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We’re 98% chimp. Is the remaining 2% enough to save humanity?

What if the world were run by chimps — chimps pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, chimps dumping toxic waste into water supplies, chimps engaging in violent terrorism and military attacks, chimps bankrupting businesses and countries and families…. Wait. The world is run by chimps who are doing all those things and more. There’s not [...]

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Are humans smarter than yeast?

Are humans smarter than yeast? This question, once posed in jest, is increasingly asked in earnest by those concerned about population growth and diminishing natural resources. It’s the title of an eight minute YouTube video by Dan Chay, but Dave Bice explains its meaning more concisely: “Yeast growing in grape juice provide a good example [...]

RECENT ASIDES

• Six researchers have left the Heartland Institute, a conservative think-tank that is so aggressively skeptical of global warming it hosts an annual conference of deniers, to form a new firm called R Street Institute that will accept climate science. Their specialty has been insurance and related finance issues, which they will continue to research, but as their spokesperson says, “R Street will not promote climate change skepticism....Our intent is to take scientific consensus seriously, in advocating for public policy issues that relate to climate risk....” For example, “Global warming is relevant to the risk of catastrophic floods. It is relevant to crop losses from drought, and we see scientific consensus as suggesting those concerns must be taken seriously as we evaluate federal subsidies for flood insurance and crop insurance.” #
• "An American Oligarchy?" is the headline question that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders answers in the affirmative: "At a time when the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing and the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well, many Americans are wondering whether this country is moving toward an oligarchic form of government where a handful of very wealthy people control the economic and political life of the nation. At a time when the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150 million people, it was not surprising to learn from a recent study that between 2009 and 2010, 93 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers. Additionally, it is extremely disturbing that because of the absurd Citizens United Supreme Court decision, many of these billionaires are now using their money to strengthen their political hold on the country. 'This is not what democracy looks like. This is what oligarchy and plutocracy look like,' Bernie said." #
• The Ogallala aquifer -- a huge fresh water resource deep beneath the states of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming -- took thousands of years to fill, but in the average lifetime of one human, under 70 years, the water table has dropped 150 feet. As reported by National Geographic, based on a study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), about "266 million acre-feet -– a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie" has been pumped out of the Ogallala since 1940. "Unfortunately, that water is not coming back any time soon," which is a problem not only for those who farm in those eight states but for everyone who depends on the crops grown on that land, because it represents "27 percent of the nation’s total irrigated area." Understandably, water districts in that region are setting caps on "production" from wells. "In Texas, a bastion of the free-market Tea Party, such a rule is hard to fathom. Most of the state abides by the 'rule of capture,' which basically allows farmers to pump as much water as they want from beneath their own land. But... if the region is to have any future at all, water users must find a way to curb the pumping." #
• "...We are no longer a capitalistic society.... In a very anti-capitalistic move the government decided that stupidity and criminal activity should be rewarded. I'd say they took our money, but it is worse, we didn't have that much money. So they borrowed the money in our name. The loan has a variable rate. They borrowed so much money that our kids cosigned the loan. In fact, our kid's future kids signed on the dotted line. That is unequivocally immoral. They gave that borrowed money to a bunch of morons as a reward for stupidity. Morons who created subprime loans, liar loans, no income no documentation loans and other fraudulent instruments. Morons bundled that trash, got it rated AAA and then sold these turds or weapons of mass destruction that they had the audacity to name complex financial instruments or derivatives to pension funds, countries and other "investors." Then it all blew up. Big surprise.... The idiots who created the mess were rewarded with a 700 billion dollar "bailout." This "bailout" was anything but a bailout and had a price tag of anything but 700 billion. The actual price tag is closer to 11 trillion and puts us on the hook for another 13-17 trillion -- not counting interest. Think about that for a second. This stupidity crisis is the equivalent of our Federal Debt which took generations of politicians over a hundred years to wrack-up. For anyone who still believes we live in a free country where capitalism reigns please show me one economic textbook which states that failure and fraud get rewarded with borrowed taxpayer money. For anyone who believes we live in a democracy please show me a textbook that says the government will en-debt you and your kids and their kids to pay for a failed business. How is that democratic?" (From "Why We Are Totally Finished," by D Sherman Okst, on Financial Sense.) #
• "Did you know that the US Networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) devoted a grand total of 32 MINUTES and 14 news stories for all of 2011 to the single most important story of this century last year. It's true. Despite all the evidence, despite all the extreme weather events in the world, despite the study by a climate change skeptic (funded in part by the Koch Brothers) that concluded climate researchers had it right all along when they concluded that climate change was caused by all the giga-tons of greenhouse gases human beings are pumping into the atmosphere, 32 minutes of coverage on the US Television networks was all they deemed fit to broadcast." (From an AlterNet report about a Climate Progress study.) #