MindMover
MindMover's Journal
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"Stick a fork in the American Southwest, the ranches there are broiled
Separate analyses published this week both found that the region has heated up more than any other in the U.S. in recent decades as global warming’s most prominent effect — warming — has taken hold. The first analysis came from Climate Central, which looked at summertime heat:
Nationwide, the summer warming trend averages out to a little more than 0.4°F per decade since 1970. The places warming the fastest also happen to be some of the hottest places in the country, with a large chunk of the Southwest and all of Texas warming more than 1°F per decade.
The notable blue spot in a sea of red is the Upper Midwest, where substantial parts of Iowa and the Dakotas have seen a slight cooling trend since 1970. Interestingly, that region is actually home to some of the fastest-warming states when you look at the change in annual average temperatures. Winters in particular have warmed dramatically there over the past 40 years.
On that note, the AP analyzed average year-round temperatures, reaching these conclusions:
http://grist.org/news/american-southwest-heating-faster-than-rest-of-nation/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=socialflow
"This is how little it costs for states to go renewable
States can boost renewable energy capacity at bargain-basement prices, a new study finds.
Federal researchers examined the 29 states where renewable portfolio standards (RPS’s) have been in place for more than five years. They concluded that these standards, which require utilities to generate a certain percentage of power from clean sources, led to the development of 46,000 megawatts of renewable capacity up until 2012 — and that they raised electricity rates by an average of less than 2 percent.
(If you’re wondering why California’s green line extends above and below the zero-cost line, it’s because the researchers used two different methodologies — one suggested that the state’s ambitious standard resulted in net costs, while the other suggested that it actually resulted in net savings.)
The researchers, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also examined other studies that have attempted to quantify the economic impacts of RPS policies: “A number of the studies examined economic development benefits annually or over the lifespan of the renewable energy projects, with benefits on the order of $1-$6 billion, or $22-30/MWh of renewable generation.” RPS’s can also help make electricity prices more stable, the researchers note.
http://grist.org/news/this-is-how-little-it-costs-for-states-to-go-renewable/?
Here is where I found that the CIA was involved .
http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/animal-farm-animated-funded-by-the-cia-1954.html"In the middle of the twentieth century, America’s Central Intelligence Agency saw art and culture as a weapon: they secretly funded not just abstract expressionist painting and a Russian-language printing and distribution campaign of Doctor Zhivago, but an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Anybody could have seen the anti-Soviet propaganda value of George Orwell’s satirical, allegorical tale in which livestock overtake their farm from its human owners and turn, without hesitation, into illogical tyrants. Though widely read in novel form, a film version of Animal Farm would, so the CIA presumably hoped, get the message across more immediately and accessibly — especially after they’d demanded certain simplifications of the story. Taking pains not to reveal its identity, the CIA simply became in 1954 a set of somewhat demanding “financial backers” for the animated Animal Farm; to take on Orwell’s “memorable fable” (as the opening titles put it), the CIA went with the animation studio of John Halas and Joy Batchelor, resulting in the first British-made animated feature ever theatrically released, which you can watch at the top of the post.
The Guardian‘s Karl Cohen writes that “the production employed about 80 animators. In Halas’s book The Technique of Film Animation, 1959, he states that the film’s target audience was adults rather than children and that they needed to simplify the plot. Vivien Halas [Halas and Batchelor's daughter] adds that the film wasn’t shown in Paris until the 1990s as it was considered too anti-communist. When it finally premiered in Paris in about 1993, the mayor of Aubervilliers (a suburb of Paris) ‘introduced it as a tribute to communism! My father said no, this is not communist or anti-communist. It is a fable for all time. It is anti-totalitarian and it has a humanist message.’” Still, this aesthetically impressive piece of work ignores, at the CIA’s request, Orwell’s original ending, an indictment of not just animals, and not just the pigs who would memorably declare that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” but every living species, from humans on down. The then-concealed CIA had requested this change (along with a less sympathetic treatment of Trotsky figure Snowball) but Halas had a justification of his own for the happier conclusion: “You can not send home millions in the audience being puzzled.” Fair enough, though it hardly needs pointing out that, 60 years later, we remember not that ending, but the one Orwell wrote."
You can find Animal Farm in our collections: 550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
"Maureen Dowd is extremely naive or would drink any man under the table
The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
What could go wrong with a bite or two? Everything, as it turned out.
Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.
But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=1
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Do you drink a fifth of whiskey at one sitting ... ?
Video of Bergdahl release
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Member since: Sun Jul 31, 2011, 05:36 PMNumber of posts: 5,016
