Good Morning!
Lilacs by the kitchen window. April, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Narcissus salome. April, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Kwanzan cherry. April, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Bradford pear. April, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
The Beatles - Blackbird
News and Opinion
Open Thread! Happenista Crowd Sourced News/Opinion section today.
I stayed up way too late last night, and didn't have the time or energy to do the news section today. Tell me about the news stories and opinion pieces that you have seen recently, and I will read them, excerpt them and post at least some of them here, until I have to get back to work on my school work, house work and gardening.
Along N.J. bay, rising sea draws ever closer
She had been driving to her waterfront home along the Delaware Bay in South Jersey. As she crossed the wide marsh in the dark, the water rose quickly. It became too deep - ahead and behind. She had to stop and wait.
To her, no longer were climate-change predictions an abstract idea. Sea level has been rising, taking her waterfront with it.
"This isn't something that's coming," she later told a group of bay shore residents and officials. "It's here. We just happen to live in a place that will affect us sooner."
[...]
On the Atlantic coast, beach replenishment masks the effects of sea-level rise. But along the low-lying bay shore, veined with creeks, the problems are striking.
[...]
In the last century, sea level in the bay has risen a foot, gauges show, partly because the warming ocean is expanding and polar ice is melting. Also, New Jersey is sinking.
[...]
The executive director of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, she cited research showing the dramatic loss of the bay's wetlands. Nearly 5,000 football fields' worth vanished from 1996 to 2006 alone, mostly from sea-level rise and erosion.
h/t to cosmic debris.
Eulogy for the Blog
As the 'Times' moves to eliminate theirs, we should remember its golden age
In November 2011, Politico's most prominent blogger, Ben Smith, declared the advent of the "the post-blog blog." "The dusty old form of the personal political blog has required some updating. Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out," he wrote. "Other successful bloggers—from Andrew Sullivan to Michelle Malkin, Chris Cillizza to Ezra Klein—have been edging in different ways toward institutionalizing what works, staffing up and formalizing their beats to better serve their audiences." Smith was announcing that his own blog, which dated back to Politico's beginnings nearly five years before, would undergo a similar sort of change. About a month later, though, he announced that he would become editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a website where nearly every article is, in a sense, a blog post, but there are no actual blogs, and whose traffic model depends in no small part on discovery via social media. In other words, a post-blog blog.
Wealthiest Americans Only Winners in Recovery, Pew Says
The U.S. economy has recovered for households with net worth of $500,000 or more, a new study shows. The recession continues for almost everyone else. Wealthy households boosted their net worth by 21.2 percent in the aftermath of the recession, according to the study released today by the Pew Research Center. The rest of America lost 4.9 percent of household wealth from 2009 to 2011.
Pew attributed the disparity to gains during that period in the stock and bond markets, benefiting affluent households, while the housing market’s decline hit others harder. The report underscores the nation’s growing income inequality, with the top 13 percent of households recovering their losses from the 18- month recession that ended in June 2009, and the rest of the country continuing to hemorrhage wealth.
h/t to Agathena.
Owner of collapsed Bangladesh building arrested at border
An announcement was also made by loudspeaker at the site of the collapsed building in a Dhaka suburb, where people cheered and clapped. At least 362 people are confirmed to have died in the collapse of the 8-storey building on Wednesday. Three of its floors were built illegally.
The death toll is expected to rise but it is already the deadliest tragedy to hit Bangladesh's garment industry, which is worth $20 billion annually and a mainstay of the economy. The collapse and previous disasters in garment factories have focused attention on the poor working conditions of workers who toil for as little as $38 a month to produce clothing for top international brands.
h/t to Agathena.
Rare bald eagle hatching on Lake Ontario signals revival of habitat
But bird groups, conservation authorities and the RBG have worked hard in recent years to help the population rebound. Cootes Marsh, the largest wetland on the western shore of Lake Ontario, has been a major focus of those efforts.
The installation of a fishway to prevent invasive species from entering the marsh, the planting of cattails and other native species to control pollution, and upstream sewage overflow controls have all helped establish an environment where eagles can find and hunt the fish they need to survive.
The hatchlings serve as evidence that the efforts are working.
"It's a sign of the progress the eagles are making in re-establishing themselves and it's also a sign we're doing a good job in restoring our habitat and the progress RBG has been making in habitat restoration in Cootes Paradise," she said.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Massachusetts "Revisits" Trans Rights
Beatles - If I Fell