Ta-Nehisi Coates’s graph of the year. Time has its "Person of the Year. " Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. First up? Ta-Nehisi Coates. My nomination is Patrick Sharkey's look at neighborhood poverty levels for blacks and whites. If you look at the chart, in the first generation, 62 percent of black people but only 4 percent of white people lived in neighborhoods where 20 percent or more of the people were poor. The chart basically mirrors something that most black people know intuitively.
So this idea that we can just change the subject and pretend that middle-class blacks and whites are, somehow, the same is erroneous. Being Liberal - New York, New York - Political Organization. In California, a Mayor’s Rise Is a Sign of the Times. Candlestick Park Fades From a Spotlight It Made a Habit of Stealing. Chris Kerrigan’s Return to Politics | Sohum Parlance II. Ryan Burns reports that he’ll be running for Mayor of Eureka next year.
He’s run two election campaigns for city council and won both times, actually trouncing Rex Bohn the last time around despite the plastering of Bohn signs all over the city which had some Kerrigan supporters demoralized until election day – which is when I learned that the frequency of signs in Eureka aren’t a good measure of support given that more conservative landlords on the main arteries seem willing to impose their politics on their tenants by placing signs on the lawns. Kerrigan won each time by walking every neighborhood in the city, and I hope he repeats that strategy, because we don’t just need progressive wins. We need a discussion. It bodes well not only for local progressive politics. Now we need some candidates for city council. Photo comes from the NCJ, and they got it from Facebook.
Addendum: He was interviewed on KHUM today. Like this: Like Loading... Humboldt County supervisors to vote on Halvorsen Quarry appeals; General Plan status update on tap. Lorna Rodriguez and Catherine Wong/The Times-Standard Posted: 12/08/2013 02:16:06 AM PST0 Comments|Updated: 5 months ago The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will hold a public hearing on appeals made by local environmental groups to county staff's approval of the proposed Halvorsen Quarry Reclamation Plan. According to a county report, Planning and Building Department staff recommend that the board reject three of five appeals that were made by Humboldt Baykeeper and California Trout following the plan's approval by the county Planning Commission in a 6-1 vote in May. ”We believe the plan is not adequate to protect the coho salmon habitat in the stream,” Humboldt Baykeeper Policy Director Jennifer Kalt said. The Halvorsen Quarry, currently owned by Eureka business Ryan Schneider Construction, is located along Rocky Creek Road near Bayside. ”We're not trying to shut down the quarry,” Kalt said.
If you go: What: Board of Supervisors meeting When: 9 a.m. Rough Waters | News | The Journal. Faced with a shrinking pool of funding, local environmental nonprofit Humboldt Baykeeper is in the process of dramatically downsizing its organization. The office staff was reportedly laid off recently, and last week Executive Director Jessica Hall learned that she, too, was being laid off. Only Policy Director Jennifer Kalt, whose position has been reduced to part-time, remains employed by the organization. Hall, who was hired as the group's executive director in October 2012, said Baykeeper recently lost some key financial support from foundations such as the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund and Environment Now. Baykeeper's current financial woes can be attributed at least in part to an overreliance on such foundations, according to Kalt. Their budgets are heavily influenced by the stock market, and during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s charitable foundations were flush with money and unaware that the riches were temporary.
Mine(s) in Humboldt County, California. @ CaliforniaMaps.org. Darren mierau | California Trout, Inc. The Trinity River is enjoying a renaissance with California’s steelhead fishermen, and while steelhead populations seem to be prospering, salmon populations remain a bigger question. The Trinity River (photo Craig Nielsen, ShastaTrout.com) In this piece, CalTrout’s North Coast manager Darren Mierau looks at the Trinity’s recent history and (maybe) comeback. By Darren Mierau More than a decade has passed since the Trinity River Record of Decision (ROD) was signed in December 2000 by Bruce Babbitt, then Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton.
Since then, there has been uncertainty about what has been done and the effectiveness of the work on the Trinity. A Little History A brief reminder of the Trinity’s illustrious background may be useful to set the stage. Up To 90% Of Flows Diverted Construction of Lewiston Dam on the Trinity River was completed in 1964 and blocked salmon and steelhead access to over 100 miles of habitat above the dam.
Chinook Coho Steelhead Rebounding? Democracy Distilled [Infographic] Ten Key Values | Green Party of CA. Ecological WisdomNonviolenceSocial JusticeGrassroots DemocracyDecentralizationCommunity-Based EconomicsFeminismRespect for DiversityPersonal & Global ResponsibilitySustainability Ecological Wisdom How can we operate human societies with the understanding that we are part of nature, not on top of it? How can we live within the ecological and resource limits of the planet, applying our technological knowledge to the challenge of an energy efficient economy?
How can we build a better relationship between cities and countryside? How can we guarantee the rights of non-human species? How can we promote sustainable agriculture and respect for self-regulating natural systems? How can we further biocentric wisdom in all spheres of life? Nonviolence How can we develop effective alternatives to our current patterns of violence at all levels, from the family and the street to nations and the world? Social Justice How can we respond to human suffering in ways that promote dignity? Grassroots Democracy Feminism. The color of the Sun. A beautiful, informative, and surprising video from NASA. [link] This video of the sun based on data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, shows the wide range of wavelengths -- invisible to the naked eye -- that the telescope can view. SDO converts the wavelengths into an image humans can see, and the light is colorized into a rainbow of colors. As the colors sweep around the sun in the movie, viewers should note how different the same area of the sun appears.
This happens because each wavelength of light represents solar material at specific temperatures. Californians' Support for Legalized Recreational Pot Trends Higher. Creative Dad Colors His Kids’ Drawings. What do you get when you combine the aesthetic talent of an artistic adult with the uninhibited creativity of a child? The resulting art might look something like these images by Reddit user Tatsputin, which were a creative collaboration between a father and his children. When Tatsputin takes his monthly three-hour work-related flight, his two children give him their drawings for him to color in, which he does during the flight. Tatsputin began by using colored pencils. He later switched to his iPad and the ArtStudio program, but intends to return to the colored pencils.
His kids give him free reign to choose the colors for their artwork. According to him, his children only disagreed with his coloring choices once – when his daughter insisted that the shirt on her character was not supposed to be red. This sort of collaboration can be a great idea for anyone with kids, and Tatsputin isn’t the only person whose done something like this. Source: imgur “This one is an araucana from my son. Doesn’t Eat, Doesn’t Pray and Doesn’t Love. Doesn’t Eat, Doesn’t Pray and Doesn’t Love. Giving Thanks.
HCDCC Politics. TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE ~ ONLINE| Serving Klamath & Trinity River Communities. Batman's Gun: Why the Comic-Book Hero Was Disarmed in 1939. To a midnight showing of the new Batman film at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, James E. Holmes carried a .223-calibre Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault-style rifle, a Remington twelve-gauge shotgun, and a .40-caliber Glock handgun; a second Glock was found in his car.
He had a magazine for the AR-15 that would have allowed him to shoot a hundred bullets before reloading. He had bought more than six thousand rounds of ammunition online. He dressed in black, with a tactical vest and helmet, and wore a gas mask. He had dyed his hair red. He is thought to have shot seventy people; twelve have died. No one expects this massacre to lead to a reform of the nation’s gun laws. As I wrote in the magazine in April, there are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and five million rifles, eighty-three million shotguns, and a hundred and six million handguns. It hasn’t always been this way.
Not so. How Homestar Runner changed web series for the better | TV | 100 Episodes. For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In 100 Episodes, we examine shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced or reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity.
The idea of television that originates on the Internet is still a new one. There remains the lack of a critical apparatus to talk about web series, short of just applying the ones used when talking about TV to a very different, very young, format. So much of this understanding of web video was already present in the works of Homestarrunner.com, the first online provider of TV-like content to see significant crossover success.
Much of Homestar Runner’s animation is fairly rudimentary stuff.
Local Races in California are NINO—Nonpartisan in Name Only | California Progress Report. Printer-friendly version Send by email As long as school board elections are partisan affairs, aspiring politicians will use educational posts as stepping stones and students will suffer By Marsha Sutton The acronyms DINO and RINO bring to mind extinct or endangered creatures and thus are appropriate designations -- Democrat In Name Only and Republican In Name Only. The terms, often used pejoratively, apply to politicians who do not strictly adhere to party positions -- they may think independently and refuse to embrace the party line in every instance. They are endangered because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to win elections without the full support of a particular political party, especially if candidates (gasp) think for themselves on occasion.
Veering off the party’s path can be political suicide. Most voters want candidates who represent centrist positions and embody a combination of ideologies from a variety of political points of view. Sounds a bit naïve now, doesn’t it? History of psychiatric institutions. The rise of the lunatic asylum and its gradual transformation into, and eventual replacement by, the modern psychiatric hospital, explains the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry.
While there were earlier institutions that housed the 'insane,' the arrival at the answer of institutionalisation as the correct solution to the problem of madness was very much an event of the nineteenth century. To illustrate this with one regional example, in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were, perhaps, a few thousand "lunatics" housed in a variety of disparate institutions but by 1900 that figure had grown to about 100,000. That this growth should coincide with the growth of alienism, now known as psychiatry, as a medical specialism is not coincidental.[1]:14 Medieval era[edit] In the Islamic world, the Bimaristans were described by European travelers, who wrote on their wonder at the care and kindness shown to lunatics. Emergence of public lunatic asylums[edit] Dr. Shutdown coverage fails Americans. U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms.
It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy. When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance.
" We need a more fearless media. Carl Sagan-Cosmos edited for rednecks. American Bile. Javier Jaén Not long ago I was walking toward an airport departure gate when a man approached me. “Are you Robert Reich?” He asked. “Yes,” I said. “You’re a Commie dirtbag.” “I’m sorry?” “You’re a Commie dirtbag.” My mind raced through several possibilities. I decided to respond, as civilly as I could: “You’re wrong. “Fox News. A year or so ago Bill O’Reilly did say on his Fox News show that I was a Communist. “Don’t believe everything you hear on Fox News,” I said. It’s rare that I’m accosted and insulted by strangers, but I do receive vitriolic e-mails and angry Facebook posts. Scholars who track these things say the partisan divide is sharper today than it has been in almost a century.
At the same time, polls show Americans to be more contemptuous and less trusting of major institutions: government, big business, unions, Wall Street, the media. I’m 67 and have lived through some angry times: Joseph R. These changes help explain why Americans are so divided, but not why they’re so angry. Why I Hate Landscape Fabric | Down and Dirty | The Journal. The black death — aka landscape fabric — stifles your soil and looks lousy when it inevitably peeks through. Sometimes I try to be fair and balanced on an issue so I don't sound like some kind of gardening zealot. Today isn't one of those times. I think landscape fabric sucks. There, I said it. I regret using it in nearly every case that I have, and I try my hardest to show my clients why they shouldn't use it either.
I'm not judging you if you want to try using the stuff — I understand why people want to. But after 17 years of designing and maintaining gardens professionally, it's a rare garden where I go "Oh yeah, that landscape fabric really worked out well! " Here's why I hate it so: 1. What's that mean in normal language? I'm not a scientist, so I don't know the stats on it, but I can tell you what I have seen over and over again with my own eyes: After 10 years, you pull up the landscape fabric, and that soil is dead. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. So what's your alternative? Mark Levin: Fox News Isn't 'Conservative,' It's 'Republican' Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin's Religious Atheism. Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever | Marty Kaplan. Debating Capitalism - Redefining Outdated Terms.
Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever | Marty Kaplan. North Coast Journal - May 1, 2003: IN THE NEWS. Dramatic New Palco Plan | North Coast Journal Blogthing. Cost of Occupation | News | The Journal. North Coast Journal - May 1, 2003: IN THE NEWS. Thanet Earth: the farm of the future. The March to Anarchy. Pope Bluntly Faults Church’s Focus on Gays and Abortion. Political Deadlock in Tunisia: 9oddem el UIB. Understanding Glenn Beck's Nonsensical Call For Impeachment. Morning Roundup: Medieval Batman Better Watch Out For “The Jester” Two-State Illusion. How to Survive a Mass Extinction - Even One Caused by Us. Lifelines for Poor Children. GIVE THESE PEOPLE AIR!
Occupy Wall Street Legacy. How Chris McCandless Died. Northern California County Votes To Secede From California. Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party. The Celery Stalks at Midnight: Scientific American asks “Are Engineered Foods Evil?” Difference Between Education and Indoctrination | Difference Between | Education vs Indoctrination. Commissions « Sketches From Memory. Illegal. Immoral. Dangerous. Why Congress needs to say No! One Theme, Three Ways: Customizing iTheme2. 11 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My First Blog.