1/ The first line of this article says it all - "freak storms are the new normal".......
Reality is settling in - climate change is here, and the effects are an increase of extreme weather all across the world.
One thing the article doesn't mention is the cost of these events - think of the cost of rebuilding Joplin, MS, just devastated by a tornado. Hundreds of millions. Who pays? Insurance companies? Not for long.......if they have to start actually paying out claims they will get out of the business - too risky.....so you and I will get the bill as usual......
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Newsweek's Sharon Begley on why we're unprepared for the harrowing future, and how adapting to the inevitable might be our only option.
Joplin, Missouri, was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes' notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John's Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John's, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather's extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven't seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state's trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren't scenes from another deadly weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They're all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren't alone. Across the U.S., it's just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they'll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
2/ And Tom Tomorrow thinks the weather is normal - it's just those crazy liberals distorting things...........
3/ Paul Krugman with another excellent column on how our "elites" feel about joblessness.....They. Just. Don't. Care.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Against Learned Helplessness
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 29, 2011
Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. Some European countries have it even worse: 21 percent of Spanish workers are unemployed.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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Times Topic: Unemployment
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Nor is the situation showing rapid improvement. This is a continuing tragedy, and in a rational world bringing an end to this tragedy would be our top economic priority.
Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.
So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility.
What kinds of excuses am I talking about? Well, consider last week’s release of the latest report on the economic outlook by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. The O.E.C.D. is basically an intergovernmental think tank; while it has no direct ability to set policy, what it says reflects the conventional wisdom of Europe’s policy elite.
So what did the O.E.C.D. have to say about high unemployment in its member countries? “The room for macroeconomic policies to address these complex challenges is largely exhausted,” declared the organization’s secretary general, who called on countries instead to “go structural” — that is, to focus on long-run reforms that would have little impact on the current employment situation.
And how do we know that there’s no room for policies to put the unemployed back to work? The secretary general didn’t say — and the report itself never even suggests possible solutions to the employment crisis. All it does is highlight the risks, as it sees them, of any departure from orthodox policy.
But then, who is talking seriously about job creation these days? Not the Republican Party, unless you count its ritual calls for tax cuts and deregulation. Not the Obama administration, which more or less dropped the subject a year and a half ago.
The fact that nobody in power is talking about jobs does not mean, however, that nothing could be done.
Bear in mind that the unemployed aren’t jobless because they don’t want to work, or because they lack the necessary skills. There’s nothing wrong with our workers — remember, just four years ago the unemployment rate was below 5 percent.
The core of our economic problem is, instead, the debt — mainly mortgage debt — that households ran up during the bubble years of the last decade. Now that the bubble has burst, that debt is acting as a persistent drag on the economy, preventing any real recovery in employment. And once you realize that the overhang of private debt is the problem, you realize that there are a number of things that could be done about it.
For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.
So there are policies we could be pursuing to bring unemployment down. These policies would be unorthodox — but so are the economic problems we face. And those who warn about the risks of action must explain why these risks should worry us more than the certainty of continued mass suffering if we do nothing.
In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.
As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.
4/ Keith Olbermann is still around, and he starts a new show on Current [?] later this month....here is a very interesting 5 minute clip where he argues that Glenn Beck is "good"..... a fascinating premise based on the fact Beck drank the Murdoch kool-aid.......
Whatever your opinion of Keith O, he's a very intelligent man......
5/ Don't worry Floridians, our Republican leadership won't let this "democracy thing" get out of control......letting the peasants vote? Very dangerous.....
Another good column from Carl Hiaasen......
GOP won’t let democracy get out of hand
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
According to a new Quinnipiac University poll of Florida voters, Rick Scott is now one of the country’s most unpopular governors, a dubious feat after only four months in office.
It’s bad news for Republican Party bosses, but all is not lost. Scott recently signed a new election bill that is callously designed to suppress voter turnout, making it harder for many disgruntled Floridians to cast a valid ballot in 2012.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state, so GOP leaders are desperate to find ways to keep certain people away from the polls. One of the Legislature’s top priorities was to change the voting rules to avoid a repeat of 2008, when Barack Obama won the state’s 27 electoral votes on his way to the presidency.
Obama benefited from early-voting days, which proved popular among minorities, college students and retirees. Republican officials became incensed during the election when then-Gov. Charlie Crist — one of their own — decided to extend polling hours to accommodate the long lines.
The nerve of that guy, making it easier for common citizens to vote!
Determined not to let this whole democracy thing get out of hand, the GOP-held Legislature crafted a bill that reduces the number of early voting days from 15 to eight, and requires some voters who have moved to cast provisional ballots, a deliberate inconvenience aimed at students.
6/ Three minute video of sharks underwater being fed and played with by a diver......a "wow" video, but strangely beautiful.....3 minutes......
7/ One of the most bizarre infomercials ever.....the Baby Bullet Blender, so awful it's hypnotic..... try to watch only a minute of this video.....dare you......bet you watch all 7 minutes!
If you haven't experienced the majesty of the Original Baby Bullet infomercial, with its easily-impressed pregnant ladies, drunk grandma and delivery guy who has never heard of knocking, you have missed one of the seminal achievements in American paid programming.
There have been a number of parodies of the infamous narrative already, but there's nothing quite like slowing it down and adding some creepy music and graphics here and there. Thanks to The Wolfgore Show for making something so good (bad) even better (far more horrible).
Warning: You will think you're only going to watch a few seconds of this, but it will suck you in and before you know it, you will have watched the entire seven minutes. Some viewers may experience the desire to make an ironic purchase. Consult a good friend or mental health care provider before doing so.
8/ Not only did Rick Scott kick Democrats out of the budget signing event at the Villages, he is now trying to say he didn't......a flat out lie.....
This evil scumbag has got to be impeached.......
THE VILLAGES — A day after some Democrats were removed from Gov. Rick Scott's budget signing by sheriff's deputies because the event was "private," a Scott spokesman tried to deflect blame by claiming that Scott's office ordered no one out.
Only that's not true.
On Friday, Scott spokesman Lane Wright — who did not attend the event at the Villages, a conservative retirement community — told the website Politic365that it was "disappointing to know that anyone who made the effort to be at such an important event wasn't allowed in."
"Gov. Scott did not have these individuals removed," Wright said. "This was a public event. It was brought to our attention that the local authorities had removed some. We don't know first-hand who was removed or why."
The St. Petersburg Times witnessed the entire incident. Here's what happened:
9/ A future Fox News correspondent advises people to build a "justice shed"....great reporting from Onion News.....2 minutes.....
10/ O Lordy......house prices just keep sliding.......
Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out.
“The emotional scars left by the collapse are changing the American psyche,” said Pete Flint, chief executive of the housing Web site Trulia. “There was a time when owning a home was a symbol you had made it. Now it’s O.K. not to own.”
11/ Amazing. Just amazing. Rick Scott's budget cut funding for nursing homes, but they also just turned down federal funding for.....nursing homes....
When in doubt - follow the money. Someone, somewhere in the Republican world will make big money from these contradictory decisions.....
The corruption is deep folks.......
FL turns down $35.7M grant
By Carol Gentry
05/27/11 © Health News Florida
05/27/11 © Health News Florida
In March, Gov. Rick Scott’s staff said he would accept a $35.7-million federal health grant called the “Money Follows the Person.”
But apparently the Legislature decided otherwise. In the 2011-12 budget Scott just signed, lawmakers failed to give the Agency for Health Care Administration budget authority to draw down and spend the money.
Patient advocates were dismayed at the omission, since the money was to have been spent on home- and community-care programs that let disabled and elderly people move out of nursing homes or avoid them in the first place.
Patient advocates were dismayed at the omission, since the money was to have been spent on home- and community-care programs that let disabled and elderly people move out of nursing homes or avoid them in the first place.
"It's particularly appalling, considering the Legislature just cut funds to nursing homes," said Jack McRay, AARP Florida lobbyist. The industry has said the Medicaid pay cuts will force staff cuts.
Neither the Legislature nor AHCA had publicized the decision. When Health News Florida inquired, AHCA spokeswoman Shelisha Coleman confirmed it in an e-mail: "The Florida Legislature did not include budget authority …for the administration of the Money Follows the Person grant award.”
No explanation was immediately available.
Todays video - Men in the Kitchen part 3
Todays Biblical joke
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