Thank you to everyone who wrote to say they enjoyed the tale of Sting Ray (the superhero I made up in childhood). Let's stay with science today and stay with the issue of water. Dan Charles (NPR) reports:
Something odd is happening to streams and rivers on the high plains of Kansas and Colorado. Some have disappeared.
"We would go and visit these streams, and in many cases it's like a dirt bike channel. It's no longer functioning as a stream," says Joshuah Perkin, a biologist at Texas A&M University who studies the fish that live in these streams.
These waterways, he says, were partly fed by groundwater: Water moving underground, through rock and sand, draining into streambeds or bubbling up in natural springs. That groundwater kept the streams flowing through dry periods.
But people have been tapping those underground pools of water for themselves. They've drilled deep wells, mostly to irrigate farmland. "We're growing crops in a region that's arid and becoming increasingly arid," Perkin says. "And the way you grow crops when you don't have rain is to pull water from the ground."
Farmers have pumped so much water that in some places, the water table has fallen by more than a hundred feet. The water is now so deep underground that it can't flow into streams and rivers anymore. Streams dry up, and as a result, fish and plants and birds around those streams also disappear.
This could be the result of 'over-farming.' I'll allow others to police their own nations and just keep my focus on the US. (If you are interested in Europe, click for a strong article about water issues there.)
Frances Moore-Lappe, in her groundbreaking book DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET, long ago noted how in the US we do not have a food shortage. We have people who are hungry and who are starving, yes. But that's not because we don't have enough food. She also notes that corporate farms, not you family farmer, are dangerous to the environment because of the way they produce their crops (and livestock). It's a really important and groundbreaking book and C.I. noted last week, referring to the news coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' album ABBEY ROAD, that Frances' book deserved at least that much coverage when it hits 50. The book even notes the issues with California's water, the historical ones including the way farmers were routed out of the water -- a major theme in the film classic CHINATOWN starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.
On water in California, Rivard (VOICE OF SAN DIEGO) reports:
Four and a half years ago, during the height of the California drought, I started writing about water.
Gov. Jerry Brown had just ordered mandatory reductions for cities across the state. He told the public we must use 25 percent less water, a somewhat arbitrary number that came out of one of the many meetings going on at the time.
Outside of California, the general misimpression was that our taps would run dry and we’d move back to Oklahoma, a futile experiment in settling this state ended not by earthquake or fire, but by thirst.
In reality, Californians became more conscious about their water habits. Some people drought-shamed one another: Your showers are too long, your grass is too green, your car isn’t dirty enough.
In the end, we used less water.
And, then, the drought was over, at least officially. Though some farmers suffered during the drought and water officials began eyeing expensive ways to drought-proof themselves in the future, the overall economy remained intact and we’re still here.
My first story for Voice of San Diego was about where the water we use comes from. This, which will be among my last, is about what I learned since then. I’m off to New York to cover water issues there.
On water but moving to the Midwest, Jason Kelly (NOTRE DAME MAGAZINE) notes:
Some believe the Midwest will be insulated from the worst of what climate change inflicts. Not so, the models show, and a decade of recurring extremes has previewed what could, in fact, become a region of tumultuous ebbs and flows in temperature and precipitation.
“We’ve had a natural disaster every year but two years since I moved here,” says Alan Hamlet, a Notre Dame civil and environmental engineer. “And the year before I moved was 2012, which was another disaster.”
Triggering the most destructive of those local disasters, five inches of rain fell over 72 hours in February 2018. That, in itself, is not so unusual around South Bend, about a once-a-decade event. The record flooding that followed, with the St. Joseph River surging to historic highs, happened because the rain melted more than a foot of snow that had fallen in the previous week, during a month with nearly double the normal accumulation.
Hamlet incorporates into his presentations snapshots of 8,000 gallons of standing water in his basement and people canoeing around his neighborhood park, giving personal witness to his data that tracks climate trends and models the future. “Climate scientists are not immune to the impacts,” he says, his humor dry at least.
Nobody’s immune, a realization made manifest for many in the local area after the damage of the 2018 floods and again during the soaking spring of 2019 that delayed and, in some cases, prevented corn and soybean planting around Indiana. We’ve entered what Hamlet calls “the era of impacts,” and as hard as it feels like South Bend has been hit lately, that’s nothing.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Friday, October 4, 2019. Protests continue in Iraq while, in the US, Joe Biden continues to tarnish the legacy of Barack Obama.
Last week, Sarah Chayes, "Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption" was published by THE ATLANTIC. Yesterday on MORNING EDITION (NPR), Sarah spoke with David Green:
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is drawing attention to the questionable activities of more than one major political family. Former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter are under scrutiny for Hunter's work in the Ukrainian energy industry.
The writer Sarah Chayes is the author of the book "Thieves Of The State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security" (ph). And she argues this scrutiny is a good thing.
SARAH CHAYES: You know, when the son of a vice president gets a job in a field he knows nothing about while his father is vice president in a country that just had a revolution that, you know, typically, in that part of the world, post-revolution, all the oligarchs steal all the crown jewels, and the industry is one of the crown jewels - that is to say, gas - since when is that doing nothing wrong?
GREENE: Now, wrong does not necessarily mean illegal, Sarah Chayes told me. But she said too often these days, people with political ties or prominent political names are getting involved where they shouldn't be.
CHAYES: Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread. And that's my question. How did we all convince ourselves that this isn't corrupt? And it seems to me that we're not going to recover, you know, even an approximation of the ideals on which we were founded as a nation unless each of us, as citizens, begins to make it less comfortable for our political and economic leaders to behave this way.
GREENE: Well, let me ask you this, then. If it is not unusual, why focus on this case of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden specifically?
CHAYES: Because it's in the news and because of the word that I kept seeing apply in this context, which is, no wrongdoing, or, they didn't do anything wrong. And I'm looking at that, saying, what? And if we can say that now, in this context, then there's something awry.
From her article at THE ATLANTIC:
When allegations of ethical lapses or wrongdoing surface against people on one side of the aisle, they can always claim that someone on the other side has done far worse. But taken together, all of these examples have contributed to a toxic norm. Joe Biden is the man who, as a senator, walked out of a dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.
To quote THELMA & LOUISE, "You get what you settle for." Is that what we're willing to settle for as a society? Corruption and lack of ethics? Or do we have standards that we apply across the board? Basic expectations from our public servants?
Situational ethics will never root out corruption.
Last week, Sarah Chayes, "Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption" was published by THE ATLANTIC. Yesterday on MORNING EDITION (NPR), Sarah spoke with David Green:
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is drawing attention to the questionable activities of more than one major political family. Former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter are under scrutiny for Hunter's work in the Ukrainian energy industry.
The writer Sarah Chayes is the author of the book "Thieves Of The State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security" (ph). And she argues this scrutiny is a good thing.
SARAH CHAYES: You know, when the son of a vice president gets a job in a field he knows nothing about while his father is vice president in a country that just had a revolution that, you know, typically, in that part of the world, post-revolution, all the oligarchs steal all the crown jewels, and the industry is one of the crown jewels - that is to say, gas - since when is that doing nothing wrong?
GREENE: Now, wrong does not necessarily mean illegal, Sarah Chayes told me. But she said too often these days, people with political ties or prominent political names are getting involved where they shouldn't be.
CHAYES: Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread. And that's my question. How did we all convince ourselves that this isn't corrupt? And it seems to me that we're not going to recover, you know, even an approximation of the ideals on which we were founded as a nation unless each of us, as citizens, begins to make it less comfortable for our political and economic leaders to behave this way.
GREENE: Well, let me ask you this, then. If it is not unusual, why focus on this case of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden specifically?
CHAYES: Because it's in the news and because of the word that I kept seeing apply in this context, which is, no wrongdoing, or, they didn't do anything wrong. And I'm looking at that, saying, what? And if we can say that now, in this context, then there's something awry.
From her article at THE ATLANTIC:
When allegations of ethical lapses or wrongdoing surface against people on one side of the aisle, they can always claim that someone on the other side has done far worse. But taken together, all of these examples have contributed to a toxic norm. Joe Biden is the man who, as a senator, walked out of a dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.
To quote THELMA & LOUISE, "You get what you settle for." Is that what we're willing to settle for as a society? Corruption and lack of ethics? Or do we have standards that we apply across the board? Basic expectations from our public servants?
Situational ethics will never root out corruption.
Or is it this maybe?? Because let’s face it: Joe Biden’s son Hunter failed rehab 5 times, got kicked out of the Navy, dated his sister in law, and left a crack pipe in a rental car. The idea Hunter got a job getting paid $50,000 a month should strike everyone as suspicious.
The crack pipe?
That gets back to the Biden pass. His niece Caroline physically attacks a police officer and is arrested. She gets a pass, no time. A few years later, the niece steals over $100,000 and, again, no time sentenced, no time served. Hunter and his crack pipe?
Yea, because smoking crack isint a crime.
"Prescott Police Department officials were unable to reach Hunter Biden and, after an investigation, declined to prosecute"
And, again, campaign staff insists Hunter is the father of the child that he's denying is hit, the one the mother is suing him for. These are the values of the Biden family. These are the values we want in the White House?
Two kinds of justice -- the ones for everyone else and the ones for the Bidens?
America deserves much better than that.
Much.
And what the media and the Joe-bots don't get, the American people do. MEDIAITE notes:
Joe Biden’s third quarter fundraising numbers are out. And they are an ominous sign for the former vice president’s 2020 candidacy.
According to Bloomberg, Biden told donors at a fundraiser in Palo Alto, CA that his campaign raised $15 million in the period from July-September. That number is down markedly from the $21.5 million he brought in during the second quarter.
Biden’s third quarter haul also, notably, lags behind that of two of his rivals. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) brought in $25 million over the past three months, while South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised $19.1 million. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA),
who has emerged as the main threat to Biden’s long-held frontrunner
status, has not yet reported her third quarter numbers.
The vice president also came in way behind President Donald Trump — whose coffers grew by a whopping $125 million in the third quarter.
It's time for Joe to go.
It's no longer just about him.
Corrupt Joe makes it that much harder to call Donald Trump out for any corruption.
Corrupt Joe is tainting Barack Obama's legacy with every day.
What Joe allowed his family to get away with while he was Vice President?
That reflects poorly on Joe. It also reflects on Barack. And there's a lot more to come on that issue. Joe is harming Barack's legacy.
It's time for Joe to go.
He offers nothing that is needed and seems to believe it's 1996. He's out of touch, he's out of date and he's corrupt. He needs to go.
Turning to Iraq . . .
REUTERS notes:
The death toll from days of violent demonstrations across Iraq has risen to 44 as unrest rapidly spread across the country despite a plea for calm from the prime minister.
In an overnight TV address, Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he understood the frustration of the public but there was no “magic solution” to Iraq’s problems. He pledged to make reforms, but this drew a scornful response from demonstrators.
REUTERS plays 'even handed' and head up the ass. Why? Maybe so they can continue to cover Iraq. It's not like the western press isn't intimidated and bullied by the Iraqi government.
That's been going on openly since 2006.
UN urges Iraq to probe protest deaths ‘transparently’ National News en.nationalhaber.com/un-urges-iraq-…
Mahdi is so inept as a prime minister that the president of Iraq has dominated the news for over six months. The presidency is a symbolic office in Iraq. It has no real power, pure ceremony. But that's how weak Mahdi is and how desperate the western press has been to ignore reality in Iraq.
A non-functioning prime minister? Well, hey, just report on the doings of the president and pretend like he's the leader of the country.
Journalist Mustafa Habib reports the following:
#Breaking: In his first comment on #Iraq_Protest, The senior cleric in #Iraq Ali #Sistani sharply criticizes the political process in #Iraq & he accuse the "Sadrist" & "Fatah" blocs who formed the govt, to abandon slogans of reform that they claim it. (1)
A few moments ago, his spokesman Ahmed al-Safi read out Sistani's statement on the situation in #Iraq:-
All the three authorities in the country, Parliament, government & judiciary, responsibility for the poor conditions of Iraqis (2)
“The Parliament is the biggest responsible because the largest blocs that formed the government (Muqtada al-Sadar & Hadi al-Amiri) didn’t take anything seriously on its promises to achieve reforms and fighr corruption” (3)
"Corrupt politicians bet for years that the demonstrations can be silenced every year, but the demonstrations are getting bigger every year as we expected before, because of the insistence of the corrupt on their positions" (4)
IMPORTANT: Sistani gives proposal:-“Before its too late, I call to form committee, its members are independent & technocrats that get the demonstration trust, the committee have the right to access to all government documents to uncover proplems away from bureaucracy” (5)
And here are some Tweets about the ongoing protests.
The unrest in Iraq is escalating. Protests continue despite a curfew, an internet blackout & security forces using live ammunition. Reports of shooting at Baghdad airport now. The toll has risen to 31 dead in 3 days, according to AP.
A word on one of the dynamics behind the Iraq protests, namely: youth unemployment. In Iraq, 40% of the country is under 14, and 60% is under 25. Youth unemployment is around 40%. Changing demographics should keep policymakers up at night across the region.
Anti-government protests shake Iraq — in pictures aje.io/l3feg
Iraq protests: All the latest updates @AJENews
from Berlin, Iraqis chanting to topple the regime as deadly protests across Iraq.
If the protests of Iraq dies after Sistani says go home and wait for reform then the Iraqi people are falling for the biggest lie of the century. There will never be reform in these countries.
The following sites updated:
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Thirty Years Ago
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Caroline Biden's Vagisil problems
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Bernie
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Black Bean Quesadillas in the Kitchen
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outrageous
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MODERN FAMILY
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