Wednesday, August 13th, 2014
BILLY CORRIHER, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The Koch Brothers, whatever else may be said about them, have a political operations staff second to none. They understand that with complete gridlock and the transfer of power to the states, state supreme courts packed with their guys will give them tremendous indirect power. And they have enough money to essentially buy the office for their candidate. Here is a survey of their activities.
In his 2010 dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the majority had ‘unleashe[d] the floodgates of corporate and union general treasury spending” in judicial elections. Justice Stevens wrote, ‘States … after today, may no longer have the ability to place modest limits on corporate electioneering even if they believe such limits to be critical to maintaining the integrity of their judicial systems.” As if to underscore his concerns, judicial campaign cash set a record in 2012, and for the first time, the type of independent spending unleashed by Citizens United and other federal court rulings nearly exceeded the amount spent by the candidates.
The 2014 judicial elections could see even more campaign cash, thanks to unprecedented plans by national partisan groups to spend millions to influence this year’s judicial races. The Washington, D.C.-based Republican State Leadership Committee, or RSLC, is now the first national party organization focused on electing judges. The RSLC was the biggest spender in the May 5 North Carolina Supreme Court primary election, and four of the seven seats […]
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2014
BEN SHERMAN and LINDA AUSTIN, - NOAA
Stephan: The reality of sea rise settles in. The public is simply not prepared for what is coming, in my view.
Click through to see the full chart on the top 10 list.
Eight of the top 10 U.S. cities that have seen an increase in so-called ‘nuisance flooding”–which causes such public inconveniences as frequent road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure–are on the East Coast, according to a new NOAA technical report.
This nuisance flooding, caused by rising sea levels, has increased on all three U.S. coasts, between 300 and 925 percent since the 1960s.
The report, Sea Level Rise and Nuisance Flood Frequency Changes around the United States, also finds Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, lead the list with an increase in number of flood days of more than 920 percent since 1960. Port Isabel, Texas, along the Gulf coast, showed an increase of 547 percent, and nuisance flood days in San Francisco, California increased 364 percent.
“Achieving resilience requires understanding environmental threats and vulnerabilities to combat issues like sea level rise,” says Holly Bamford, Ph.D., NOAA assistant administrator of the National Ocean Service. “The nuisance flood study provides the kind of actionable environmental intelligence that can guide coastal resilience efforts.”
‘As relative sea level increases, it no longer takes a strong storm or a […]
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2014
Stephan: Here is some good news about one of my favorite trends, localized, organic food production. I am always happy to see stories like this one.
Click through to see the pictures.
Given Anthropogenic Climate Disruption and our dwindling capacities for producing enough healthy food, a cutting-edge farming technique that dramatically increases produce yields from a design engineer in Port Townsend, Washington, may well already be filling a critical void.
The news about our global food supply is not good.
Around the world – from the Middle East, across much of Africa, to California – wars over water and food are already occurring.
Billions of people already lack adequate supplies of potable water on a daily basis, and by 2030, nearly half the world’s population will live in “water-stressed” areas, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Environmental Outlook 2030 Report.
As Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge, has written, “Water is the new oil, and land is the new gold.” These words underscore how overpopulation and Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) have combined to overstress our capacities for producing enough food.
These facts, along with ever-escalating food prices, highlight how serious our food crisis has already become.
The corporate answer to the food crisis has been to introduce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to expand crop sizes and yields. The outcomes and implications of this, however, […]
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2014
JEFF SPROSS, - Think Progress
Stephan: The Virtual Corporate states do not see themselves as owing allegiance to any nation. They are not tied to geography, as was the case in earlier years. You can see this in the Inversion Trend. If you have any remaining doubts as to whether this is one of the great geopolitical trends, akin to the rise of nation states, I present this to make my case.
ExxonMobil began drilling in the Russian Arctic on Saturday, defying both the spirit of recent U.S. sanctions and environmental opposition to oil exploration in the region.
According to Fuel Fix, the well is a joint $700 million project between ExxonMobil and Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil producer. Drilling is anticipated to take about 70 days, and will target the Universitetskaya – a geologic formation under the ocean floor that’s roughly the size of the city of Moscow. Rosneft estimates the formation could contain up to 9 billion barrels of oil, making it a major target for Russian oil exploration. Energy provides half the Russian state’s revenue, and the country has so far maintained its oil production at a post-Soviet high of over 10 million barrels per day.
ExxonMobil’s output fell to a five-year low in the second quarter, so discovering new reserves in the Universitetskaya would also be a major boost.
‘The well is very important, it’s probably one of the most interesting wells in the global oil industry for many years,” James Henderson, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, told Fuel Fix in a phone interview.
The West Alpha rig, which ExxonMobil leased from Bermuda-based Seadrill Ltd., is doing […]
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2014
TRAVIS GETTYS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I think you will find this bizarre and creepy. I read and listen to this sort of stuff almost ever day, and cannot get over the parallel universes in which the American population lives. We occupy the same space, experience the same time, but we perceive what is happening in completely different ways.
For one thing, most social progressives are either non-believers, spiritual but not religious or, if religious, part of traditional moderate traditions. I think as society we do not yet understand that what is meant by Christianity today is to Jesus' teachings as the Taliban is to Rumi.
Click through and you can listen to the actual audio of this exchange.
Religious right broadcaster Kevin Swanson agreed with one of his guests that Abraham Lincoln imposed socialism on the United States during the ‘war against the South” – more commonly known as the Civil War.
Swanson hosted neo-Confederate author Walter Kennedy last month on his radio program, reported Right Wing Watch, where the pair argued the Republican Party had been founded by ‘radical socialists and communists.”
‘The Democrats, both Northern and Southerners, believed in limited government, and the Marxists hated that concept,” Kennedy said. ‘They wanted to do away with states’ rights and limited government so that they’d have one big all-powerful indivisible government that could force its will upon the American people.”
The broadcaster – who has argued the Disney hit movie ‘Frozen” was a satanic tool for indoctrinating girls to become lesbians – agreed with his guest, saying Lincoln and Mark Twain helped ruin the U.S. by replacing Southern slavery with socialist slavery.
‘It’s the socialist utopians that come into town and they promise deliverance from local fiefdoms, only to create a large tyranny in the Soviet Union, Soviet America and Soviet China and Soviet everywhere else in the world,” Swanson said.
Kennedy – who has written books such as ‘Lincoln’s Marxists” and the […]
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