Skyfalling

Things that have fallen out of the sky.

Greece: Blackwater Mercenaries Guarding Govt and Overseeing Police; Coup Feared

Scaring off lions by being intelligent.

Our new Senator McCarthy.  Bring on the inquisition!

Josh Marshall on Justice Scalia:

Speaking for myself, it’s hard for me to read the sort of stuff Justice Scalia says these days without seeing red. As he’s aged, he’s tossed aside any pretense or desire to hide the fact that he sees himself as what originalists and advocates of judicial restraint are supposed to be against: namely, an appointed super legislator, contemptuous of Congress and happy to impose his own beliefs by judicial fiat. Hearing him rail about “racial entitlement” sounds more like you’re listening to some sort of talk radio blowhard than a Supreme Court Justice. 

But who is he (and his fellow conservatives on the Court) helping at this point? 

It’s now generally recognized (and I think it’s accurate, but who knows) that the Republican drive to disenfranchise minority voters in 2012 backfired spectacularly. The country’s demography has apparently hit a tipping point wherein you piss off and activate more people than you gain by playing to racial animus, hostility to immigrants and attacks on voting rights.

I hope you are right, Josh, because if the Voting Rights Act gets 'modified' in any way, we will have people rioting in the streets.

Starting the week with a bang... Or maybe a whimper...

Louisiana's coast is feeling the sea-level rise.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.” * Indeed, the water is rising so fast that some coastal restoration projects could be obsolete before they are completed, the officials said.
NOAA’s Tim Osborne, an 18-year veteran of Louisiana coastal surveys, and Steve Gill, senior scientist at the agency’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, spelled out the grim reality in interviews with The Lens. When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of gulf water by the end of the century.

The Republicans are getting upset that the Democrats are standing back and letting them fall on their faces. Josh Marshall says it best:

Official Washington is accustomed to having a Democratic safety net — not cash transfers for those who fall through the cracks of the market economy — but that Democrats will come in and solve crises created by GOP government by crisis.

Cheney is afraid of being tried as a war criminal.

No chemicals, no GMO grain, India has record crop:

What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind

And farmers are demanding control over the seeds:

Vandana Shiva: 'Seeds must be in the hands of farmers',Biodiversity campaigner accuses corporate giants of trying to take over the world's seed supply through genetic engineering,

I have here in my hand... McCarthyism style innuendo doesn't quite work the way it did before YouTube and the internets....

Here's a cat and some clutter

A Russian Pallas Wild cat.

One million Brits 'descended from Romans'

For parents of a genderqueer child.

One sentence to describe what's wrong with health care.

Thor's Day

Louis C. K. on racism.

Why walking through doorways makes you forget.

Stolen lives.

Ag-Gag Laws Help Agribusiness Hide Health Risks in Your Food

Monkey massage.

How many dead since the Newtown massacre?  This many and counting.

Monsanto owns the Supreme Court?

Medieval kitty prints.

7,000 year old cemetery found.. in a pond...

Short and sweet

Or bitter, depending...

Iowa Anti-Choicers Admit They Want to Imprison Women for Abortion

James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change and Bernie Sanders comes over the hill with the cavalry.... or maybe just a cattle prod to try and activate Congress.

Drano plastic bottle bombs.

Russian dashboard cams.  I don't think I'll ever want to drive in Russia....

Teachers.

Our daily bread may be killing us.  Obviously all we can eat now is dirt mixed with a few leaves...

Wal Mart is distressed that the poor are not buying enough of their stuff.  Nice that they had time to climb down from that pile of money they're sitting on.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

We've been ignoring each other for more than a century with our wireless devices....

Teen birth rates are dropping.

Nemo timelapse... that's a lotta snow...

Reactions to dead children are just a phase...

Why are you so angry?  Being female is a crime.  

A woman who walks those in need past protesters.

Curiosity killed the cat...

But satisfaction brought it back

 


Fantastic graphics of Curiosity on Mars

(Post title from a joke by Mahakal)

A Sunday slurry...

So my concerns about high fructose corn syrup and the colony collapse disorder with bees have finally connected:

Systemic pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, move up through a plant, producing contaminated pollen and nectar. And after the first frost, when outside food is no longer available, the bee colony is affected by any contaminates in the food they stored from the summer, he explained. Honeybees are also fed by beekeepers, some of whom use sugar. These days, however, many large operations routinely feed bees with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). 

The birds and the bees – and high fructose corn syrup 

A recent study, published last June in the Bulletin of Insectology by Chensheng Lu, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, gives further support to Hackenberg’s suspicions of the neonicotinoids. And Lu’s study brings up another way for bees to consume the pesticides — through the HFCS fed to them by beekeepers.  

In Lu’s study, colonies were fed HFCS treated with one of the nicotine pesticides, imidacloprid, which resulted in the collapse of almost every test hive, all showing the same pattern consistent with the CCD seen by beekeepers. Corn seed, which is still widely treated with the neonictinoids, received extra high doses of the chemical several years ago, just around the time CCD was first being recognized.

Asteroid deciding whether to visit or not...

Common sense gun regulation  and why gun show attendees support it

69 feet of sea level rise

Chris Christie's lack of impulse control.

Weirdness:  the aye-aye and its spooky fingers.

Droning on....

The deadliest war the U.S. has ever had is the war we waged against ourselves.

Tell gun owners to get gun insurance:

Seven states – California, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado – have, in the past month, introduced bills to have gun owners put their money where their mouth is: liability insurance for their firearms, codifying that responsibility if their firearms are used incorrectly – used by children who find them, by criminals who easily steal them; by people to whom they sell them without requiring a background check.

All things Richard III.  The timeline for the hunt for his grave site and the miraculous find.

Sea urchins save the world!

We aren't the greatest nation in the world.

Prisons in private hands go badly

Drone killing memo

Keeping track of our users of the Second Amendment

Because we don't need government regulations to teach our citizens how to handle their guns.

If it's Tuesday, it must be...

Why men should not vote.

Trying to find some reason women should not take birth control.

Citizens United Repeal Amendment Goes Viral Via Reddit

Krugman talks about austerians.

Plane safety.

Our pile of guns doesn't make us safer:

It doesn't matter how many thousands of lives are lost (between 2001 and 2010, about 270,000 U.S. residents died in shootings, including homicide, suicide and accidents). And it doesn't seem to matter how many mass killings there are, like the one Friday at the elementary school in Connecticut.

Doonesbury agrees.

DNA can be changed.

I say, old chaps!