Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t – but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word ‘class” is ‘Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere – for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of ‘diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme – why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.

And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.

Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet – 97 percent of the literature – are the product of a vast international […]

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The next time your throat is as dry as a bone and the Sun is beating down, take a glass of clean, cool water.

Savour it. Sip by sip.

Vital and appreciated as that water is, it will be even more precious to those who will follow you.

By the end of this century, billions are likely to be gripped by water stress and the stuff of life could be an unseen driver of conflict.

So say hydrologists who forecast that on present trends, freshwater faces a double crunch — from a population explosion, which will drive up demand for food and energy, and the impact of climate change.
World maps showing water resources, energy consumption and regional hydroelectric potentional.

“Approximately 80 percent of the world’s population already suffers serious threats to its water security, as measured by indicators including water availability, water demand and pollution,” the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a landmark report in March.

“Climate change can alter the availability of water and therefore threaten water security.”

Already today, around 768 million people do not have access to a safe, reliable source of water and 2.5 billion do not have decent sanitation. Around a fifth of the world’s aquifers are […]

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WILLIAMS, ARIZONA — In the northern Arizona city of Williams, restaurant patrons don’t automatically get a glass of water anymore. Residents caught watering lawns or washing cars with potable water can be fined. Businesses are hauling water from outside town to fill swimming pools, and building permits have been put on hold because there isn’t enough water to accommodate development.

Officials in the community about 60 miles from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim have clamped down on water use and declared a crisis amid a drought that is quickly drying up nearby reservoirs and forcing the city to pump its only two wells to capacity.

The situation offers a glimpse at how cities across the West are coping with a drought that has left them thirsting for water. More than a dozen rural towns in California recently emerged from emergency water restrictions that had a sheriff’s office on the lookout for water bandits at a local lake. One New Mexico town relied on bottled water for days last year. In southern Nevada, water customers are paid to remove lawns and cannot install any new grass in their front yards.

Officials in Williams jumped straight to the most severe restrictions after receiving only about […]

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The news: Colorado’s pot sales are booming.

The state’s Department of Revenue reports that marijuana retailers sold nearly $19 million in recreational weed in March, up from $14 million in February. The first three months of legal weed have netted about $7.3 million in taxes, not including medical marijuana sales taxes and licenses, which bring the number to $12.6 million. In it’s first few months, Colorado could already soon be outpacing those historic first-day sales on a daily basis.

Retail marijuana sales taxes brought in $1.4 million in January, $1.43 million in February and now $1.898 million in March – a clear upward trajectory. And total marijuana tax transfers and distributions went from $2.927 million in January to $4.077 million in March. And perhaps more importantly, while it’s still somewhat early, the up-trending numbers indicate that initial sales weren’t simply the result of “new-toy” excitement wherein everyone was buying pot just because they could. Coloradans wanted marijuana before, and they still do now.

(Un)intended consequences: Over the same time period, crime in Denver has slightly declined, making opponents who said it would result in more trafficking seem kind of silly. It’s created a modest number of jobs ranging from “budtending” and marijuana […]

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Resveratrol — a substance found in red wine, grapes and chocolate — may not add years to your life, and it doesn’t appear to reduce the risk for heart disease or cancer either, according to new research.

“When it comes to diet, health and aging, things are not simple and probably do not boil down to one single substance, such as resveratrol,” said study lead researcher Dr. Richard Semba, a professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

The findings also cast doubt about taking resveratrol supplements, he said.

“Perhaps it brings us back again to rather tried and true advice of diet — Mediterranean-style — and regular aerobic exercise for healthy aging,” said Semba.

The report was published May 12 in the online edition of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Red wine and chocolate have been shown to have beneficial effects on health, and these benefits were attributed largely to a single substance — resveratrol. Resveratrol has been credited as being responsible for the so-called “French paradox,” in which even a diet high in cholesterol and fat can be healthy if it is accompanied with red wine, the researchers explained.

For the study, Semba’s team followed nearly 800 men and women 65 years […]

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