Tag: Beer

I have 3 articles for your perusal today.

The first, just lovely:

California Aquifers Poisoned by Fracking While State’s Water Shortage Becomes Grim

In the midst of the worst drought in California’s history comes news that hydrofracking operations are polluting the state’s dwindling water supplies.

In July, during the height of the drought, state regulators halted operations at 11 injection wells used to dispose of wastewater used in hydraulic fracturing. The state found that the wastewater might have contaminated aquifers used for drinking water and farm irrigation. The Environmental Protection agency had ordered the state to send them a report regarding the situation within 60 days.

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Today I have 2 articles for your perusal.

First up is an interview with Noam Chomsky. It covers a variety of issues and is long but well worth the read:

Chomsky: U.S. Spawned a Fundamentalist Frankenstein in the Mideast

For decades now, Noam Chomsky has been widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive (linguist, philosopher, social and political critic) and the leading US dissident since the Vietnam War. Chomsky has published over 100 books and thousands of articles and essays, and is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees by some of the world’s greatest academic institutions. His latest book, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, has just been published by Haymarket Books. On the occasion of the release of his last book, Chomsky gave an exclusive and wide-ranging interview to C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout, parts of which will also appear in The Sunday Eleftherotypia, a major national Greek newspaper.

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For this Monday, I give you a few articles that I read over the weekend.

First, an excellent Op-Ed call out of the Catholic Church and their rampant hypocrisy:

The Church’s Gay Obsession

Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad. It’s also self-defeating, because it’s souring many American Catholics, a majority of whom approve of same-sex marriage, and because the workers who’ve been exiled were often exemplars of charity, mercy and other virtues as central to Catholicism as any guidelines for sex. But their hearts didn’t matter. It was all about their loins. Will the church ever get away from that?

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I read this last weekend and it was an interesting article, but it was also a piece of beautiful writing. Enjoy!

Intelligent People All Have One Thing In Common: They Stay Up Later Than You

There’s an electricity in the moon. A pulse, a magic, an energy. A bewitching entrancement unlike that of the sun.

The moon is for things unseen, things done in the shadows and beneath the fog. Under bridges and beneath bed sheets – it’s for wild hearts and unconcerned minds. It’s where plans are made in dark alleyways and secrets revealed under the soft haze of light coming through the cracks of closed shutters.

It’s when fugitives escape and kids run away. It’s when girls lose their virginities on torn leather seats and boys get into trouble. It’s when the suffering take their lives and the lonely seek comfort.

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So, I posted this short rant on my Facebook wall yesterday and I thought it might be a decent discussion piece:

only humans could be arrogant enough to think that we could destroy or damage large parts of earth’s ecosystems and natural defenses and not manage to change the earth detrimentally. we have paved over, removed, and added things to the land, air, and water, which, even when naturally occurring, do not occur at the rates and levels we have contributed to them.

the earth may have had natural rhythms and periods of warming and cooling, but that’s when left alone with what earth had on its own. what we’ve done to it over the past couple centuries in the name of making our lives easier and some of us richer, cannot – absolutely cannot – have not had any effect. i don’t need any friggin graphs, charts, or studies to tell me that. i just need to not be stupid to know it.

only humans could be arrogant and stupid enough to believe that all we’ve done to it would not make a detrimental difference in the earth’s well being. arrogant and stupid, that about sums us up.

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Ok, I’m sick right now, so I’m going pretty light on this one. I can’t believe I missed it when it was written some 13 odd years ago, but it’s well worth the read as it’s still pertinent. Yeah yeah, I know it’s the Onion, but it’s right on the mark!

God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule

NEW YORK-Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

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So, in honor of the worldwide marches yesterday, I give you a few of my weekend reading on Climate Change.

First, a WaPo editorial urging action:

A climate for change: America should not wait while the world warms

FOR MORE than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. For decades, they’ve realized humans can affect the climate by burning coal, oil and gas. But the country’s leaders remain divided on the need to curb greenhouse emissions, let alone how to do it.

Among mainstream scientists, this paralysis is mind-boggling.

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I have one really good article on an idea that Utah put into effect a few years ago that is working. Now if we can only get more places to jump on this bandwagon…

Home Free?

In 2005, Utah set out to fix a problem that’s often thought of as unfixable: chronic homelessness. The state had almost two thousand chronically homeless people. Most of them had mental-health or substance-abuse issues, or both. At the time, the standard approach was to try to make homeless people “housing ready”: first, you got people into shelters or halfway houses and put them into treatment; only when they made progress could they get a chance at permanent housing. Utah, though, embraced a different strategy, called Housing First: it started by just giving the homeless homes.

(snip)

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Well, here’s a roundup of Adrian Peterson/NFL news.

First, Cris Carter says exactly what needs to be said:

Watch Cris Carter take an emotional stand against child abuse on ESPN

“My mom did the best job she could do. Raising seven kids by herself. But there are thousands of things that I have learned since then that my mom was wrong. It’s the 21st century. My mom was wrong. She did the best she could, but she was wrong about some of that stuff she taught me. And I promise my kids I won’t teach that mess to them.”

Apparently, Peterson had another son that got the Peterson discipline in much the same way. I’m sure the NFL is looking into it. Not.

More accusations for Adrian Peterson

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I’ve got 3 articles from my weekend reading for your perusal.

The first one is on the stupidity of the DC politicos and their stupid geniusus:

All these effing geniuses: Ezra Klein, expert-driven journalism, and the phony Washington consensus

In a recent article on Vox, Ezra Klein declared that his generation of Washington journalists had discovered political science, and it is like the hottest thing on wheels. In the old days, he writes, journalists “dealt with political science episodically and condescendingly.” But now, Klein declares, “Washington is listening to political scientists, in large part because it’s stopped trusting itself.” Klein finds that political scientists give better answers to his questions than politicians themselves, because politicians are evasive but scientists are scientists, you know, they deal in “structural explanations” for political events. So the “young political journalists” who are roaring around town in their white lab coats frightening the local bourgeoisie “know a lot more about political science and how to use it” than their elders did.

Hence Klein’s title: “How Political Science Conquered Washington.”

Nearly every aspect of this argument annoyed me. To suggest, for starters, that people in Washington are-or were, until recently-ignorant or contemptuous of academic expertise is like saying the people of Tulsa have not yet heard about this amazing stuff called oil. Not only does Washington routinely fill the No. 1 spot on those “most educated cities” articles, but the town positively seethes with academic experts. Indeed, it is the only city I know of that actually boasts a sizable population of fake experts, handing out free-market wisdom to passers-by from their subsidized seats at Cato and Heritage.

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