Stephan: If you have been reading SR for a while you know that Oklahoma has become the earthquake center of the U.S. — because of all the fracking. So, not surprisingly, people whose houses are falling down because of these quakes have been trying to protect their property by organizing and passing local fracking bans. But as Red value state voters have discovered when it comes to backing their interests or a corporation's interests there is no contest. The corporations win everytime. Here is proof of this principle.
And what is even weirder, I would bet you, Oklahoma voters will re-elect the people who screwed them with a fracking ban. Too bad about your house.
Oklahoma’s towns and cities are no longer allowed to ban fracking under a bill signed into law on Friday by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin.
Fracking — the process of injecting high-pressure mixtures of water, sand, and chemicals underground to crack shale rock and release oil and gas — is
prolific in Oklahoma, and
Fallin said […]
No Comments
Cariol Vaughan, - ABC News (Virginia)
Stephan: I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia, in a house built in 1653 on the edge of a small bay, which I believe by the time my grandsons are my age will be unlivable because of flooding. And the Eastern shore across the bay from Wilson's Creek will be underwater. It is already starting.
Eastern Shore Virginia flooding
A new study that looks at how sea-level rise will affect the Eastern Shore of Virginia found 33 miles of roads could be permanently flooded sometime between 2025 and 2050, with one foot of sea-level rise.
Most of the affected miles are on the northern bayside of Accomack County.
Seven communities, including Saxis, could be entirely inaccessible by road at that point, according to the May 2015 report by the Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission.
“We just need to be talking about this; it’s important that this gets into the conversation,” said Curt Smith, Director of Planning at the ANPDC.
Nearly one-quarter of the Shore’s roads and more than 50 communities and facilities in the two Eastern Shore counties are vulnerable to sea-level rise, the study concluded.
“This will be the first study on the Shore that will look into when this is projected to occur — that’s the last piece of the puzzle,” said Smith, who authored the 190-page report.
Recent advances in technology made possible more precise mapping of the region — with accuracy to within less than an inch rather than […]
No Comments
Stephan: As I have said before, I read the Theocratic Right's media in order to understand their world view and cultural values. Their sense of sexuality and gender roles is one of the hallmarks of this cohort, and I think it is important to understand them, because these people as a group have achieve higher percentage of voting than social progressives. Therefore they elect politicians who create policies from their perspective. I suspect this essay is going to outrage a lot of SR's women readers.
As Christians who embrace God’s Word as the guide for our lives, we know that the Bible condones sex ONLY within the bounds of marriage. But unfortunately, since the sexual revolution of the 1960’s our culture has embraced the idea that pre-marital sex is the norm, and that we actually need to try out the person sexually before we are married to make sure that we are sexually compatible.
Our culture’s acceptance of pre-marital sex has been one of the major contributing factors to the decline in marriage, and the rise in cohabitation rates.
Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?
This phrase was coined to reflect the reality that when you make sex outside of marriage culturally acceptable, less people will marry, and the statistics today prove it. The most literal and historical meaning of this phrase meant “why marry a girl, when she will give you sex without marriage?”
I remember growing up in my Church youth group, hearing speakers sometimes say this phrase about the milk and the cow. Obviously they […]
No Comments
Natasha Geiling, - Think Progress
Stephan: Sadly I am afraid most social progressives, like most Americans don't really understand how the government works with power spread across the three branches. A large percentage of Americans don't even know there are three branches.
This report on why Obama made the choice he made recently about Arctic drilling gives an accurate sense of the process and its limitations. This is why voting in a Congress of corrupt morons makes a difference to your life, and the only planet you are ever going to live on.
Arctic oil rig
Credit; Shutterstock
On Thursday afternoon, President Obama took to his newly-minted personal Twitter account to answer questions about climate change. After fielding a question about climate denial, the president took on the controversial question of drilling in the Arctic — something that has been seen as contradictory to his interest in fighting climate change.
President Obama began by pointing out that he has already shut off the most sensitive Arctic areas to drilling, including the Bristol Bay, home to a number of endangered species and 40 percent of America’s wild-caught seafood. In April, his administration also finalized a proposal to set aside a majority of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, which prevent drilling across some 12 million acres across northeastern Alaska.
But according to the president, it’s impossible to stop oil exploration in the Arctic completely.
Despite low global crude prices (helped along by a natural gas boom in the United States), the Arctic remains an appealing long-term development […]
No Comments
Stephan: Yet further proof of the toxic anti-life effect of the Corporate Theocratic Right. A certain segment of the country, about a third, seems on the evidence, to lack the capacity to think more than a step or two ahead. The ideology of small government, and that government is bad sabotages what ought to be an obvious commonsense view: That the planet is in danger as a result of human activities, and those activities must be moderated to support wellness.
Some of how that must be done requires comprehensive governance at the Federal level. That's why the Founders wrote the Constitution the way they did. They distributed power because they had directly experienced living under a distant dictator in a frontier world. They knew first hand what it took for a society that was constantly morphing to survive and prosper.
The American revolution was unique because it was not an uprising of the masses, it was a rebellion of the managers. That's why they changed the rhythm and form of the local post-colonial world as little as possible. Essentially just at the top. Locally the same place you went to register a land sale was the same place after the war, often manned by the same person.
This obstructionism on the part of the Republicans is literally dangerous.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration says a new federal rule regulating small streams and wetlands will protect the drinking water of more than 117 million people in the country.
Not so, insist Republicans. They say the rule is a massive government overreach that could even subject puddles and ditches to regulation.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia, is promising to “rein in” the government through legislation or other means.
It’s a threat with a familiar ring.
Capito and other Republicans are also pledging to block the administration’s plan to curb carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, its proposal for stricter limits on smog-forming pollution linked to asthma and respiratory illness, and a separate rule setting the first national standards for waste generated from coal burned for electricity.
The rules are among a host of regulations that majority Republicans have targeted for repeal or delay as they confront President Barack Obama on […]
1 Comment
