Fish and other sea life have been moving toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters, part of a worldwide, decades-long migration documented for the first time by a study released Wednesday.
The research, published in the journal Nature, provides more evidence of a rapidly warming planet and has broad repercussions for fish harvests around the globe.
University of British Columbia researchers found that significant numbers of 968 species of fish and invertebrates they examined moved to escape the warming waters of their original habitats.Previous studies had documented the same phenomenon in specific parts of the world’s oceans. But the new study is the first to assess the migration worldwide and to look back as far as 1970, according to its authors.
The research is more confirmation that “global change is real and has been real for a long time,” said Boris Worm, a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who was not part of the study. “It’s not something in the distant future. It is well underway.”
Barack Obama is allowing the fires to dominate because he has not defined his core agenda. During the 2012 campaign it appeared to be restoring jobs, rebuilding the middle class, and reversing the scourge of widening inequality. Since then, though, the core has evaporated – leaving him and his administration vulnerable to every pyromaniac on the Potomac.
Something that is not President Obama’s fault: the IRS “scandal”
Frankly, I wonder why political groups have any tax exempt status at all. But they do, so they should be treated equally. So, we had a lot of small conservative oriented groups applying for this status. The trouble: the larger groups (Karl Rove’s group and the pro-Obama groups) had lawyers write up their applications to make them complete and compliant. No, this is nothing new; liberal groups have been singled out in the past. And no, it wasn’t just a regional office. But:
Even as Obama vowed that his administration “will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” however, the IRS offered no new information on how it selected which groups to single out for scrutiny.
The White House is legally barred from contacting the IRS about a tax matter, under a prohibition adopted after the Watergate scandal. And although it can contact the Treasury Department about tax issues, neither Treasury nor the IRS can disclose specific taxpayer information. The IRS can release information about a petition for tax-
exempt status only after it has been approved.
Obama is not in a position to remove Lerner, a career official who can be terminated for cause only under normal civil service proceedings. The IRS has two political appointees: the commissioner, who serves a five-year term, and the chief counsel.
So, this isn’t a matter of the President targeting political enemies; remember that the best funded, most dangerous groups were not targeted.
Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Vern Buchanan each sent letters today to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew seeking more answers about the IRS’ focus on tea party groups. Rubio said the IRS commissioner should be fired (though the commissioner in charge resigned in November).
Turns out the press got played again by Republicans. Jake Tapper has the smoking gun of the original email from the Obama administration which differs significantly from the “leaked emails” ABC ran with.
In an exclusive for CNN, Tapper reveals that CNN has the original email sent by a top Obama aide, regarding the administration’s reaction to the Benghazi attacks. Tapper reported, “The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.”
“The actual email from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever (sic) leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department,” Tapper concludes (my bold).
The email was sent on Friday, September 14, 2012, at 9:34 p.m. and was obtained by CNN from a U.S. government source. Ironically, the email points out that there is a “ton of wrong information” coming from Congress and people who are not particularly informed (waving hello to Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney):
“Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.
“There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.
“We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.”
Tapper notes how ABC and the Weekly Standard covered the leaked emails, which were “paraphrased” “inaccurately” and “inventing the notion” that the White House tried to protect the State Department:
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told CBS News that Republican lawmakers who are blasting President Barack Obama’s administration for failing to take military action during last September’s surprise attacks in Benghazi have a “cartoonish” view of the military.
“I listened to the testimony of [Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta] and [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey],” Gates explained to CBS host Bob Schieffer in an interview that aired on Sunday. “And, frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were.”
“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East — despite all the turmoil that’s going on — with planes on strip alert, troops ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. And so, getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible.”
[...]
“Based on everything I’ve read, people really didn’t know what was going on in Benghazi contemporaneously, and to send some small number of Special Forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, I think, would have been very dangerous,” the former defense secretary observed. “And personally, I would not have approved that.”
“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces. The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way. And there just wasn’t time to do that.”
But here is the thing to remember: THIS IS POLITICAL. Looking like an idiot to a knowledgeable person doesn’t matter at all, and the Republican politicians understand that. What is important is to fire up their base; to whip them in a lather.
No, I don’t think that the Republican base is any dumber than the Democratic base, but the Republicans are better politicians than we are.
Workout notes
It went better than I thought it would: it was windy (13 mph, gusts to over 20 mph) and chilly (low 40′s) and sunny…very pretty.. and I felt ok.
9:30 at 1.03, 40:17 half way, 9:18 return leg for 1:20:43.
So I’ve done this 2 minutes faster (at my best) but this is one of my better performances on this course. Given the heavy legs, I’ll take it.
Posts
Reinhart and Rogoff, two Harvard economists, put out a “working paper” (NOT peer reviewed) that right wingers used to justify austerity during a recession. But they made some serious mistakes in their calculation (not a matter of opinion) and they excluded countries that would rebut their hypothesis. References: here and here.
Robert Reich on Barack Obama
Barack Obama is perhaps my favorite president, ever. But no one is perfect, and in my opinion, he has this maddening desire to “reach out to the political opponents” and sometimes does it to a degree that makes him less effective. But people are package deals…
“Occasionally I may make some of you angry because I’m going to reach out to Republicans and I’m going to keep on doing it,” President Obama said at a Democratic fundraiser last night. “Even if some of you think I’m a sap I’m going to keep on doing it because that’s what I think the country needs.”
Given the current state of the Regressive Party I don’t think this is what the country needs, at least not in the way Obama has been reaching out — putting compromises on the table before negotiations have even begun (cutting future Social Security benefits); setting lines in the sand and then caving (insisting the Bush tax cuts would not be extended to incomes over $250K and then extending them up to $400K); giving them easy escapes from the consequences of their policies (avoiding the fiscal cliff); allowing them to use the filibuster to thwart a large majority of voters (background checks before gun purchases); trying to reassure them by moving to the right (increasing deportations); and legitimizing their views (setting up Simpson-Bowles deficit commission and saying government budgets are like family budgets).
The way to “reach out to Republicans” is to be mercilessly tough on them — using the powers of the presidency to punish and reward them (and their constituents), holding them publicly accountable, leading the charge against the filibuster, and not giving an inch. When Obama reaches out to them as he has, congressional Republicans see only weakness, and they’ve used that weakness against him time and again.
I was wide awake before 4 in the morning. But I am not going to run long as last weekend was tough and I have to watch that left leg, so I’ll do something gentle on the treadmill and then stretch.
At my age, I have to worry about injuries just a bit more. More training might cut my potential marathon time by a minute or two, but might increase my risk for injury which would mean no marathon at all. So I have to play it safe.
Articles
Every now and then I’ll change what I eat and eat something less healthy (sometimes while travelling). Usually one day of this makes me feel sluggish and and almost ill. There might be a reason for that:
A few years before Super Size Me hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona, a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body’s response to McDonald’s—specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties.
Dandona is a professor at the State University of New York-Buffalo who also heads the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of Western New York, and what he observed has informed his research ever since. Levels of a C-reactive protein, an indicator of systemic inflammation, shot up “within literally minutes.” “I was shocked,” he recalls, that “a simple McDonald’s meal that seems harmless enough”—the sort of high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal that 1 in 4 Americans eats regularly—would have such a dramatic effect. And it lasted for hours.
One of the keys is the interplay between bacteria in our gut and what we eat.
Over the next decade he tested the effects of various foods on the immune system. A fast-food breakfast inflamed, he found, but a high-fiber breakfast with lots of fruit did not. A breakthrough came in 2007 when he discovered that while sugar water, a stand-in for soda, caused inflammation, orange juice—even though it contains plenty of sugar—didn’t.
[...]
The Florida Department of Citrus, a state agency, was so excited it underwrote a subsequent study, and had fresh-squeezed orange juice flown in for it. This time, along with their two-sandwich, two-hash-brown, 910-calorie breakfast, one-third of his volunteers—10 in total—quaffed a glass of fresh OJ. The non-juice drinkers, half of whom drank sugar water, and the other half plain water, had the expected response—inflammation and elevated blood sugar. But the OJ drinkers had neither elevated blood sugar nor inflammation. The juice seemed to shield their metabolism. “It just switched off the whole damn thing,” Dandona says. Other scientists have since confirmed that OJ has a strong anti-inflammatory effect.
And yes, I drink a lot of orange juice.
What else is going on:
Those subjects who ate just the McDonald’s breakfast had increased blood levels of a molecule called endotoxin. This molecule comes from the outer walls of certain bacteria. If endotoxin levels rise, our immune system perceives a threat and responds with inflammation.
Where had the endotoxin come from? One possibility was the food itself. But there was another possibility. We all carry a few pounds’ worth of microbes in our gut, a complex ecosystem collectively called the microbiota. The endotoxin, Dandona suspected, originated in this native colony of microbes. Somehow, a greasy meal full of refined carbohydrates ushered it from the gut, where it was always present but didn’t necessarily cause harm, into the bloodstream, where it did. But orange juice stopped that translocation cold.
I always had viewed my orange juice as something I enjoyed and liked; I never realized that it was something that was good for me too.
I admit that I like hash browns but I also can’t eat them too often, else I get a stomach ache.
Gaming the system
Ok, the state pays for “senior citizen centers” where old people, presumably of reduced physical and mental capacity, can spend the day. These centers are for profit. So, how do you make them profitable? Well, one way is to get healthy, alert old people to become your clients!
For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria, fear that unless we slash spending we’ll turn into Greece any day now. After all, haven’t economists proved that economic growth collapses once public debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.?
Well, the famous red line on debt, it turns out, was an artifact of dubious statistics, reinforced by bad arithmetic. And America isn’t and can’t be Greece, because countries that borrow in their own currencies operate under very different rules from those that rely on someone else’s money. After years of repeated warnings that fiscal crisis is just around the corner, the U.S. government can still borrow at incredibly low interest rates.
But while debt fears were and are misguided, there’s a real danger we’ve ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. And even as the case for debt hysteria is collapsing, our worst fears about the damage from long-term unemployment are being confirmed.
Now, some unemployment is inevitable in an ever-changing economy. Modern America tends to have an unemployment rate of 5 percent or more even in good times. In these good times, however, spells of unemployment are typically brief. Back in 2007 there were about seven million unemployed Americans — but only a small fraction of this total, around 1.2 million, had been out of work more than six months.
[...]
The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.
One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.
To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.
So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.
Krugman goes on to state that we could have helped by providing more stimulus (again, stimulus for times like these, austerity for boom times)
My hunch: perhaps Senator Reid saw that the bill (which needed 60 votes) didn’t have enough Republican support to pass; hence he quietly gave the red-state Democrats permission to vote “no”. After all, in such states, raising the ire of liberals might help them win a tough reelection bid in the general election.
But this is just a guess; I have no insider information, etc.
Three months after Gun Appreciation Day resulted in several accidental shootings, another gun-advocating event has been marred by gun violence. On Saturday, it was reported that a man died from gun shot wounds suffered at NASCAR’s NRA 500 race at Texas Motor Speedway. Late Sunday afternoon, medical investigators ruled the shooting a “self-inflicted injury,” saying the man shot himself in his head.
Fort Worth police said the incident occurred shortly after the man, 42-year-old Kirk Franklin of Saginaw, Texas, engaged in an argument with other campers at the event. There were several witnesses to the incident, but no other injuries were reported. Police also said that alcohol may have been a factor.
Why in the hell would you bring a gun to an event like that???? Goodness…..
Liberals found much to praise, like Mr. Obama’s proposed new spending for road construction, nationwide prekindergarten education and advanced manufacturing research; a higher federal minimum wage; and reduced tax breaks for the wealthy. But they were shocked that he proposed the new cost-of-living formula. With that as the kindling, their opposition movement intensified.
My point: there is much more there than just the cost of living adjustment. So if we (as a country) are better off in the long run, well, isn’t that the point? I think that we need to look at the whole picture.
A new study using the patterns of Google search queries suggests that mental illnesses flourish in winter and decline in summer.
In both the United States and Australia, researchers found distinct seasonal patterns, high in winter and low in summer, in searches pertaining to anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, depression, suicide, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. The study appears in the May issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Searches related to eating disorders varied the most — 37 percent higher in winter than summer in the United States and 42 percent higher in Australia. The smallest variations were in searches related to anxiety: 7 percent and 15 percent more common in winter than summer in the United States and Australia, respectively. The variations persisted after he researchers controlled for seasonal differences in Internet use, mentions of the diseases in news articles and other factors.
Why this happens, and whether it is connected to increased incidence, is unclear, but it is known that varying hours of daylight, variations in physical activity and seasonal changes in blood levels of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids can affect mood. [...]
Extreme natural events, not man-made climate change, led to last summer’s historic drought in the Great Plains, a new federal study said Friday.
Drought occurred in six Plains states between last May and August because moist Gulf of Mexico air “failed to stream northward in late spring,” and summer storms were few and stingy with rainfall, said a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Neither ocean states nor human-induced climate change, factors that can provide long-lead predictability, appeared to play significant roles in causing severe rainfall deficits over the major corn producing regions of central Great Plains,” the report summary said.
The drought in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota was the worst since record keeping began in 1895, even eclipsing the notorious Dust Bowl droughts of 1934 and 1936, said study leader Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist.
“The event was rare, and we estimated maybe a once in a couple of hundred years event,” Hoerling said. “But for as extreme as it was, it didn’t have any strong indications for early warning.
[...]
“I’m an advocate of global warming because science tells me that greenhouse gases have warmed the planet by about 1 degree Celsius in the last 100 years. So there’s no question about that,” he said. “But the science also tells that every drought that’s occurring isn’t a result of climate change.”
Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.
Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called “choice blindness,” researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.
What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they’d become undecided. [...]
I’m not sure what to think. It appears to me that second term Presidents drift somewhat to center during their second terms. I wonder if this is what is happening here.
Well, I slept much of the day away; I have a mild fever. If I am not a lot better tomorrow morning, I’ll have to cancel.
If I feel ok, I might walk/jog the 10K course with Tracy and keep her company.
When Barbara had this, she was affected for about 12 hours.
So, on one hand, I want to be objective and critical where required. On the other hand, he appears to know what he is doing.
It is a fine line between earned trust and being a “bot”; I stopped giving the benefit of the doubt to President W. Bush after the State of the Union in 2003 when he said that we were going to war with Iraq.
Adding to his ever-growing list of fears, conservative commentator Erik Rush suspects that President Obama will work with the American Psychiatric Association to classify Christianity as a mental illness in order to take away their rights and detain them indefinitely. Rush, who ironically encouraged a possible Romney administration to begin prosecuting and disenfranchising liberals, writes that the health care reform law will be the mechanism that will enable Obama to begin targeting Christians for persecution.
Oh good grief. Seriously, President Obama IS a Christian (as much as I wish he were an atheist, he really isn’t). And, as much as I disrespect certain religious beliefs (e. g. that humans were an intentional creation of a deity or that there is some deity keeping score over us), if it came down to a vote to make religion illegal I’d vote “no, keep it legal”. Of course, given that we live in a liberal democracy and that freedom of religion is one of our rights that can’t be voted away (and should remain a protected right), well, it is a moot point anyway.
To keep track of my training. I train for ultramarathons (I usually walk these) and sometimes do running races, bicycle rides and open water swims for variety. My best ultra accomplishment was walking 101 miles in 24 hours in 2004. These days, I walk a marathon every once in a while (5:30 to 7 hours) There was a time when I could run a sub 40 minute 10K (did that once), but that was another lifetime ago; these a days 2427-28 25 minutes for a 5K would be more like it. I also have an off and on interest in yoga and in weight training. My lifetime PB in the bench is 310; currently I do sets of 4 with 175.
From time to time, I post what I am thinking about mathematically
I often post links to science articles, especially articles about cosmology and evolution.
I am very sympathetic to the “new atheist” movement, though some might consider me to be an agnostic. I reject any notion of a deity that interferes with physical events, but remain agnostic to the idea that there might be something “grand and wonderful” (Dawkins’ phrase) outside of our current spacetime continuum.
I am a liberal Democrat who thinks that the current social atmosphere is tilted way too far toward the interests of big business, and I reject the idea that a “free market” cures all ills, though pure socialism doesn’t work either. I am also a believer in the freedom of speech, including speech that I might not like. Also, I’ve been involved (to a moderate degree) with political campaigns, ranging from City Council races up to Presidential races.
Since being targeted by neo-nazis, I’ve started to identify with the anti-racist and the anti-fa movements.
I like to post photos of trips and vacations.
I sometimes blog about boxing matches and football games.
Ollie is a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.
The above refers to me; the below refers to Barbara (my wife)
Barbara's Liberal Identity:
Barbara is a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. She believes in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
Created by OnePlusYouBlog Roll Notes
As of March 20, 2010, I went through my longer blogroll and deleted links that no longer work. Be advised that some blogs have not been updated and others have been moved, but you can get to the new address via the old one.
I've read and visited all of these sites at one time or another. However, I've decided to post a separate list of those blogs which I read regularly (some daily, others periodically).
My list of my regular reads
Humor
It was funny and very, very biting. 
