Sea level rise over the North Carolina Coast.
Credit: www.biogeocreations.com
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — During the early morning hours of May 2, part of the northbound lane of North Carolina Highway 12 in Kitty Hawk broke off and washed into the Atlantic Ocean.
While the loss of 200 feet of roadway and about 500 feet of a protective sand berm will be temporary, it was more than just another hit to the road from a big spring storm at high tide under a full moon. In a state that has been engaged in a highly charged, highly politicized debate about climate change for more than five years, it was a reminder that the Atlantic isn’t waiting to see who wins the argument.
It was also a reminder that North Carolina, with its rapidly developing coastline and intricate ecological network of sounds and estuaries, has a lot at stake as sea levels rise. The state has more than 300 miles of direct coastline and thousands of […]
The Justice Department’s latest settlement with felonious big banks was announced this week, but the repercussions were limited to a few headlines and some scattered protestations.
That’s not enough. We need to understand that our financial system is not merely corrupt in practice. It is corrupt by design – and the problem is growing.
Let’s connect the dots, using news items from the past few weeks:
The Latest Sweetheart Deal
Four of the world’s biggest banks pleaded guilty to felony charges this week, agreeing to pay roughly $5.6 billion in fines for fixing the price of currencies on the foreign exchange market. Justice Department officials made much of the fact that, unlike previous sweetheart deals with Wall Street, this one required the banks’ parent companies to enter a guilty plea.
That’s an improvement over previous deals. But it’s not as significant as it might have been, since the settlement wasn’t finalized until the banks were able to strike side agreements with regulators to ensure they’d be able to keep doing business as usual.
One of the institutions involved in this deal was Citigroup. […]
Worked stone implement dating back 3.3 million years, 700,000 years earlier than previously known, and before the Homo genus emerged.
Credit: The Independent
The oldest known stone tools, dating to long before the emergence of modern humans, have been discovered in Africa.
The roughly-hewn stones, which are around 3.3 million years old, have been hailed by scientists as a “new beginning to the known archaeological record” and push back the dawn of culture by 700,000 years.
The discovery overturns the mainstream view that the ability to make stone tools was unique to our own ancestors and that it was one of a handful of traits that made early humans so special.
The new artefacts, found in Kenya’s Turkana basin, suggest that a variety ancient apes were making similar advances in parallel across the African continent.
“It just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said Chris Lepre, a geologist at […]
What appears to be a bedroom is also a safe room hiding in plain sight. Credit: The New York Times
While serving as president of the New School, Bob Kerrey, the former United States senator, needed a residence befitting his station. The university moved him into a red brick Neo-Grec townhouse on West Fourth Street in Manhattan, which was previously owned by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
The $20,000-a-month rental had many grand spaces for entertaining, including Mr. Kerrey’s favorite, a rooftop terrace. Yet, its most unexpected amenity was quite private and secretive: a safe room.
“It looked like any old walk-in closet,” Mr. Kerrey said of the 8-feet-by-12-feet bulletproof space inside the third-floor master bedroom (a space the former Navy SEAL said he had little use for). “There was nothing about it that gave it away as anything but a place to hang your clothes.”
That is the point. For centuries, the best way for the wealthy to feel protected, or at least give the […]
Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph Stiglitz
The United States and the world are engaged in a great debate about new trade agreements. Such pacts used to be called “free-trade agreements”; in fact, they were managed trade agreements, tailored to corporate interests, largely in the US and the European Union. Today, such deals are more often referred to as “partnerships,”as in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But they are not partnerships of equals: the US effectively dictates the terms. Fortunately, America’s “partners” are becoming increasingly resistant.
It is not hard to see why. These agreements go well beyond trade, governing investment and intellectual property as well, imposing fundamental changes to countries’ legal, judicial, and regulatory frameworks, without input or accountability through democratic institutions.
Perhaps the most invidious – and most dishonest – part of such agreements concerns investor protection. Of course, investors have to be protected against the risk that rogue governments will seize their property. But that is not what these provisions are about. There have been very few expropriations in recent decades, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
