Absolutely awe-filled, stunning photos of an 8,000 year old Latvian bog. A place of amazing diversity and beauty. Living history. Just a few photos here, there are many more at the link.
Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.
Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.
Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.
Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.
Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.
Courtesy Gary Dorr.
Later, a veteran buddy looked it up to be sure, matched it up with our pictures, and based on his experience noted:
“My suspicion is that the Avenger Missile Systems deployed to Standing Rock are a cost-effective alternative to having an Apache Helo flying overhead when they need it. The Avenger system has Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) Capabilities. The civilian plane and helicopter probably don’t have FLIR and that is when they need an Apache Helo to “monitor” situations under darkness and record for evaluation later. Instead of calling up the Apache, they can have Avengers on-site for instant intelligence day or night. The Avenger system also has video capabilities. It costs them far less to have an Avenger system on the ground 24 hrs a day than to deploy an Apache Helo occasionally. The security ground forces have Night Vision but the Avenger has FLIR and a laser rangefinder along with video capabilities. The FLIR will be at least a plate-sized round lense mounted on the weapon rail on the left side (driver side) if there is one. Just a suspicion. If I am correct, there should be more info to request in a FOIA. The sheriff’s Department can’t all have TS Sec clearances so if they brief them all using Avenger footage, it should be low hanging fruit that would be unclassified.”
The Raft of Lampedusa.
Many of you may be familiar with Jason deCaires Taylor, sculptor and environmental activist. His work is renowned and highly known. A new sculpture garden has been created in Atlantic Ocean, Las Coloradas, Lanzarote.
Working in partnership with The Cabildo of Lanzarote, Jason deCaires Taylor constructed the first underwater contemporary art museum in the Atlantic Ocean and Europe on the 28th of Feb 2016. Situated in clear blue waters off the south east coast of Lanzarote, Spain, the unique, permanent installation is constructed at around 14m deep and features 10 different installations with over 300 figurative works.
It most celebrated works include: The Raft of Lampedusa, The Rubicon and The Vortex.
The project draws on the dialogue between art and nature. It is designed on a conservational level to create a large scale artificial reef to aggregate local fish species and increase marine biomass whilst, on the other hand, questions the commodification and delineation of the worlds natural resources and raises awareness to current threats facing the worlds oceans. The central concept is depicted by means of a monumental gateway and wall, which include a series of installations based on the dialogue between past and present and the divisions within society with both political and social comment. The works incorporate for the first time large architectural components and an underwater botanical sculpture garden referencing local flora of Lanzarote, which has unique status as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve.
The Museum is constructed using environmentally friendly, pH neutral inert materials and the formations are tailored to suit endemic marine life. The museum was completed in December 2016, and is the first time large scale architectural elements have been deployed underwater occupying a barren area of sand-covered sea bed (approximately 50m x 50m), The artist invited local residents and visiting tourists to participate in the project by modeling for a life casts. A process where the body is covered in skin safe sculpting materials and a cast of the body and face is made to produce a figurative sculpture to be included in the museum.
The project has created a habitat area for marine life whilst defining Lanzarote as a modern, dynamic and cultural island celebrating its unique natural resources. The project is the first underwater museum in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean and over time will become the first destination of artificial reef diving among the European diving market, leading to increases in revenue for the local economy and help support the diving, snorkelling and sailing industries. It will also attract cultural tourism with higher purchasing power that will reaffirm Lanzarote´s cultural and artistic affluence based on the legacy of Spanish artist Cesar Manrique. The permanent installation is designed to last for hundreds of years but will be an ever-changing exhibition as marine life changes and transforms the surfaces of the sculptures.
For those who are unfamiliar with Mr. Taylor’s work, you can read up at The Creators Project.
Mark Trahant has an in-depth article about the problems of no healthcare. In related news, Trump’s Health and Human Services pick is busy trying to fan the stench of corruption away from himself, but the stink is speaking loudly:
Washington (CNN)Rep. Tom Price last year purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would have directly benefited the company, raising new ethics concerns for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.
Price bought between $1,001 to $15,000 worth of shares last March in Zimmer Biomet, according to House records reviewed by CNN.Less than a week after the transaction, the Georgia Republican congressman introduced the HIP Act, legislation that would have delayed until 2018 a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regulation that industry analysts warned would significantly hurt Zimmer Biomet financially once fully implemented.
Full story at CNN.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Scott Heppell, File.
Less than a week ago, Trump, via his ‘team’ announced there would be no new foreign deals, in an attempt to quiet critics who keep noting he will not deal with his conflicts of interest. It was also stated that all pending deals would be off the table. Naturally, it didn’t take long for Trump to blithely break his word, which is utterly worthless. As usual, Trump found a way to skate around his statements, and he’s busy sliming over Scotland once again.
A multi-million dollar expansion of President-elect Donald Trump’s golf resort in Scotland is reportedly underway — less than a week after Trump’s attorney told reporters that the president-elect had, in an effort to distance himself from conflicts of interests with regards to his businesses, “ordered that all pending deals be terminated.”
According to the Guardian, which first reported the story on Sunday, the Trump Organization is moving forward with a plan to greatly expand the president-elect’s Trump International Golf Course Scotland, located in Aberdeenshire. The plans include construction of another 18-hole golf course, a new 450-room five-star hotel, a timeshare complex, and a private housing estate. The expansion would greatly increase the value of the property to the Trump Organization, according to the Guardian’s report.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization told the Guardian that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction” and therefore the Trump Organization plans to proceed with the deal, despite Trump’s assertion that he would no longer pursue foreign investments relating to his company.
I doubt the residents of Balmedie, Scotland are pleased by this move. If you don’t know why Trump is almost universally loathed and reviled by residents of Scotland, have a read. Then you can start wondering which parts of uStates are going to get smothered under the same Trump slime.
Made in collaboration between photographer Kate Fichard and plastic artist Hugo Deniau, ‘Scarecrows’ is a series that invites the former tradition ousted by sharp technological progress. The project was born out of Fichard’s observation that the tradition of blanking out birds from the crops has faded recently in France. “I noticed that scarecrows no longer exist on fields and vegetable gardens. Unfortunately, today they are replaced by pesticides and protection nets.” Being sensitive to environmental issues, the photographer decided to bring back the tradition and offer the meeting with these mysterious sculptures once again. This time, however, scarecrows are inspired by the idea of contemporary terror by using objects and colors tied to pollution and attacks that ruin the environment. Fichard, who got very much involved in the project, plans to continue travelling around different fields and produce more works, aiming at publishing a book or an exhibition about the subject.
All images © Kate Fichard
You can see more of these amazing statements at iGNANT.
Physicist William Happer arrives for a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City on Jan. 13. (Albin Lohr-Jones/European Pressphoto Agency/Pool).
Trump met with crank physicist William Happer, the climate change denier’s climate change denier. Happer sings the wonders of carbon dioxide, extolling its virtues at every opportunity. He doesn’t get every little thing wrong, but he denies the big picture, human responsibility, and the rather serious question of balance, and what happens when instead of balance, you have a tipping point. What we have here is yet another omen of our impending doom.
…In a 2011 essay in the journal First Things, Happer further argued that “the ‘climate crusade’ is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types — even children’s crusades — all based on contested science and dubious claims.”
The essay triggered an in-depth rebuttal from Michael MacCracken, a climate scientist who formerly directed the U.S. Global Change Research Program in the Bill Clinton administration, and who characterized it as “so misleading that, in my view, it merits a paragraph-by-paragraph response.”
The meeting may be most noteworthy as an example of how Trump plans to get scientific advice — through meetings with people whose views are not necessarily part of the mainstream. It’s not a model that most scientists will approve of.
Trump has met individually not only with Happer, but also with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose views on the safety of vaccines have been rejected by scientific authorities. The meeting has caused alarm in the medical community.
The president-elect has not yet named a presidential science adviser.
This story is covered by The Washington Post, Gizmodo, and Raw Story.
North Bay’s Timothy Joseph Elzinga snapped the photos on his cellphone camera on Jan. 6. (Timothy Joseph Elzinga).
“It looked like someone from Star Trek was trying to beam people up,” Elzinga said.
Yes, it does! How cool. You can read all about the pillars of light here.
CREDIT: Department of Energy (DOE).
Clean energy. It’s the only possible way to go right now, and there’s more promise in clean energy than anything else, but Pendejo-elect Trump is making sure that America will not only miss out on all the money clean energy can bring, but the millions of jobs which go with it. No, much better to commit to filthy energy, which can stuff a few select, already overflowing pockets with more money, making sure that the environment gets destroyed, and to keep on denying climate change. Oh yes, that’s just so much better, by golly, that will make America great again, you betcha. :insert near-fatal eyeroll here.:
A few days ago, Joe Romm at Think Progress had an article up about the clean energy, and how it will be a $50 trillion industry, and how Trump has determined that the U.S. will not be a part of it.
The best charts of 2016 reveal the clean energy revolution is unstoppable. At least, it is unstoppable globally.
But if the United States makes a historic blunder and shifts its focus back toward dirty energy just when the rest of the world has made a $50 trillion (or higher) commitment to a carbon-free future, then it won’t reap the vast job-creating benefits of the remarkable ongoing cost reductions shown in chart above.
That article is here.
Today, there’s an article about all the jobs created by clean energy.
Renewable energy jobs in select countries (excluding large hydropower). CREDIT: IRENA.
China is preparing to go big on the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades.
Beijing’s newest 5-year energy development plan invests a stunning 2.5 trillion yuan ($360 billion) in renewable generation by 2020. Of that, $144 billion will go to solar, about $100 billion to wind, $70 billion to hydropower, and the rest to sources like tidal and geothermal power.
The Chinese National Energy Administration said in a statement Thursday the resulting “employment will be more than 13 million people.”
China is already doing way better than the U.S. in this regard, and President-elect Trump’s commitment to opposing clean energy will not make things any better. As the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported last year, China already has over 40 percent of all jobs in renewables, globally, while the U.S. has under 10 percent (see chart above).
We know clean energy jobs are the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades for several reasons.
If you’re one of those Americans who fell for Trump’s “jobs!” bullshit, perhaps you should look into moving to China, I hear they are hiring. The full article is at Think Progress.
Credit: fourever.eu
Looking at America today, we have repubs going nuts over porn; the active dismantling of ethics and ethical oversight in favour of open corruption; and Donny “Pendejo” Trump waging twitter war with Kim Jong Un, because nothing screams “Greatness!” like two sociopaths with all the maturity of a toddler in full meltdown. And nukes, can’t forget the nukes.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, there’s a move to break the consumer cycle of “buy, it breaks, toss it out, buy another.”
Sweden’s Minister of Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs Per Bolund says we need to change that mindset.
“Part of that is making it more affordable and economically rational to stop the buying and throwing away, instead repairing your goods and using them for a longer time,” says Bolund.
He’s trying to push people in that direction through tax breaks; he’s spearheading a 50-percent tax cut for Swedes to repair items like clothes, shoes and bicycles. The new rule takes effect on Jan. 1, 2017, with a goal of decreasing waste in the world’s landfills, which are filling up at an alarming rate.
This idea — not just discarding stuff — it’s not exactly revolutionary.
A 50% tax break. I just bet that wouldn’t get the attention of Americans, nooooo. [Serious, deadly sarcasm there.]
And in Finland, they are breaking out a guaranteed universal income pilot program.
Giving people money regardless of whether or not they’re working seems to defy common sense about personal responsibility and how to boost productivity. But supporters of UBI have argued that it just makes sense as public policy, for several reasons. First, in the long run, it might be simpler and cheaper for the state to give people money than to oversee a complicated welfare bureaucracy. And it looks as if technological advances might level industries that may have seemed impervious to automation, such as truck driving: driverless vehicles will soon be out of the experimental stage, journalist Gwynne Dyer has noted.
So, America: bowl full of rotten apples.
Pan Pan at the China Conservation and Research Centre in Dujiangyan in September 2015.
The world’s oldest male panda, with more than 130 descendants — a quarter of all the captive-bred pandas on the planet — has died aged 31, officials said.
Giant pandas have a notoriously low reproductive rate, a key contributor — along with habitat loss — to their status as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of threatened species.
But Pan Pan — whose name means “hope” in Chinese — was a prolific father, siring many cubs over the years that have gone on to have offspring of their own.
Announcing his death, the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas called it “heart-wrenching news” and said the “hero father” had been suffering from cancer.
[…]
The most recent estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas in the wild, up by more than a sixth over a decade, with experts crediting nature reserves, bamboo planting, farmer subsidies and commercial programmes for the increase.
Via Raw Story.
A YouTube video from North Dakota’s new Gov. Doug Burgum. More of the same about Standing Rock.
Damn. Think about what was possible: A governor who is framing his entire administration on innovation just dismissed the most disruptive force in his state’s recent history. That is what Standing Rock is about. Instead of saying, “What can we learn from this? What can we do together?” The new governor relied on the screen saver that was there before; the idea that powerful forces will roll over the tribe and build the Dakota Access Pipeline without interference. Thank you.
Burgum also scratched away at an old story: The Obama administration created this problem.
But his larger message is that the state of North Dakota and its corporate partners are more powerful than any tribal government. Instead of a pause, a moment to engage in a government-to-government dialogue, the new governor emphatically says the pipeline will get built soon. No. Matter. What.
“Make no mistake, this infrastructure is good for our economy,” the governor said in his YouTube video. “And it’s the safest way to transport North Dakota products. Failure to finish it would send a chilling signal to those in any industry who wish invest in our state and play by the rules.”
[…]
The new governor could have reset the law enforcement battle lines too. Nope. “As a result of the Obama administration’s refusal to uphold the rule of law on federally owned land, both our citizens and local and state law enforcement have been put in harm’s way,” he said. “These actions are putting daily demands on the scarce resources of our state and local government.”
Those daily demands are because the state of North Dakota made it so. Pick a word: defuse, de-escalate, negotiate. There were so many better alternatives, ones that were dismissed in favor of sending in the cavalry. I have interviewed many government officials over the years that successfully reduced tension instead of using the police powers of a state. In every test the state failed in this regard and the new governor is following the same path.
I had hopes that Gov. Burgum would see the potential of the Standing Rock story as one that could make North Dakota a beacon. Think about this: This moment in history has brought indigenous people together in a way that’s unprecedented. And the world is paying attention to that. What an amazing opportunity, something that could stir the imagination of investors, entrepreneurs, and governments. Potential partners in a state that found a solution by working with tribes to solve an intractable problem.
The former governor blamed social media for this global perception. But that misses the point that the Standing Rock Tribe owns the story. And that won’t change because the new governor posts a video on his account. The problem is not social media. It’s the message that the State of North Dakota will use the rule of law, the police power of a state, to roll over a tribal nation. It’s a message of brute force instead of inspiration.
Same old tired shit. Same old tired white privilege. Nothing ever changes. Mark Trahant’s full column at ICTMN.