| |
|
Sunday, February 4, 2007
|
|
Citizen Boo: "Every once in a while, a piece of art sticks to something inside of you -- defining something that you've been trying to express but couldn't. This video, Radiohead and Unkle's Rabbit In Your Headlights is so powerful that I've blogged it twice before. Enjoy it for the weekend entry ... become inspired, stand up, then fight like hell for what you believe in."
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
10:00:50 AM 
|
|
The Denver Post took some time to look at Friday's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from a Colorado perspective. From the article, "Colorado's average temperature could heat up by 7 or 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to a U.N. climate change report released in part last week. 'That's considerable warming, and it could conceivably be quite a bit greater than that,' said Linda Mearns, a climate researcher with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. It'll almost certainly get warmer in the Southwest, Mearns said, and Colorado's mountain snowpacks along with those across the West will continue to thin. Spring's melt season may end several weeks earlier by 2100, said Mearns, a co-author of the report. The Western forecast bodes poorly for water managers and those using the mountains for recreation, she said. 'We'll be saying 'The National Park formally known as Glacier,' Mearns said."
The Post article has links to the IPCC report, video and slide show. (The weblog philosophy of sending people away so they'll come back.)
Category: Colorado Water
9:25:24 AM
|
|
Funding sources for healthcare and scientific research have been severely curtailed over the last few years, according to the Denver Post. From the article, "Since 2004, researchers looking for treatments for cancer, heart disease and other ailments have found it harder and harder to get NIH funding as the agency's budget has stagnated. This year's proposed NIH budget, according to a House Appropriations Committee spokesman, is $28.9 billion, just a 2.2 percent increase and less than the rate of inflation. The result is more researchers clamoring for a limited pool of money and more scientists - especially those just starting their careers - shut out of federal research dollars. 'You lose a generation of scientists,' said Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the NIH director. 'They can't stay; they leave science.'"
Market driven (private) healthcare research is largely driven by finding chemicals that can be patented and these are seldom low cost or natural. There is no market apparatus that will fund promising research in areas that may not lead to profit. Is there a way to fund Open Source solutions in healthcare and science?
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
9:16:49 AM
|
|
Here's a call to action for environmentalists from Jeffrey St. Clair in Counter Punch. He writes, "A kind of political narcolepsy has settled over the American environmental movement. Call it eco-ennui. You may know the feeling: restlessness, lack of direction, evaporating budgets, diminished expectations, a simmering discontent. The affliction appears acute, possibly systemic. Unfortunately, the antidote isn't as simple as merely filing a new lawsuit in the morning or skipping that PowerPoint presentation to join a road blockade for the day. No, something much deeper may be called for: a rebellion of the heart. Just like in the good old days, not that long ago. What is it, precisely, that's going on? Was the environmental movement bewitched by eight years of Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore? Did it suffer an allergic reaction to the New Order of Things? Are we simply adrift in a brief lacuna in the evolution of the conservation movement, one of those Gouldian (Stephen Jay) pauses before a new creative eruption?...
Read the whole rant - it's pretty good actually. Many of us will get new additions to our reading list.
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
8:53:00 AM
|
|
From the Glenwood Springs Independent (free registration required), "About 30 people turned out for a showing of the film, A Land Out of Time, at the Glenwood Springs Community Center Wednesday evening. Directed and co-produced by Aspen native Mark Harvey with Laurel Garrett, it follows the stories of ranchers, conservationists and passionate lovers of the West in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, and close to home in western Garfield County, who have seen the effects of oil and gas drilling on their land. New Mexico ranchers Tweeti and Linn Blancett spoke about selling the ranch that's been in the family for six generations. They talked of losing cows to poisoned water from the gas drilling and seeing their land increasingly cut up by rigs so there isn't enough room for their cattle to graze. Rifle hunting guide Keith Goddard spoke about the loss of the Roan Plateau to oil and gas drilling and how that has brought together folks who had previously been on opposite sides of the table. 'Not too long ago you couldn't get me in the same room with environmentalists,' he said. Now that's changed. 'Sooner or later we'll have to band together to get what we want.'"
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
8:36:19 AM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2007 John Orr.
Last update: 3/3/07; 7:09:09 AM.
|
|
|
