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"The Senior Gleaners of San Diego County are working to enhance the food-giving capacities of local agencies, most of which run out of food on a monthly basis. Senior Gleaners is divided into three main working groups in the county , South County, North County and the Coastal area. Each area has a team of workers who volunteer to pick, sort, gather and deliver up to 100,000 pounds of food to area agencies monthly. Only agencies that qualify under federal poverty rules (and have a 501-c-3 nonprofit status) are eligible to receive the food. Growers contact team leaders when they have crops that are over-ripe or too costly to pick; certain grocery stores offer edible food that cannot be sold and packing sheds have crates of food that is not suitable for the marketplace but safe to eat."
"Our bodies need darkness to produce the hormone melatonin, which keeps certain cancers from developing, and our bodies need darkness for sleep."The primary point here is that the author, Paul Bogard makes is that we can change this.
"The rest of the world depends on darkness as well, including nocturnal and crepuscular species of birds, insects, mammals, fish and reptiles. Some examples are well known — the 400 species of birds that migrate at night in North America, the sea turtles that come ashore to lay their eggs — and some are not, such as the bats that save American farmers billions in pest control and the moths that pollinate 80% of the world's flora. Ecological light pollution is like the bulldozer of the night, wrecking habitat and disrupting ecosystems several billion years in the making. Simply put, without darkness, Earth's ecology would collapse."
"It doesn't have to be this way. Light pollution is readily within our ability to solve, using new lighting technologies and shielding existing lights. Already, many cities and towns across North America and Europe are changing to LED streetlights, which offer dramatic possibilities for controlling wasted light. Other communities are finding success with simply turning off portions of their public lighting after midnight. Even Paris, the famed "city of light," which already turns off its monument lighting after 1 a.m., will this summer start to require its shops, offices and public buildings to turn off lights after 2 a.m. Though primarily designed to save energy, such reductions in light will also go far in addressing light pollution. But we will never truly address the problem of light pollution until we become aware of the irreplaceable value and beauty of the darkness we are losing."In addition to this informative piece is a companion, Dark Skies (pdf) with some really good illustrations to support the Bogard argument.
"Bil C-45 includes changes to the Canadian Indian Act regarding how reserve lands are managed, making them easier to develop and be taken away from the First Nation people.Protest begins around 4:21 after introduction by film maker in Toronto who is actively involved in this fast moving resistance.
The bill also removes thousands of lakes and streams from the list of federally protected bodies of water. “This is unacceptable. They have made a unilateral decision remove the protection of waterways... Shell Canada has proposed to mine out 21km of the Muskeg River, a river of cultural and biological significance. This ultimately gives the tar sands industry a green light to destroy vital waterways still used by our people," stated Eriel Deranger, Communication Coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.
Atiwapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence has been on a hunger strike since December 11th, resolved to starve herself to death unless Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets to discuss treaty rights, and Canada’s relationship with its Indigenous peoples. She is currently living in a teepee on Victoria Island, in Ottawa, just a kilometer away from the Parliament buildings. So far, Harper has rejected calls to meet with Spence."
Idle No More's mission statement reads, in part:Via Common Dreams
On December 10th, Indigenous people and allies stood in solidarity across Canada to assert Indigenous sovereignty and begin the work towards sustainable, renewable development. All people will be affected by the continued damage to the land and water and we welcome Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies to join in creating healthy sustainable communities. We encourage youth to become engaged in this movement as you are the leaders of our future. There have always been individuals and groups who have been working towards these goals – Idle No More seeks to create solidarity and further support these goals. We recognize that there may be backlash, and encourage people to stay strong and united in spirit.
The goal of the research project — led by Guza and one of his former star pupils, Reinhard Flick, Scripps researcher and staff oceanographer for the California Department of Boating and Waterways — is simple: Watch the sand. Carefully.This sounds so rational I can hardly believe it's real. And, it looks to me like the beach sand replenishment is yet another Stocks & Bond legacy that is being questioned.
The technology they’re using is a step up from Radio Shack: a laser scanner that collects data points multiple times a second; acoustic Doppler velocimeter; bathymetric mapping; and a bunch of other sci-fi stuff.
Guza, his love of sand gushing, says it’s insane that we spend millions on periodic beach “nourishment” while less than .01 percent of that money goes to measuring what happens to the sand once it’s dropped off.
[ . . . ] “Our beaches are changing,” Guza says. “We can either monitor them and have a good idea what they’re doing and what happens when we try to fix something, or we can not watch them and do stuff randomly and not know what works.”
"Eight different groups — including oil companies — bid for the leases involving 15 parcels of land up for auction in rural stretches of Monterey, San Benito and Fresno counties, Bureau of Land Management spokesman David Christy said. The agency plans to announce the winners within 24 hours.Via Crooks & Liars
Numerous environmental groups who saw the auction as a sign that California is next in line for an oil and gas boom protested outside the auction in Sacramento, with some activists donning hazmat suits.
The auction attracted a normal turnout of bidders, and about half the parcels went for just $2.50 an acre, much less than the typical price in nearby Kern County, an oil-rich basin along a mountain range north of Los Angeles."
There were protests, of course, but that didn't really stop anything. Similarly, the regulations around fracking are so loose that having to get an additional permit is just part of the cost of getting richer to these oil barons. Worse, fracking regulations aren't even finalized yet, and were just pushed back yet again. Until demand lessens, they're going to be able to destroy the environment and hasten climate change. This needs to be as high of a priority as Medicare and union membership. The oligarchs will not be satisfied until they have exhausted or stolen every resource on the planet.Related Story in the Cultural Environment
This is a worthy read, both for the orchestrated huge money tactics that are being rolled out by fossil fuel industry and for the story being told by this Hollywood film. (It is still difficult to believe that prisons are not filled with these fossil fuel industry decision makers, bribery agents and hucksters.)Next month Focus Features releases Matt Damon’s new movie and the oil and gas industry is worried sick about it. The movie, Promised Land , is about a Pennsylvania farm town deciding whether to go forward with shale gas drilling after a team of landmen arrives in the area.
Despite the industry's faux-outrage and attempts to stir up hype, the Damon movie is not anti-fracking or a propaganda piece. The film offers up a clear-eyed look at economic hardships faced in many rural communities. It also makes a simple point: with so much at stake, shouldn't communities have a candid, informed discussion about the risks and benefits of oil and gas drilling?
“I think that you will see us talking about more environmental issues,” she said, “more sustainability issues.”
One of the Encinitas councilmen who lost his seat was Jerome Stocks. Stocks was the city’s representative on SANDAG, San Diego’s regional planning board. Stocks served as the SANDAG chair and a spokesperson for the region’s 2050 regional transportation plan. That SANDAG plan was recently struck down in court for not meeting the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Barth said she plans to nominate political newcomer Lisa Shaffer to replace Stocks as the city's representative on the SANDAG board, and bring a more environmentally-friendly perspective to regional planning.
Shaffer, who was the top vote getter in the Encinitas City Council election, is an ethics teacher at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management and has worked with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NASA and NOAA.
And The Guardian reports:
Shankar not only transcended culture, race and geography but also had no difficulty with the generation gap and the phenomenon of class. The children of the flower-power generation turned a deaf ear to their elders but listened most intently to the stranger on the shore.
Showered with citations and awards, the Indian republic made him a Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India) and Britain made him an honorary knight. In the US he received several doctorates and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In later years he divided his time between Encinitas, California, and Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, where the Ravi Shankar Institute of Music and the Performing Arts, fully functional by 2003, was the culmination of his lifelong dream. Housed in an elegant pink granite building, it attracts students from all over the world.
He is survived by his second wife, Sukanya, and their daughter Anoushka who, diligently tutored by her father, is a well-known sitar player. He also leaves a daughter, Norah Jones, the Emmy award-winning singer, from an earlier relationship with the concert producer Sue Jones. Shubhendra, his son from his first marriage, predeceased him.
But many of the proponents of the “negative path” to happiness take things further still, arguing — paradoxically, but persuasively — that deliberately plunging more deeply into what we think of as negative may be a precondition of true happiness.Love that concept and the post is highly recommended, like the Fool, "deliberately plunging more deeply into what we think of as negative may be a precondition of true happiness."
Perhaps the most vivid metaphor for this whole strange philosophy is a small children’s toy known as the “Chinese finger trap,” though the evidence suggests it is probably not Chinese in origin at all. In his office at the University of Nevada, the psychologist Steven Hayes, an outspoken critic of counterproductive positive thinking, keeps a box of them on his desk; he uses them to illustrate his arguments. The “trap” is a tube, made of thin strips of woven bamboo, with the opening at each end being roughly the size of a human finger. The unwitting victim is asked to insert his index fingers into the tube, then finds himself trapped: in reaction to his efforts to pull his fingers out again, the openings at each end of the tube constrict, gripping his fingers ever more tightly. The harder he pulls, the more decisively he is trapped. It is only by relaxing his efforts at escape, and by pushing his fingers further in, that he can widen the ends of the tube, whereupon it falls away, and he is free.
In the case of the Chinese finger trap, Hayes observes, “doing the presumably sensible thing is counterproductive.” Following the negative path to happiness is about doing the other thing — the presumably illogical thing — instead.
There are two groups behind this genius ad: Oil Change International — an advocacy organization that’s fighting for clean energy and against fossil fuels — and The Other 98%, which calls itself “a grassroots network of concerned people fed up with the status quo in Washington.” There’s actually a policy agenda behind the ad — eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels. Here’s the argument the two groups are making:
Imagine if your government gave a company a sweet deal to build your local playground. Then, that company dumped toxic waste underneath where your kids play everyday, just because it was the most profitable thing for them to do.Well, this commercial -- brought to you courtesy of Oil Change International and The Other 98% -- answers them. And guess what: ExxonMobil really hates it. Why? Because it tells the stark, horrible truth about how Big Oil and ExxonMobil harms children in real ways, far more than having a bad score on a standardized test. It has them so aggravated that they're pushing to have the ads removed.
What would you do? Obviously you’d protect your children and demand that the company fully pay to clean up their mess … you’d demand that your government immediately stop sending your tax dollars — subsidies — to that company.
That company is Exxon, the playground is our planet, and the sweet deal they get is by way of massive government handouts.
The groups are raising money for an ad buy next week; “the locations and scope will depend on the online fundraising campaign,” Oil Change International’s director told The Hill. But it looks like one of the audiences they’re looking to reach is Fox News viewers … and I would pay good money just to see how they try and defend Exxon against this argument. “Exxon loves your children! They make it possible for them to drive cars!” “They’re just trying to make money … oh wait …”
“The campaign is offensive to the thousands of ExxonMobil employees and contractors who work hard every day to deliver an essential product in a safe and environmentally responsible way,” the company said in a statement Wednesday.Via Crooks & Liars:
Well, shoot. I'm sorry, ExxonMobil, but it simply tells the truth about what you're really doing.The company and oil industry more broadly are battling proposals to end tax deductions, arguing the efforts unfairly single out the industry for punishment and would stymie energy development.
Oil industry critics say that the tax code should not reward fossil fuel development at a time when scientists are increasingly sounding the alarmabout runaway global warming.
In this day of real-time news, it's really impossible for Big Oil to disguise their malfeasance and greed with slick education reform PR campaigns. That's what they really hate.
"I need feminism to make me feel like a person. I need feminism to help me understand why I feel this sense of rage and helplessness living in this culture and to put a name to that which provokes those feelings - misogyny. I need feminism in order to see myself, and to get others to see me, as a complex, multidimensional human being with my own unique likes, dislikes, personality traits, etc. rather than something that I am told I should be. I need feminism in order to expect more from everyone around me. I need feminism in order to remind myself and others that the "war of the sexes/men are from mars women are from venus" ideas are bullshit, and that the fight for equality and equal opportunities isn't a zero sum game. I need feminism to recognize that men can be more, can be better, than what the patriarchy says they are. I need feminism to know that it's not just me, to know that others are seeing and feeling and realizing what I do. I need feminism to know better than to swallow shit and think that it's ice cream. I need feminism to know that there are infinitely many ways to be a person, and that NONE of them need be defined solely or primarily by my gender."Comment made on a thread where people are asked to share why they need feminism.
"On Men Being Part of the Solution: To a woman whose every post on sexual assault and domestic abuse has prompted untold numbers of women (and some men) to share their stories of having been raped or otherwise violently abused, that the subject could never come up among men is simply astounding. And yet I am assured by the men in my life, it does not. Of the issues with which they concern themselves, sending them into tumbling debates about what should be done and how best to solve the problem—the environment, poverty, encroachments on civil liberties, etc. etc. etc.—the fact that one out of four women will be raped in her lifetime, and many more yet victims of domestic abuse, rarely, if ever, makes the list. How can it be that so many men and women live such different lives? I dream of the day when we don't."THAT I want that, Santa.
