published by Texas A&M University as part of its Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life), is a nuanced portrait of the town, filled out by archival family photos and a history of the town

The book compiles oral histories of 15 families, from those whose trace their lineage in Tamina for seven generations to relative newcomers. Resilience and pride in Tamina are common threads throughout the book, tying together family stories into a wonderful tribute.

As Annette Hardin, one of the descendants of the founding families, told Corn, “The value developers place on our land is vastly different than ours. What they don’t understand is that it’s not just our property—it’s our legacy. The land represents the blood, heart, and soul of our African American heritage.”

Live Oak
This emancipation town’s landscape has a unique pastoral charm. Eighty-year-old live oaks shade houses built years ago. Horses can be found along most streets behind the wooden fences or tethered to a tree.

Molly
“The prejudice we have felt might be one of the reasons we are such a close community.”

Lonnie

Horse and Trailer
This is a community that is at risk of gentrification as real estate values escalate and surrounding cities eye Tamina land for development.

Bubba

Joe
“Five-fifty a week, that’s what we made cuttin’ wood. We’d cut four cords a day to make that dollar. Times sure could be real hard, and we had many hungry days.”

Ruth
Faith plays an important role in Tamina. There are five churches, many of which line the railroad tracks.

Sweet Rest Cemetery
Many headstones at Tamina’s Sweet Rest Cemetery are hand-made with names either painted onto crosses or etched into concrete markers. The cemetery floods every time there is a heavy rain, causing headstones to sink into the ground.

Jada
Tamina has the opportunity to send its children to some of the best schools in the country, thanks to the growth of surrounding cities. But that growth also puts the town at risk of gentrification.

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedman’s Town
Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Commerce

Link: 

Powerful Photos From One of Texas’ Most Historic Black Communities

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People in the Northeast Sure Do Love Their Landlines

by EunicePKCI Posted on February 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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At the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik writes:

Although customers have been rapidly abandoning their landline phones for wireless and Internet-based service, more than 18% of California households still relied on landlines for all or most of their phone service as of 2012, according to federal government estimates.

Huh. Only 18 percent? That’s a lot lower than I would have thought. And that got me curious. Which states have the highest percentage of households that have given up on landlines completely? Which states have the lowest percentage? Here’s the answer:

I don’t see much connecting the top ten. I guess they’re a little more rural than average, but that’s about it. The bottom ten, however, are exclusively from the northeast. And more recent surveys confirm this: At the end of 2014, about 30 percent of households in the northeast were wireless-only compared to 50 percent in every other region. That’s a pretty big difference.

This is just idle curiosity, but I wonder what the deal is here? Something regulatory? Why would the entire northeast be so dedicated to their landlines?

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People in the Northeast Sure Do Love Their Landlines

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John Oliver Explains How the Chicken Industry Systematically Screws Over Impoverished Farmers

by MiraHarricks Posted on May 18, 2015

Mother Jones

Americans eat a ton of chicken—so much so, chicken farmers produce 160 million chicks a week just to keep up with national consumption, according to the latest “Last Week Tonight.” But despite the industry’s massive output, many contract farmers live near or below the poverty line, all while working under the constant fear of losing their jobs. And that’s because the business model is such that farmers own the equipment used to raise the chickens, and corporations own the chickens.

“That essentially means you own everything that costs money, and we own everything that makes money,” Oliver explains.

Perhaps the most damning part of the segment is a defense from Tom Super of the National Chicken Council, who responded to the question of why farmers live under the poverty line with the following: “Which poverty line are you referring to? Is that a national poverty line? Is that a state poverty line? The poverty line in Mississippi and Alabama is different than it is in New York City.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Oliver shot back. “It doesn’t matter. The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.”

Read the article:  

John Oliver Explains How the Chicken Industry Systematically Screws Over Impoverished Farmers

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Watch John Oliver Explain How the Government Seduces Americans to Spend Huge on the Lottery

by SalliePflaum Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Americans spend a colossal amount of money betting on the lottery, even when the chances of winning have always been near-impossible. In fact last year alone, lottery sales raked in a massive total of $68 billion, according to the latest Last Week Tonight.

“That’s more than Americans spent last year on movie tickets, music, porn, the NFL, Major League Baseball, and video games combined,” John Oliver explained. “Which means Americans basically spent more on the lottery than they spent on America.”

It becomes even more bizarre when you understand it’s our states governments profiting from the giant business, which targets lower-income families who have historically spent more on tickets than the wealthy.

One of the frighteningly successful ways governments accomplish this is by creating ads that essentially mask the lottery as some kind of mutual fund or “charitable investment.” Watch below:

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Watch John Oliver Explain How the Government Seduces Americans to Spend Huge on the Lottery

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Gemma Ray’s Latest Is Fresh and Unsettling

by DeborahClisby Posted on September 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gemma Ray
Milk for Your Motors
Bronze Rat
A perfect master of noir pop, British-born Gemma Ray turns a familiar recipe—twangy guitars, dreamy melodies, hazy rhythms and wistful voices—into something fresh and more than a little unsettling. Milk for Your Motors transcends artful background music because her songs are smart and unpredictable, encompassing the nostalgic desire of “When I Kissed You” (“I want to remember how I kissed you / ’round the back of the air-raid shelter”) and the gruesome dark comedy of “Waving at Mirrors” (“It was all a terrible mess / Which came from nothing less / Than a moment carelessly spent applying make up instead of driving”) Aching and wry at once, Ray is a mesmerizing presence, mixing brainy cool and genuine passion with precise skill. For added hipster cred, note cameos by Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and Alan Vega (Suicide), who references his own classic “Dream Baby Dream” on the spooky “Out in the Rain.”

Original source – 

Gemma Ray’s Latest Is Fresh and Unsettling

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Walk to work — you’ll be happier

by SergioBiraban Posted on August 21, 2014

Walk to work — you’ll be happier

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20 Aug 2014 8:59 PM

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A recent survey from Montreal’s McGill University suggests that people who walk or take the train to the McGill campus are more satisfied with their daily commutes than those who do anything else.

Makes sense: If you walk or take the train, you’re not a slave to traffic. Ride the train, and you can even use your commute to get work done. That explains why walkers and train riders expressed 85 and 84 percent commute satisfaction, respectively.

But the discrepancies between the other modes of transportation are where things get interesting. Look at cyclists (82 percent satisfaction) and bus riders (75.5 percent), for example.

From City Lab:

Travel time accounts for much of the difference between the two tiers. Longer travel time led to lower satisfaction whatever the mode, but walkers, train riders, and cyclists were the least affected by time variables. … The satisfaction of drivers and bus riders also took a hit with additional “budgeted” trip time, likely on account of unpredictable traffic. …

While cyclists only budgeted 5 extra minutes a day for trip delays, bus riders budgeted 14 minutes. That’s more than an hour a week set aside by bus riders just to be sure they aren’t late for work.

Still, 75.5 percent satisfaction for those bus riders isn’t bad. Who knows, maybe people in Canada are just happier, no matter how they get to work.

Source:
Which Mode of Travel Provides the Happiest Commute?

, City Lab.

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Walk to work — you’ll be happier

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Here Is "Stone Cold" Steve Austin’s Wonderful Defense of Gay Marriage

by JanellSibley Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hello. Good afternoon.

“Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s defense of gay marriage is filled with cursing and common sense. All in all, pretty great!

I don’t give a shit if two guys, two gals, guy-gal, whatever it is, I believe that any human being in America, or any human being in the goddamn world, that wants to be married, and if it’s same-sex, more power to ’em. What also chaps my ass, some of these churches, have the high horse that they get on and say, ‘We as a church do not believe in that.’ Which one of these motherfuckers talked to God, and God said that same-sex marriage was a no-can-do? Okay, so two cats can’t get married if they want to get married, but then a guy can go murder 14 people, molest five kids, then go to fucking prison, and accept God and He’s going to let him into heaven? After the fact that he did all that shit? See that’s all horseshit to me, that don’t jive with me.

Listen:

(via Deadspin)

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Here Is "Stone Cold" Steve Austin’s Wonderful Defense of Gay Marriage

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